A fan standing near the fence at the Presidents Cup in Medinah kicked Corey Conners’ ball onto the green. Officials still called it out of bounds. However, Kevin Kisner spent his next podcast appearance trying to make sense of it.
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Kisner brought up the moment on the Fore Play podcast, and he wasn’t shy about his frustration. “I was losing my mind in commercial,” he said, describing his reaction as the ruling unfolded. He zeroed in on how officials characterized the spectator’s action. “The word intentional is insane in that scenario,” Kisner said.
Conners and Nick Taylor were playing Russell Henley and Jacob Bridgeman on the second hole of Medinah No. 3 when Conners’ approach drifted left and crossed the split-rail fence marking the course boundary. The 460-yard hole runs alongside the same three-foot-tall fence that lines the first and third holes. The course was redesigned by OCM, the firm co-founded by International captain Geoff Ogilvy, and the fence drew attention from players during practice rounds. Min Woo Lee said his first reaction was to ask, “Geoff, what are you doing?”
While Conners’ ball was still moving, a spectator standing near the fence kicked it back into play. On the broadcast, commentators reacted in real time: “Somebody kicked it. That’s going to be in play. I don’t know what happened. Yeah, it looked like somebody kicked it.” The ball rolled onto the green and settled 13 feet from the hole, drawing boos from part of the crowd.
The moment of relief didn’t last. PGA Tour official Mark Dusbabek ruled the kick a “deliberate action,” which triggered Rule 11.2 of the Rules of Golf. Under Rule 11.2c, when a deflection is judged deliberate, officials estimate where the ball would have finished without the interference rather than allow it to be played from its new position. “You estimate where the ball would’ve landed if it wasn’t deflected,” Dusbabek said. “That ball would be out of bounds.” Taylor had to replay the shot from the original spot under stroke-and-distance relief per Rule 18.2, adding a penalty stroke to the team’s score.
The ruling wasn’t the only controversy tied to that fence. Jackson Koivun, playing alongside Justin Thomas, hit his own tee shot out of bounds on the second hole, and players spent the week debating whether a boundary that close to the tee was fair. Xander Schauffele offered a more forgiving take: “At least with a fence if you’re going towards it, maybe it’ll bounce off of it.”
Kisner also said he took his frustration straight to the source. Dusbabek was in the 18th tower with him, and Kisner told him that if he were Ogilvy, he would have stopped the entire competition on that green until officials explained the call. That was Kisner’s hypothetical, not something Ogilvy actually did during the match.
The penalty stroke decided the hole. Henley and Bridgeman made bogey and still won it, moving 2 up after two. That early swing looked costly at the time, but Conners and Taylor rallied from as many as 3 down to beat Henley and Bridgeman 1 up, sealed by a Conners par putt on the 18th green, the same match that helped push the International team to a three-point lead heading into Sunday singles.
It didn’t hold. The United States completed the largest final-day comeback in Presidents Cup history, winning 9.5 of 12 available points on Sunday to take the Cup 17-13, the Americans’ 11th straight win in the event. Conners lost his own singles match 5&3 to Justin Thomas. Kevin Kisner, for his part, wanted the sport to rethink how it handles fan interference altogether. “I told them, I said, now every time a fan reaches his hand up and it touches a ball, you should make them play it from where it should have gone,” he said. “This is insane.”
The ruling cost Conners and Taylor a stroke but not the match, and the International team’s Saturday lead didn’t survive Sunday. Kisner still sees a reflex that no one could call intentional. Golf Digest, by contrast, called the ruling correct, since the kick was deliberate and the ball would otherwise have finished out of bounds. Under Rule 11.2c, the official on the spot makes that call.