Keegan Bradley cleared by PGA Tour of wrongdoing at Memorial

Keegan Bradley has come under fire for a pre-shot routine that may be a tad less twitchy than that of a former member of his sainted Red Sox. The leader of the belly putter brigade has even weathered charges of cheating for using an anchoring stroke that remains legal.

Thursday at the Memorial, the 2011 PGA Champ was the object of further scrutiny after a European TV analyst’s suggestion that the 2011 PGA champ cheated during his first round caused a mini-maelstrom on Twitter.

Sky Sports’ Mark Roe, a former professional golfer from England who’s claim to infamy was his DQ from the 2003 British Open for a scorecard blunder, raised the possibility of wrongdoing as Bradley practiced chip shot after chip shot on the seventh hole while walking the fairways alongside Tiger Woods and Fred Couples.

“This is buried. This is a horrible lie....He can’t see his golf ball right now,” the broadcaster, identified in a Steve Elling tweet as Roe, said as Bradley went through the motion he would use to chip the ball out of a wretched spot in heavy rough off the green. “During this pre-shot routine, there’s a lot going on behind the ball.”

Bradley brushed the grass a couple of times, walked up to the hole to take a peek, and returned to his spot to tap the grass three more times and weed whack again, which is when Roe called foul.

“Now I can see the ball a little bit more clearly now than before,” said Roe, who claimed Bradley’s actions improved his lie. “There was too much going on behind the ball for my liking there. You know, it’s just a little bit too deliberate.”

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One would be hard-pressed to find a golf watcher not perturbed by Bradley’s Nomar Garciaparra/OCD-like prep.

That’s not what rocked Roe’s boat, however, and Elling’s posting of the YouTube video sparked a bit of Twitter talk.

The “incident” made its way to the usual La-Z-Boy suspects, prompting Golf Channel’s Scott Walker to respond with his own tweet.

Whether remote rules refs blew the whistle on Bradley or the potential violation made its way to tourney authorities some other way, it was, as readers may have surmised, a big brouhaha about absolutely nothing.

“Rules staff saw it. No issue,” Chris Reimer, the tour’s director of communications told SBNation in an e-mail on Friday. “Not sure if someone called in or how the rules officials heard about it. but they definitely took a look at it.”

We now return to Jack Nicklaus’ Memorial Tournament, where, through 10 holes of Friday’s second round, Tiger has a bogey and a double and sits, with Bradley, directly on the projected cut line at 2-over.