Ken Venturi, a major champion and the longtime television analyst for CBS golf broadcasts, alleges in a new book that Arnold Palmer cheated to win his first major, the 1958 Masters. "Nobody, not even Palmer, is bigger than the game," Venturi says in "Getting Up & Down: My 60 Years in Golf," according to The Associated Press. "I firmly believe that he did wrong and that he knows that I know he did wrong."

At issue - and it was an issue between Venturi, who eventually finished two strokes behind, and Palmer at the time it occurred - is a drop that Palmer took during the final round.

Palmer's ball was embedded and he sought relief from a rules official, who denied his request. Palmer played the ball and wound up with a double bogey. Palmer disagreed with the ruling and played a second ball (the little-known Rule 3-3a), taking a drop near the spot of the embedded ball. With the second ball, Palmer made par.

Three holes later, Palmer was informed that he should have been given relief from the embedded ball, and so his par with the second ball counted.

Here's the problem: While Palmer has always claimed (he's written about the ruling in a couple books) that he followed Rule 3-3a and announced before playing the embedded ball that he would also be playing a second ball, Venturi claims in his book that Palmer didn't say anything about a second ball until after making double bogey with the first. In the book, Venturi even claims that he and Palmer argued about it in the scorer's tent following the round.

It is probably impossible at this point to determine if what Venturi says is true. But it is possible to determine that it's a shame Venturi has chosen to make an issue of this nearly 50 years later. Maybe Palmer did do something wrong in 1958. The point is, it's impossible to tell now. And 50 years later, it is Venturi's reputation, not Palmer's, that will suffer because of this allegation.

Read more about Venturi's allegation on espn.com