Banks Steele had dreamed up the scenario many times.
The 17-year-old from Lancaster, South Carolina, who had only started playing competitive golf two years earlier, was going to tee it up in his first U.S. Junior Amateur at Trinity Forest, and with the top college coaches in the country watching and on national television, he was going to win the thing.
“But obviously, that took more than just an average turn; it was a complete 180,” Steele said Wednesday evening, a day after he was disqualified from the 77th U.S. Junior Amateur Championship.
Steele’s disqualification, though, wasn’t of his own doing. Rules officials determined that his local caddie, hired for the week, had twice measured the wind with an artificial object. By simply throwing his hat into the air, the caddie violated Rule 4.3a(2), which states that players, or by extension, their caddies, are not allowed to use “an artificial object to get other wind-related information (such as using powder, a handkerchief or a ribbon to assess wind direction).”
The USGA confirmed the reason for disqualification with GolfChannel.com.
Steele said his caddie didn’t know the specific rule, and neither did he or his two playing competitors. As far as they knew, tossing one’s hat up to test the wind was as innocuous as doing so with some blades of grass.
“I definitely do not want to blame my caddie whatsoever,” Steele explained via phone, having just arrived home from Dallas. “Everyone makes mistakes, everything happens for a reason, and I don’t want to hold anything against anybody. It was very hard on him, and I know if that was me in that situation, and I was caddying for a player, I would obviously be blaming myself. He had no intention of doing anything wrong or breaking any rules. It was just an unfortunate result.”
Steele opened his week with a 6-over 76 at Brook Hollow, the companion course for stroke play and the tougher of the two layouts by over two strokes. He’d begin his second round at Trinity Forest with a bogey on the first, too, but had found something and started stringing together some pars and near-birdies.
After stuffing a wedge shot to 5 feet at the par-4 sixth, Steele was walking to the green, putter in hand, when he turned back and saw his caddie chatting with an official. He didn’t think much of it, but following a short miss, Steele was stopped on his way to the next tee. The official informed Steele of the caddie’s mistake prior to Steele’s approach, and he asked the player if he’d witnessed any other instances of the caddie using his hat to test the wind. Steele said he hadn’t, was given a two-shot penalty for the one infraction, and he proceeded to play on.
Not about to give up, Steele announced to his caddie, “Well, looks like we’re going to have to make two more birdies than we thought.”
Only once Steele finished his ninth hole, still at 9 over, he was summoned by the officials again. The caddie was also seen using his hat in a similar manner on the fifth hole, and because there had been multiple infractions, Steele was disqualified.
“I tried to handle it the best way I could,” said Steele, whose only frustration was that they didn’t find out about the infraction on the fifth hole when it happened.
“We learn then, that’s the first instance, we get the penalty, and then I still get to finish out my U.S. Junior experience,” he added.
This is just the latest rules violation by a caddie in a USGA amateur championship. At the 2020 U.S. Amateur at Bandon Dunes, Argentina’s Segundo Oliva Pinto lost the 18th hole in his Round-of-16 match to eventual champion Ty Strafaci after Pinto’s local caddie was shown on camera bending down and testing the sand with his hand. Two years before that, at the 2018 U.S. Amateur at Pebble Beach, Akshay Bhatia had a hole taken away after his caddie took a cart ride back from the restroom from a volunteer whom he thought was a USGA rules official; Bhatia went on to lose his first-round match in 19 holes.
“What can you do? I’ll have plenty of opportunities to play in this tournament, so I’m not too upset about it,” Bhatia said then.
Steele, a rising high-school senior, is hopeful for more opportunities as well. This was the first U.S. Junior he’d tried to qualify for, and he got through a 7-for-3 playoff to punch his ticket, an impressive feat considering Steele didn’t log his first golf tournament until giving up travel soccer two summers ago. Steele had just finished a big national tournament for Charlotte Soccer Academy in late June 2023, when on the drive home, he told his parents that he was done with soccer. About a year earlier, he started playing rounds with some older friends from church, and ever since then he had squeezed all the golf he could between soccer training and games. He won the HV3 Invitational, a tournament hosted by Harold Varner III, earlier this year.
Now, he’s on the verge of playing NCAA Division I golf, as several college coaches were out following him in Dallas.
Steele was initially worried about what people would think about the words, “DQ,” next to this name at the bottom of the 264-player leaderboard. This was the first time he’d ever been penalized, let alone disqualified. His caddie also was so devastated that he asked the Steeles to not pay him; they ignored that request. “That would not have been right,” Steele said.
Steele and his caddie, before they exchanged goodbyes, ended with this agreement: “This is just going to make my story that much better.”
“I’m just going to use this as pure motivation to keep going while understanding that golf is a tough game with a lot of different rules,” Steele said. “Hopefully, it doesn’t happen again, but I can’t worry about it.
“I’m going to be back at practice tomorrow, trying to get better.”
