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Burlington, WI 53105
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“Integrity is telling myself the truth. And honesty is telling the truth to other people.”
Spencer Johnson
July 25th, 2010
Do you tire of hearing about executives fudging the truth to their own advantage? Nearly every day we learn of some banker making a killing personally, yet finding a way to somehow take advantage of normal investors so that they virtually lose it all. To find someone honest, particularly when it costs them, is rare. So let me share a wonderful story of integrity!
At a golf tournament in April, the tournament ended up tied after the regulation 72 holes. Jim Furyk and Brian Davis finished up tied and then headed to a sudden death playoff hole. Jim Furyk has 15 career tournament wins, including a major championship, winning the 2003 U.S. Open. He’s won over $45 million during his career and is the #5 ranked golfer in the world. He’s one of the top names in golf. Brian Davis is basically an unknown. It’s his fifth season on the tour and he’s never won a tournament in his entire career. Until this particular tournament, he was ranked 166th in the world and had won just over $111,000 for the season. For most of us that seems like a fairly nice annual salary, but in the world of professional golf, it’s a pittance and it placed him in the bottom third of the money list.
In this tournament these guys were vying for some big money at the top of the payout list. 1st place garnered $1.026 million, and 2nd place dropped all the way down to just over $615,000. Roughly $400,000 separated the winner from the guy who finished second. That difference alone is nearly four times what Davis had won the entire season so far. So there they are then on the first playoff hole. Brian Davis hits his second shot just off the green and into the adjacent hazard. Jim Furyk hits his second shot on the green, a fairly good distance away from the hole. Though Furyk is on the green, he’s farther away from the hole, so he plays his ball first. He putts it and it’s not a great putt. He pulls it to the left and it slides on past the hole a good ways. Davis walks down into the hazard, which has no water, just sand, twigs, weeds, and other miscellaneous debris. He surveys the ground, takes a few practice swings, looks around, figures out how he wants to hit the shot, addresses the ball and takes his swing. He hits his ball and it flies way past the hole and ends up a good thirty feet from the hole. And this is where it gets very interesting. For those of you who don’t know golf, what happens next is outstanding and unbelievable! What no one sees when Brian Davis hits the ball is his reaction after he hits the ball. Instead, the camera follows the flight of the ball. Later, on the replay, we see that after hitting his shot Brian Davis looks down at where his ball was and instantly calls the rules official over to the spot. “Hey, Shooter,” he calls to him. (Shooter is the nickname of the guy officiating this hole.) “Come here,” Davis says. Brian Davis’ reaction is nearly instantaneous. He took no time to think, didn’t weigh the options, or anything. He just reacts. And Brian Davis, with his first career tournament win on the line and a $1 million 1st place prize within his grasp, called a rule violation...on himself. Actually, he wasn’t sure he broke the rule, but he knew something wasn’t right, so he brought it to the attention of the rules official. If you watched it in fast motion, it probably would never have been noticed. And his infraction was completely unintentional and was part of his normal swing, but it was still a violation of a rule. He could also have easily explained it away by pleading ignorance. When this Shooter guy was trying to figure out if a rule had been violated, he contacted another guy on his walkie talkie and they had a discussion that lasted a few minutes. Viewers could partially hear the discussion. It was pretty clear that neither instantly knew the rule. They had to look at the replay to make their final decision.
Davis could easily have just trudged his way onto the green, attempted to win or tie the hole, pretended he had no idea there was any possibility a rule may have been broken, and if, in the end, he got busted, he could have easily pleaded ignorance to this rule that was so hard to determine anyway. But that’s not what he did. Instead, he instantly pointed out the possible infraction, thus ending any chance of winning, because breaking the rule cost him a two-stroke penalty. He was done, finishing 2nd and costing himself $400,000 in the process. Now one could look at this situation and think, “Big deal. The guy won $600k instead of a million. It’s easy to do the right thing when you’re guaranteed $600k.” And that may be true to some degree, but his reaction and commitment to integrity was instantaneous.
Yes, I know it’s just golf, it’s one tournament, and they were playing for ridiculous sums of money. There’s just something noteworthy about seeing honesty play out on such a public stage. I wonder what I would have done. I hope I would have done the right thing but I know my heart. I know that I would have wanted to do the right thing, yet I’m not positive that I would have. A lot of money was at stake, the rule is relatively obscure, and the likelihood of being caught was minimal. That’s typically a perfect recipe for doing the wrong thing. I don’t know the answer to the question, and none of us really can know what we’d do in any situation until we’re actually in it.
What I do know is that Brian Davis is free from being enslaved to the guilt, shame, and fear that can come from doing the wrong thing. “It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery” (Gal. 5:1). One of the freedoms we have in Christ is the freedom to do the right thing out of our love for God, our appreciation of His love for us, and as an outpouring of the combination of that love. I don’t know where Brian Davis is at spiritually, his act of integrity, though, was second nature for him. It’s so ingrained in him that he instantly did the right thing. He didn’t let thoughts of what was at stake, what he could have gained, how much money he could have won, and the status and fame he might have obtained cloud his thinking. He just did the right thing. What about you? What about me? God wants us to be people of honesty and integrity. The world needs to see Christians who are people of truth so that they will believe that Jesus Christ is the truth. Are we committed to integrity and truth?
