National Sports Journalism Center

My favorite time of day is 30 minutes before deadline.

The world is made small, just you, your notes, and your typing machine.

By then, you've done all the reporting, most of the thinking, a lot of the writing, and you're fervently hoping that a kicker will present itself, and the sooner the better.

Wait.

All that is true, and yet . . .

On the best day for any reporter, a story comes suddenly out of nowhere to change everything. And that is the most fun of all — such as last week's bizarre climax to the PGA Championship at Whistling Straits Golf Club.

I wrote daily for Golf Digest's website. On Sunday, the tournament's last day, I spent six hours crawling, climbing, and clambering on hundreds of the thousands of sand dunes that make the Whistling Straits course unique. My objective was to witness every move made by Rory McIlroy, the Irish prodigy who, at 21, may be golf's next great player. Though he began the day four shots off Nick Watney's lead, I believed him capable of a low number — he'd put up a 62 and a 63 recently — that would shout out loud that Tiger's time was over and that Rory's had come.

My notebook became a maze of scribbled details and thoughts . . ..

"Dozen boats on lake."

"Dragon flies galore."

"What's the pendant?"

When McIlroy, en route from the ninth green to the 10th tee, tossed a ball to a boy, I interviewed the boy. He was George Eastin, 13 years old, Gladstone, Mich.,"a pretty good golfer." The ball was a Titleist 7, with a straight line of purple ink on the side opposite the logo, identifying the ball as McIlroy's.

More notes . . .

"As soon as I think, 'No more McDowells, Oosterhizens,' Kaymer 12 under leading."

"R driver (!) (after rubbing pendant)"

"5:13 pm. A shot down."

"18. INTO WIND! Fan shouts, 'Be brave, Rory, go for it.' Encouragement of unnecessary kind."

Had McIlroy won his first major that day, there was nothing I didn't know about his work on the most important six hours of his career. But two putts at the tournament's 72nd hole — after that long, brave shot into the wind — left McIlroy one shot behind the leader in the clubhouse, Bubba Watson.

I listened to McIlroy's brief press interviews in an area near the clubhouse, above and behind the 18th green. From there a person could see the last twosome, Watney and Dustin Johnson, play in. We saw Johnson in trouble, maybe 40 yards right of the fairway's center, up on a hillside where fans had to be moved away to give him room to hit. We saw his shot — saw a puff of sand rise up from the impact — and watched him finish with a bogey five that put him in a three-way playoff for the championship with Watson and Martin Kaymer.

My plan then was to deal with the playoff inside a McIlroy-focused column built around one quote from him: "Now I know that I'm definitely ready to win a major." That way I could still herald the arrival of McIlroy while noting that Tiger, stuck on 14 majors in his chase of Jack Nicklaus's record of 18, is now 0-for-10 in majors played since he won the 2008 U.S. Open.

Then I noticed people gathered around a television.

My editor, Sam Weinman, knelt at the front of the crowd.

"What's happening?" I said.

"There's a question if he grounded his club," Weinman said.

The puff of sand I saw flying on the 18th hillside was not just simple scattered sand. It came from a bunker. The bunker was far out of play, except that Johnson had hit his tee shot so far off-line as to bring the bunker into play. It was one of the near-thousand Whistling Straits bunkers created for no real purpose other than decoration. Fans had walked through it, dumped debris in it, generally made it such a mess that Johnson later would say he didn't know he was in a bunker, he thought it was just a piece of dirt.

If, in fact, he grounded his club in a bunker, that's a two-shot penalty and he'd be out of the playoff.

That was the question being considered by officials.

"You want to deal with that?" Weinman said to me.

"If you want me to, sure."

"It's the story."

It was the story either way. If Johnson were hit with the penalty, he'd be out of the playoff, and if not penalized, he'd have been given a dramatic, last-minute reprieve.

Then, still watching the CBS telecast, we saw a desultory Johnson rubbing a pencil's eraser against his scorecard. The PGA officials had called the two-shot penalty. Johnson's 5 at the 18th became a 7 and put him out of the playoff. The great old editor, Ben Bradlee, once said, "Nothing's better than a big story, not even sex." Bradlee had in mind the publishing of governmental secrets on the Vietnam war, or, perhaps, the unseating of a president. For golf writers, the Dustin Johnson story was big enough to cause a tingle. Johnson was the guy who shot 82 the last day of the U.S. Open to blow a four-shot lead. Now he had screwed up on a fundamental rule of golf to lose the PGA.

And there the poor guy was, tall and lean, dressed all in black, walking out of the scorer's building toward the player's locker room, all by himself — until a dozen reporters scurried away from the press-interview area in hot pursuit.

David Feherty, CBS's intrepid on-course reporter, got to him first, called him out of the shower, in fact, and, with due sympathy, put a series of good questions to him, the most important one asking if Johnson had been aware of a local rule that ALL bunkers were in play, no matter where they were, no matter if people had trampled them, no matter if in them a player should find the remains of a dinosaur. That local rule had been printed first on the sheet given to players on arrival and, for emphasis, had been printed in 24-point type and taped to the mirrors in the players' locker room.

Johnson told Feherty he'd never read the rule. He said he read the local rules only if he had reason to and he'd had no reason to this time. It is, of course, every professional golfer's responsibility to know the rules of his game, especially the local-course rules designed for odd situations that might arise at that particular course — such as off-line bunkers at Whistling Straits. It's also stunning that a professional golfer would admit to not even reading the local rules.

Done with the CBS interview, Johnson answered questions from us another 10 minutes and walked to his car, still talking to five or six reporters.

For the next couple hours, I wrote.

Not a word about Rory McIlrory.

All about Dustin Johnson.

I was a happy boy.

Dave Kindred's latest book, "Morning Miracle," is an inside-the-newsroom account of two years in the life of The Washington Post. Now a contributing writer at Golf Digest, Kindred is a Red Smith Award winner and member of the National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Association Hall of Fame. He can be reached at inkstained1@aol.com. He can be followed at Twitter.com/DaveKindred and facebook.com/people/Dave-Kindred/509353295.