Advice on a couple of rules please

[tjy355]

By the way, this thing pictured below is usually on sale in most pro shops and costs a whole $2

[SubPar]

By the way, this thing pictured below is usually on sale in most pro shops and costs a whole $2

I carry one in my bag. it is also on line and searchable, but if you have taken the time to dig into the rules of golf and the full book of "decisions", which is the size of an LA phonebook, you'll see it is not so easy to make the right call on the course.

Pro players often wrong and even rules officials are sometimes wrong. SubPar

[Fourputt]

I carry one in my bag. it is also on line and searchable, but if you have taken the time to dig into the rules of golf and the full book of "decisions", which is the size of an LA phonebook, you'll see it is not so easy to make the right call on the course.

Rules officials do make mistakes, but at the top levels that is exceedingly rare. They all carry radios and call for help when they are uncertain of a ruling. For a person to even qualify as a USGA official he has to score at least 85 on the exam in the annual 4 day Rules Workshop. And to participate in the higher level USGA tournaments, I believe he has to score 95. I can tell you that it is very difficult to do. I scored 80 in the last one I attended, and that was well above the average. I was surprised at some of the answers I got wrong, but overall I wasn't that unhappy with the results.

Some of the questions are stated in such a way as to either be deliberately confusing, or to add in extraneous information that has nothing to do with the ruling. In many ways that is the same way that an official gets the information on the course when trying to investigate a situation. He then has to sort out the relevant from the irrelevant and make a ruling, but he has to trust what he is told because it is rare that he is actually on hand to witness the incident. At the front of the rule book right after the title page is a page entitled "How to Use the Rules Book". That page is one of the keys to understanding the Rules of Golf. If you skip or ignore that page, it will make working with the rules much more difficult. The list of 5 questions under the heading "What is the Ruling?" are exactly what the rules official asks to get the facts about the situation. When I answer some of the questions I see here I ask those same questions before I go any further. The same rules breach can be treated in different ways depending on the answers.

[Pinseeker81]

I got another question on rules.Hole #9 at the course I play at has a dogleg to the right with out of bounds down the right side.With a very good drive you can cut the corner and almost reach the green.Is it legal to cut across out of bound as long as it dont land in it?

It doesn't matter where the ball's been, just where it ends up.

[zeg]

Furthermore, you can even stand out of bounds to play your in-bounds ball.

(but you don't get any relief for conditions out of bounds that interfere)

[jermzkill]

I don't want to steal your thread but I had a rules question, that may be somewhat similar but not really haha. Say there is a LONG hazard in front of you water, swamp, super high grass, etc. Say I take 2 trys to get over the hazard with no success, can I drop somewhere on the other side of the hazard and take a stroke or something? If so where would I drop the ball?

maybe there should be a sticky for just rules questions. just a thought

[Pinseeker81]

I don't want to steal your thread but I had a rules question, that may be somewhat similar but not really haha. Say there is a LONG hazard in front of you water, swamp, super high grass, etc. Say I take 2 trys to get over the hazard with no success, can I drop somewhere on the other side of the hazard and take a stroke or something? If so where would I drop the ball?

Someone will correct me if I'm wrong, but you can just drop on your side of the hazard on the same line as the ball crossed into it. Say you were 50 yards from it in the first place, you don't have to keep playing from the same point, you can drop 50 yards closer as long as it's still on the side you started from.

I'm not aware of any rule that lets you just go drop on the other side.

[Fourputt]

I don't want to steal your thread but I had a rules question, that may be somewhat similar but not really haha. Say there is a LONG hazard in front of you water, swamp, super high grass, etc. Say I take 2 trys to get over the hazard with no success, can I drop somewhere on the other side of the hazard and take a stroke or something? If so where would I drop the ball?

Under the rules there is no option but to keep hitting until you get over or around it. If it is a hazard that starts right in front of your position and you have no choice but to carry over it, then there is no other alternative by the rules. I'm assuming from the way you describe it that it is not a lateral water hazard. If it's marked in yellow then your point of reference for a drop is where the ball last crossed the margin of the hazard. If that point is right in front of where you are playing from, then you're stuck.

If you are just playing a casual round with friends, then in the interest of pace of play and to just eliminate the frustration, I see no harm in doing what you suggest, as long as they agree with it. If you do so, there is no rule that would tell you where to drop, so you and your friends would have to decide what you consider fair among you. Just so that you are aware that this is not the correct procedure under the rules in case you face that sort of situation in a tournament or other competitive environment.

[JerseyThursday]

I can't even think of a reasonable example right offhand, so I would think that such a case would be exceedingly rare.

Intense wind?

If that excuse doesn’t work how about earthquake?

[Fourputt]

Intense wind?

What I said was if there was no obvious reason for it's movement, then the player is usually deemed to be the cause. A strong wind would be an obvious reason to believe that the player might NOT be the cause of the ball moving. You need to read the entire post before commenting.

[JerseyThursday]

What I said was if there was no obvious reason for it's movement, then the player is usually deemed to be the cause. A strong wind would be an obvious reason to believe that the player might NOT be the cause of the ball moving. You need to read the entire post before commenting.

It was meant as a joke.

Lighten up.

[SubPar]

I don't want to steal your thread but I had a rules question, that may be somewhat similar but not really haha. Say there is a LONG hazard in front of you water, swamp, super high grass, etc. Say I take 2 trys to get over the hazard with no success, can I drop somewhere on the other side of the hazard and take a stroke or something? If so where would I drop the ball?

If you hit it in the hazard a second time and think you will never get over it. You can take your 1 stroke penalty for the drop and drop on the other side. Then add an additional 2 stroke penalty for playing the ball from the wrong spot.

