Baffled by golf ’s rules? That’s par for the course
Attempts to speed up the game are laudable, but its fine points will still be a mystery to most of us
Golf is a hard enough game as it is without being hidebound by rules. Few, if any, sports have more dos and don’ts designed to cover every mishap that may befall the participant and ensure that even if the standard of play is poor it is at least fair.
News that the Royal and Ancient and the United States Golf Association are about to embark on another round of rule changes is enough to make the heart sink for those of us who have yet to master the existing regulations despite having played for 40 years or more. Some of them are, frankly, baffling. Why can you repair a pitch mark on the green on the line of your putt but not a spike mark? Search me, but there it is.
If your ball is in a bunker you can remove so-called “movable obstructions”, such as a sweet wrapper that someone has dropped, but not anything classed as a “loose impediment”, like twigs or branches. This seems fair enough since it distinguishes between natural and artificial objects; but there are a lot of golfers who are unaware of this.
Every player knows, or should know, that you can’t ground your club in a bunker. Yet even the greatest are caught out. A few years ago, the American golfer Dustin Johnson fell foul of this rule, grounding his club in what he thought was scrubland but which had been redesignated as a bunker, thereby incurring a two-shot penalty that kept him out of a play-off for the US PGA. More than any game, golf requires its players to police themselves. Unless you are taking part in a major tournament complete with an army of officials, timekeepers and referees, there is often no one but your opponent, playing partner and God to witness what you get up to.
It is on your conscience if you nudge the ball a foot to the right to get a better shot out of the woods you have sliced into; or claim to have found your ball in the light rough when everyone else could have sworn it went deep into the wilds, never to be seen again. There is an old joke about the four golfers involved in a close match searching for a ball in the undergrowth, whereupon the player shouts “found it” and promptly hits it back on to the fairway. “I’ll bet that’s not his ball,” says an opponent to his partner. “I think he cheated”. “I’m sure he cheated,” says the other. “I found his ball – it’s in my pocket!”
One of the objectives behind the changes (described as the “most sweeping” for 30 years) is to speed up proceedings, so the maximum time allowed to search for balls is to be reduced from five to three minutes. But the real slow play culprits are often the professionals who seem to spend about five hours on a round. We lesser mortals should be able to get round most courses in under four hours as a four-ball and just over three hours as two-ball. But, of course, it is never your group causing the hold-up; it’s those players in front who stalk the greens to see their putts from every angle as though they were in the Ryder Cup. Just get on with it!
One rule of thumb is that if you are not sure you are doing the right thing on the golf course then you almost certainly are not. Do I get a free drop from this path? Is this ball still in bounds? The answer is invariably no, so take the punishment or face something invariably worse than a penalty stroke – the poor opinion of your golfing peers. If you are in doubt, there is always the R&A to help, as my colleague Peter Foster found while reporting in Afghanistan after the US invasion in 2001. Hiring an old set of clubs from a Kabul shop he went to play on the long neglected Qargha Lake Golf Club, where the fairways were strewn with the detritus of umpteen wars.
When his ball came to rest behind a 75mm Russian howitzer he called the R&A by satellite phone for a ruling. The weapons were deemed “moveable” under rule 24-1 if they could be shifted without “unreasonable effort” and without damaging the course. When the gun carriage refused to budge, Foster dropped the ball a club’s length away, not nearer the hole, without incurring a penalty. And what about landmines? Even this was covered by Decisions on the Rules of Golf (with particular reference to Section 1, paragraph 4/10). “If a ball comes to rest in a situation dangerous to the player, for example a rattlesnake or bees nest, in equity a player can, without penalty, drop at the nearest point which is not dangerous.”
Among the proposed changes, my undoubted favourite is to cap the score on a particular hole.
This means that when I have already taken 10 shots and am still nowhere near holing out I can pick up and put it down as an 8. Since I do that anyway, it is nice to see it made official.
When his ball came to rest behind a 75mm Russian howitzer he called the R&A by satellite phone for a ruling