The first ruling he made in the first tournament he ever worked is one he won’t soon forget. It came at the boys 4A state high school tourney more than a dozen years ago.

A competitor hit his ball up against a cart path. With the nearest relief, he had a tree that would interfere with his swing. While Montgomery was sorting out the issue, the player’s father was throwing in his two cents regarding the situation. Suffice it to say the two disagreed on precisely how to proceed.

“I said, ‘Sir, I guarantee we’ll get this and get this right,'” Montgomery recalls.

The player, slightly under the tree after taking relief, ended up hitting his shot onto the green.

“I kind of looked at the father and said, ‘I told you we’d get it right,'” Montgomery said.

A little later, the tournament’s chief rules official Gene Miranda, with whom Montgomery was in contact via radio while making the ruling, came to the site and asked what parent he had heard in the background during the ruling. Montgomery said he didn’t know, but after a little investigating, the player with whom Monty was interacting was Kent Denver’s Gunner Wiebe. Miranda then informed Montgomery that he had been arguing with Mark Wiebe, a two-time winner on the PGA Tour.

“That was funny,” Montgomery said in thinking back on the moment.

Such is the life of a rules official. Over the years, there are going to be moments like those that stay etched in the memory.

On Wednesday night, more than 12 years after working that first event, Montgomery (pictured) had another memorable moment. That was when he received the Jim Topliff On-Course Official of the Year Award from the CGA. The honor — named for Topliff, a longtime tournament director for the CGA who passed away in 2007 — is given out annually to a volunteer rules official who typically works quite a few days and makes an impression while conducting his or her duties.

Montgomery, a 69-year-old lifelong Coloradan, put in 31 days of rules officiating in 2018, according to the CGA, making him one of nine people who worked at least that many days this year — out of the 127 officials on the CGA roster. In a similar vein, a Volunteer of the Year Award is typically also given out at what is now known as the CGA Women’s Golf Summit, which in 2019 will be held March 9 at Pinehurst Country Club.

“It’s truly a deep honor to receive this (Topliff Award),” Montgomery said on Wednesday at Pinehurst, where the CGA held a holiday and retirement celebration for three of its staffers — Gerry Brown, Laura Robinson and Anne Bley. “I know what it stands for and what it goes to. I’m honored someone has recognized my efforts. When I go to a golf course, the days I volunteer, whatever assignment they give me that’s where I go. And they always know I’m going to do what they ask me to do.

“I’m not the best rules official they have, but I am one who will work an assignment and work it to the best of my ability — with usually no complaints.”

Making the honor even more meaningful for Montgomery is that he knew Topliff a bit. When Monty was a senior at Bear Creek High School, he said Topliff taught at nearby Bear Creek Elementary. And Montgomery said Topliff helped found the men’s club at Foothills Golf Course and was it first president. Foothills is Montgomery’s home course and he’s twice been president of the men’s club himself (2006 and ’16).

Greg With, a prominent rules official and a past winner of the Topliff Award, serves on the CGA board of directors and chairs the CGA Rules Committee, which decides on the Topliff Award recipients.

“In Monty’s case, I don’t know of many rules officials that connect with players like he does,” With said on Wednesday. “He’s a big guy, but he’s just like a teddy bear on the course. He’s able to administer the rules in ways that players — particularly junior players — understand, and they get it. So we really appreciate that.

“He’s done this for more than a decade, and he’s worked a lot of days every year. He’s well known at the tournaments he works.

“When I called him, he said something like, ‘I didn’t go searching for this award.’ And I said ‘that’s not how it works. If you go chasing it, you’re never going to get it. This award chased you.’ He’s very deserving.”

Approrpriately, With is among the rules officials Montgomery calls his mentors in recent years — along with Mike Rice, Mike Boster and CGA board member Brad Wiesley.

But it was Dustin Jensen — a onetime director of youth programs for the CGA who went on to become the association’s managing director of operations before returning to North Dakota a year ago — who is responsible for getting Montgomery into officiating in the first place.

You see, when Montgomery first joined the Foothills men’s club board 14 years ago, he volunteered to be on the rules committee, which entailed going to a rules seminar. And the next year, he attended the seminar for a second straight year.

“That year I met Dustin Jensen,” Montgomery said. “Dustin said, ‘It’s your second year here. Maybe you should think about coming out with us’ as a rules official. I said I’m not all that good. He said all you have to do is learn how to work a radio. We’ll help you with the rules. You can call on the radio and say you need help. So Dustin talked me into it.”

Nowadays, while Montgomery works the CGA’s most prestigious tournaments — the Amateur and the Match Play, in addition to senior majors — about two-thirds of his officiating days are devoted to junior golf events.

