By Alex Myers
In recent years, golf’s governing bodies have relaxed some of the game’s rules, including those regarding the signing of an incorrect scorecard when you didn’t know you’d committed a penalty. What hasn’t changed, though, is a player still has to sign his/her scorecard.

Unfortunately, one LPGA Tour pro found this out the hard way on Thursday at the Pelican Women’s Championship. China’s Yu Liu forgot that tiny detail and was disqualified from the tournament.

Golfweek’s Beth Ann Nichols alerted us to the unusual situation:

Yu Liu was disqualified after the first round for failing to sign her scorecard. She opened with a 74.

— Beth Ann Nichols (@GolfweekNichols) November 20, 2020

As Nichols notes, Liu had opened the tournament with 74, so at least she didn’t waste a great score. Liu bogeyed three of her last four holes, perhaps explaining why she might have been distracted in the scoring area. At four over, the 25-year-old who is 28th on the Race to the CME Globe points standings sat 10 shots behind first-round leader Sophia Popov.

That being said, there were still three rounds to go, so anything’s possible. Well, anything other than Liu making this mental mistake again.

The post LPGA player disqualified for failing to sign her own scorecard appeared first on Golf Digest Middle East.

By Alex Myers
Two Chinese golfers, Shanshan Feng and Yu Liu, withdrew from this week’s Swinging Skirts LPGA Taiwan Championship on Tuesday. And according to Reuters, this had nothing to do with an issue specific to either player, but everything to do with their home country.

Reuters reports someone “high up” in the Chinese government told Feng, a former World No. 1, and Liu to skip the event amid growing tensions between China and Taiwan.

“They said I can’t respond regarding the issue of withdrawing from the competition,” Liu, an LPGA rookie who played collegiately at Duke, told Reuters via her official account on the Twitter-like social-media platform Weibo. Liu added her decision was “not for personal reasons.”

Both Feng and Liu had played each of the past two weeks to kick off the Asian swing of the tour’s fall schedule.

Someone working at the tournament told Reuters neither player would be fined for such a late WD “given the circumstances,” though there was no elaboration as to what those “circumstances” are. Feng and Liu’s agent, Ruby Chen, denied her players were being pressured into not playing. However, Chen also didn’t provide Reuters with an explanation.

Feng, a nine-time LPGA winner and the bronze medalist at the 2016 Olympics, had finished runner-up and T-3 the past two years at the Taiwan event.

The post Chinese players withdraw after being told to skip LPGA event in Taiwan, according to report appeared first on Golf Digest Middle East.