And they say nothing happens in the Fall Series

When you think of golf pioneers, you think of giants of the game like Arnold Palmer, Tiger Woods, and of course, Parker McLachlin.

Wait, what? Well, think about it: while Palmer and Woods have both been credited with bringing golf to the masses, neither has been able to do so as directly as McLachlin, who violated PGA Tour policy for a first-ever in-tournament tweet during the final round of the Frys.com Open on Sunday.

The post itself wasn't terribly revealing (it read: "Just made birdie on 4. Waiting on 5th tee. First tweet during a tourney round. Don't want to get too used to this!") but it was still enough to elicit a phone call from PGA Tour executive vice president Rick George, who informed an unwitting McLachlin that he was breaking Tour policy.

For those scoring at home, the rule broken was for the use of electronic devices during competition, and not, as we first suspected, for a superfluous use of an exclamation point.

McLachlin elaborated on the infraction to ESPN.com's Jason Sobel:

"Basically, in [Sunday's] round we had a pretty long wait on the back nine sitting on the tee," McLachlin said. "The guys that I was playing with [Brad Faxon and Glen Day] were checking football scores and someone yelled out, 'You should tweet about what you're doing right now.' I was like, that's a good idea. I didn't really think too much about it."

According to Sobel, both Faxon and Day also technically violated PGA Tour rules for checking football scores on a cell phone.

Man, you'd think if guys were going to go to all the trouble of cheating, they'd at least do something that could work to their advantage.

-- *Sam Weinman