“My best times in the CGA are working with the kids — the Junior Golf Alliance (of Colorado events),” he said. “When they look up at you and say, ‘What do you mean I’ve got to drop my ball on the concrete? It’s a brand-new Titleist.’ I say, ‘Well, son, sorry about that. This is the rule’ and explain it to them. I may take too much time than I should, but with the kids, every situation is an opportunity for education. The parents will come up and say, ‘Thank you.’ That right there, that’s what I work for — the thank yous. You’re helping write my paycheck.

“Some guys say they get their pay by picking up golf balls — they get all their Pro V-1s that way. But to me it’s when a parent or a player comes up and says ‘thank you. We really appreciate the time you took to come out here and volunteer.’ What even means more is when I’m working an adult tournament and one of the players say, ‘Thank you for being here.’ That’s the satisfaction I get.”

While many officials measure their ability as a rules officials largely by how they score on the PGA/USGA Rules of Golf exam, Montgomery fully admits that isn’t his forte.

“The best I’ve ever done is 75 (percent) out of three times” taking test, he said. “I cannot take written tests because I stare at this bright white paper with the bright light up there. After about an hour I can’t read the page anymore. I’m very poor on doing written tests, but on oral tests I’ll hang in there with everybody. I think they’re starting to realize he is smarter than what his scores indicate.”

Montgomery, like all rules official, have a big change coming, with the new Rules of Golf modernization taking effect on Jan. 1. Suffice it to say Montgomery knows he’ll be devoting a lot of time to studying the rules between now and the spring.

“I don’t have it down pat (yet),” he said. “I’m pretty apprehensive. I’m signed up for the 3 1/2-day rules school in March. I’ve been to a four-hour (CGA) rules seminar. Now I’m starting to read the book and study the book. Mike Rice is sending me links and saying go to the USGA site. They have all kinds of videos you can watch.

“My objective before the first of the year is to read the rule book from front to back. Everyone I talk to says the hardest thing is finding the rule in the (new) book. Robert (Duke, the CGA’s director of rules and competitions) made a great analogy: You go on Christmas break, come back and somebody has reorganized your filing cabinets. But the more I look at it, it makes perfect logical sense of how the rules have been reorganized. I’m confident I’ll be ready to roll come this spring.”

Montgomery, who retired from the UC Health Sciences Center — where he sold medical and dental instruments to students — about 14 years ago, doesn’t by any means limit his time on the golf course to officiating. For many years in retirement, he’d play roughly 100 rounds of golf annually. And though heart problems have curtailed that somewhat, he’ll still get in almost 50 this year. And while he says he hasn’t played to it in 2018, he owns a 9.8 handicap.

By the way, as you might expect, Monty is Montgomery’s nickname. But it’s slightly more complicated than that. He said everybody outside Morrison — his hometown since 1956 — calls him Monty. But in Morrison, he goes by Gary since his dad is the original Monty.

For the CGA’s part, it can just call him the 2018 Jim Topliff Award winner.
 

Kennedy spent his professional career in the law field — as a criminal investigator, a deputy district attorney, a lawyer in private practice, then 16 years as a District Court Judge based in Colorado Springs, his lifelong home.

So the fact that the University of Colorado Law graduate has served as a volunteer rules official in Colorado over the past five years, playing an ever-larger role since retiring from the bench in 2015, makes perfect sense.

“The Rules of Golf — there are only 34 — but you have a huge number of decisions,” Kennedy said by phone on Friday. “The law is very much the same. The statutes that define criminal law, for example, are relatively small in number, but there are tens of thousands of appellate court decisions which interpret those. It’s very much the same discipline (in golf) of understanding what the rule is, but also understanding how they’re interpreted and how they’re applied in everyday circumstances.

“I think it was a pretty easy transition for me because I spent my entire adult life dealing with the law, dealing with the rules and learning how to understand them and apply them to the factual situation that existed at that time. As I told people when I first started doing this, I’m used to calling balls and strikes. That’s what I’ve been doing all my adult life. My mind works in a way that I’m able to grasp some of that stuff just because that’s what I’ve been trained to do all my adult life.”

The CGA tracks the number of dates worked by volunteer rules officials in a given year — counting CGA championships and qualifiers, USGA championships and qualifiers, CoBank Colorado Open championships and qualifiers, Junior Golf Alliance of Colorado tournaments, other junior events, and Colorado-based college tournaments — and more than 50 officials worked at least one day in 2017 on the CGA spreadsheet.

Impressively, nine people chalked up at least 25 days in 2017: Greg With (46 days), John Sova (37), Tim Hersee (33), Mike Boster (32), Mike Rice (31), Dennie Runge (31), Kennedy (26), former CGA president Jim Magette (25) and Brad Wiesley (25).

