Three years ago, Joel Dahmen called Sung Kang a cheater. Sunday at Pebble Beach, the two played in the same group together for the first time since that Quicken Loans National, where Dahmen accused Kang of purposely taking a wrong drop.
Dahmen could only tweet a worried emoji on Saturday evening after receiving a text from the PGA Tour that he’d be teeing off No. 10 at the 9:56 a.m. alongside C.T. Pan and Kang.
— Joel Dahmen (@Joel_Dahmen) February 13, 2021
So, how’d it go? Dahmen shot even-par 72, one better than Kang’s 73. As for the conversation, Dahmen’s caddie, Geno Bonnalie, tweeted afterward that Kang came with the icebreaker early.
“My friends told me I should push you off a cliff,” Kang reportedly joked on the opening tee box.
Bonnalie added: “Joel laughed. It was all good.”
It was a far cry from three Julys ago when Dahmen and Kang argued for nearly a half-hour after Kang hooked his second shot into a hazard during the final round at TPC Potomac and then took a drop some 170 yards closer to the hole than where Dahmen believed the ball last crossed into the hazard.
“Kang cheated,” Dahmen later tweeted. “He took a bad drop from a hazard. I argued until I was blue. I lost.”
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While Kang and Dahmen would speak separately about the incident in the coming weeks, it would be five weeks until they spoke to each other, Dahmen revealed last May on Golf.com’s Subpar Podcast.
“He goes, ‘Joel, I want you to apologize to me,’” Dahmen said. “I said, ‘Apologize to me? Look around, you should apologize to everybody else that was in that field. You took money from them. You did all this stuff.’ We just went back and forth about apologizing and finally he’s like, ‘You did this; you ruined my reputation,’ and I go, ‘You did this to yourself; I didn’t do this.’”
Dahmen added: “We have not spoke since.”
Until Sunday.