The golf-viewing public was nearly unanimous Sunday as it watched the events at the PGA Championship at Whistling Straits unfold. Dustin Johnson -- who went from needing a short putt to win the thing to being in a playoff to suddenly being knocked out by a two-stroke penalty for grounding his club in a small and not entirely obvious bunker on 18 -- was hosed by a ruling few could fathom.

Plenty of professional golfers reacted with outrage, via Twitter or other sources. John Daly, for instance, tweeted: "So, a sandbar off Lake Michigan considered a bunker too if that's what they're sayin."

As so often happens with these things, though, the obvious gut reaction isn't always the prevailing sentiment. Doug Hoffmann, the tournament director for the Minnesota Golf Association who also works with rules education, was in Brainerd this week for a tournament and heard plenty of chatter.

"I felt it certainly was correct and was the right penalty," Hoffmann said by phone Thursday.

Earlier this week, ESPN interviewed rules official David Price, who was on the course at Whistling Straits and had the displeasure of telling Johnson about the penalty that knocked him out of a playoff.

"It's one of those things. It's a cut-and-dried rule. There's no question it was a bunker," Price said. He added that Johnson or his caddy had asked questions related to bunkers on No. 14 and No. 16 in the final round and that he asked Johnson if he needed anything before the fateful second shot on 18.

Former PGA champion Steve Elkington, who finished tied for fifth with Johnson, went on Jim Rome's radio program and said that Johnson must not have been thinking straight. "When I was sitting in the locker room ... I was thinking, 'He's in the bunker,' " Elkington said. When asked by Rome how he knew that, Elkington replied, " 'Cause I read the [course rules] sheet."

Johnson, for his part, has handled everything beautifully. While he did offer up the line that "I just never thought I was in a bunker" when others clearly could see he was, his takeaway line was this: "I'm not trying to blame anyone else. It's no one's fault but mine."

Indeed. Nobody wanted the tournament to end that way. But that doesn't shift the blame.

"We can't allow the fact that it happened to the tournament leader on the 72nd hole influence what we do," Hoffmann said. "It's easy to get caught up in the emotion of Dustin Johnson. But one of the keys in the rules of golf is that you treat every situation identically."