The CWGA, which officially joined forces with the CGA at the beginning of this year, also has a large group of volunteer officials and it presents its Volunteer of the Year Award at the Women’s Annual Meeting, which this year will be held March 3 at the Inverness Hotel & Conference Center.

For his part, Kennedy was recently presented the Jim Topliff Award as the CGA’s on-course rules official of the year for 2017. The honor is named for Topliff, a longtime tournament director for the CGA who passed away in 2007. Of the aforementioned rules officials, Hersee (2015), Wiesley (2012), With (2011), Rice (2008) and Sova (2006) have received the award.

Kennedy took on considerably more responsibility last year in serving as the chief official for a handful of events, including the Mark Simpson Colorado Invitational that the University of Colorado hosts at Colorado National Golf Club in Erie. In 2017, he was also part of ruling crews at multi-day tournaments such as the CoBank Colorado Women’s Open and Colorado Senior Open, the Colorado Junior PGA Championship and other college tournaments.

“From the first of May until the middle of October (in 2017) I spent a fair amount of time on golf courses,” he said. “I worked a lot more than I played golf this past year, there’s no doubt about that.”

The first step in Kennedy’s increased role — following his retirement from the bench in the summer of 2015 — was taking a rules exam at the end of a PGA/USGA Rules of Golf Workshop in 2016. Kennedy recalls he scored a 96 on the exam.

“I studied pretty dang hard,” the 69-year-old said. “I told people it was the hardest exam I’ve taken since I took the bar exam. And I studied about as hard for it as I did for the bar as well.”

Besides the basic appeal of being a rules official given his legal background, Kennedy was attracted to the position for a couple of other reasons.

“I knew I wanted something to keep me active and involved and outdoors,” he said. “I’m an outdoors guy. I golf and I hike and I bike. I spend as much of my leisure time as I can outdoors. (Kennedy is pictured at Canyonlands in southeast Utah.)

“Being on the golf course seemed to be something worthwhile and you feel like you’re giving something back to the game. As a judge I spent a lot of time working with kids who had come from troubled homes so I’d always had a soft spot in my heart for working with kids. It seemed like a natural fit to work with juniors on the golf course as well.” (Besides his work on the course, Kennedy is a former chairman of the board for the YMCA of the Pikes Peak Region.)

And there are social and intellectual aspects to rules officiating as well.

“I had an interest in it and it was a good niche,” said Kennedy, a former high school golfer (Palmer HS in Colorado Springs) who plays to an 11.8 USGA Handicap Index out of the Garden of the Gods Club. “The guys that I work with are guys very much like me — my same age group, avid golfers who were looking to give something back to the game. Plus, I’m a retired judge and I wanted to have something that continued to challenge me intellectually.”

After working some events as a chief official where another person of CRO caliber was on hand to help out as need be, Kennedy was on his own in that role at the CU Mark Simpson Invite in September. And, as often occurs, an issue came up that proved challenging.

On the 12th green at Colorado National, Kennedy said when the grounds crew was mowing, something had come lose from the mower and it had created a small trench — maybe a quarter-inch wide and not quite that deep — running right across the center of the green.

“None of us knew how to treat that,” Kennedy said. “You get that kind of oddball thing that I hadn’t seen before. That was the first time I was the chief official so I had to make the final decision. That was interesting. What I did was to let players repair (the damage) as if it were a ball mark in the line of their putt so the ball wasn’t hopping across this trench. I don’t know if that was the right decision or not, but that was the only thing I could come up with that made sense for me to do. I’d be curious to see what the USGA guys would say that we would do about that.”

Kennedy, and many rules officials like him, face more challenges ahead as the Rules modernization plan announced almost a year ago by the USGA and the R&A will take effect in 2019.

“I haven’t spent a lot of time really digging into the weeds with the new rules,” Kennedy said. “Some of the things certainly needed to be updated. I don’t mind having to learn new stuff; I like learning new stuff. Some of the stuff might create some challenges for the officials just because it’s going to be a change, and most of us have been playing the game under these rules or using them as officials for a long time.

“The purpose is trying to speed up the pace of play and also make (the game’s rules) seem like they’re fair. You have the publicized things like Lexi Thompson losing (the 2017 ANA Inspiration after incurring four penalty strokes). and the Dustin Johnson thing (at the 2016 U.S. Open, which he still won). Some people look at that and say, ‘Those rules are just unfair’ and it might cast a negative view on the game of golf because it seems like the punishment does not match the crime — like a quarter-turn of a golf ball that gives you no advantage. My feeling is they’re trying to make the Rules of Golf appear more fair. If you have a minor infraction, you shouldn’t have something that costs you a major golf tournament, like what happened to Lexi Thompson.

“I hope it accomplishes what they want — that people can look at it and say that’s fair and we avoid some of the slow-play issues which sometime are caused by (rulings).”

Spoken like someone who knows a little something about rules.