This also applies when you, for example, hit a ball and it goes lost or OB and you hit no provisional, and it is impractical to go back to the original spot where you last hit. You can drop a ball around where you last saw your ball and take a total of three strokes penalty. SubPar

[RocktimusPryme]

Wouldnt that ONLY be applicable to OB? Out here anyway all the hazards other than "out of bounds" are listed as lateral hazards. Therefore if you get to where you think your ball is supposed to be, and cant find it wouldnt you take a single stroke drop penalty where you think the ball entered the hazard?

[iacas]

Wouldnt that ONLY be applicable to OB? Out here anyway all the hazards other than "out of bounds" are listed as lateral hazards. Therefore if you get to where you think your ball is supposed to be, and cant find it wouldnt you take a single stroke drop penalty where you think the ball entered the hazard?

It's applicable to a LOST ball or a ball hit OB. Not that, as a "fake rule," it's really "applicable" at all.

[RocktimusPryme]

It's applicable to a LOST ball or a ball hit OB. Not that, as a "fake rule," it's really "applicable" at all.

I dont understand. If I hit a shot off the tee that goes errant towards a lateral hazard lets say the desert because thats pretty common out here, and I see it bounce near the border of the hazard, but not sure if it stayed up. Why would I have to hit a provisional? When I get there I either find out if it either stayed up in which point good for me, or it didnt and I take a drop penalty.

That is why your saying its a fake rule right, because I was supposed to have hit a provisional anyway.

[SubPar]

I dont understand. If I hit a shot off the tee that goes errant towards a lateral hazard lets say the desert because thats pretty common out here, and I see it bounce near the border of the hazard, but not sure if it stayed up. Why would I have to hit a provisional? When I get there I either find out if it either stayed up in which point good for me, or it didnt and I take a drop penalty.

If you have good reason to assume it went in the hazard, then you play it accordingly. But if it goes lost or OB the total 3 shot penalty applies if you do not go back tot he place you hit the original shot from. It is not a "fake rule". When I was handicap chairman for a club I went to a class run by the SCGA and this is the way they explained it.

The penalty for a lost ball or a ball OB is "stroke and distance", if you take the stroke but not the distance, it is a two shot penalty for not following the rule correctly and playing from the wrong place. i.e., if you hit your tee shot 250 yards and you get down there and it is OB, it is usually not practical to go back to the tee. If you drop the ball back inbounds, you are lying four hitting your fifth shot. (some courses have a 90 degree rule for OB which allows you to bring the ball straight back in bounds and just take a 1 stroke penalty, but this is rare) If you can't go back to the tee and you are lost or OB, what other option would you have? Pick up and go home? SubPar P.S. A different but similar example would be when DL3 accidentally hit his ball when taking a practice stroke on the green. The ball moved a couple of feet. He played the ball from where it came to rest rather than replacing it to it's original spot. If he had done that he would have incurred just the 1 stroke penalty for moving the ball ( 18-2 ). Because he also played the next stroke from the wrong place ( 20-7 ) he had to take an additional 2 stroke penalty.

[Fourputt]

I dont understand. If I hit a shot off the tee that goes errant towards a lateral hazard lets say the desert because thats pretty common out here, and I see it bounce near the border of the hazard, but not sure if it stayed up. Why would I have to hit a provisional? When I get there I either find out if it either stayed up in which point good for me, or it didnt and I take a drop penalty.

If your ball is thought to possibly be lost in a hazard the Provisional Ball rules doesn't apply anyway. That only applies to a ball thought to be OB or lost.

What Erik meant by a "fake" rule is that the idea of dropping where the ball was OB or lost is NOT a Rule of Golf. That is what he was responding to. A ball lost or OB must be replayed from the original spot if a provisional ball wasn't played. Are you saying that all of the courses in Vegas call the desert a "lateral hazard"? That is something else that the Rules of Golf do not even contemplate or condone. For one thing, there is no such thing as a "lateral hazard". The term is lateral water hazard, and it must be a watercourse of some sort, even if it doesn't always have water in it. To just call everything off the green grass a hazard is making a travesty of the rules. I assume that they just call it an "environmentally sensitive area" and thus abrogate the necessity of playing real golf. But if they allow players to enter the area to retrieve balls, then they negate any consideration for it being "sensitive".

[RocktimusPryme]

Are you saying that all of the courses in Vegas call the desert a "lateral hazard"? That is something else that the Rules of Golf do not even contemplate or condone. For one thing, there is no such thing as a "lateral hazard". The term is lateral

yes most of the desert in vegas in considered a lateral hazard because they dont want you going into it and hacking around. For one you might step on a rattlesnake, and two depending on how far out of the city you are alot of it is protected wildlife habitat anyway.

It really depends on where your at. If you on a course like I played today where its built in the city in a housing development there really isnt much desert. Just some gravel and shrubs. So most of the time you can find your ball providing it stays out of the houses which are OB, even if it goes into a bush or something and is nonplayable. But most of the courses like Paiute where the course is for real built in the desert, yes they tell you not to go in there hacking around play it as a lateral. I sort of feel the way that rule is worded is unfair towards amateurs playing like most of us do in our spare time. Because under PGA or even probably most smaller tournament conditions, provided your ball stays in the field of play SOMEBODY knows where it is. Be it a rules official, a spotter, or just an onlooker. But for a normal player when a shot goes out of your field of vision so you cant see exactly where it lands, then you cant take massive amounts of time looking for it because you cant hold up the group behind you even though your damn sure its still in play somewhere. I mean when I played Torrey last year right before they closed it for the open the rough was actually thicker for us than it was for the open. They grew it way out then trimmed it just a bit in that layer formation they did. But you could throw a ball 20 feet, watch where it lands and theres a good chance you wont find it quickly if at all. And thats not an exaggeration.