USGA Announces Local Rule for 18-2 on Putting Green

[Valleygolfer]

7 hours ago, iacas said:

This has nothing to do with that.

How do you justify leaving one ball where it ends up and another moving back to a unknown position. Unless I read this wrong. The ball was at rest in both cases, why not return the ball?

[saevel25]

2 minutes ago, Valleygolfer said:

How do you justify leaving one ball where it ends up and another moving back to a unknown position. Unless I read this wrong. The ball was at rest in both cases, why not return the ball?

The rules of golf do it anyway in some cases. 

What if the wind moves your ball. You have to play it from where it ended up. Look at that golfer at The Masters last year. His ball blew off the green into the water, he took a penalty. 

Lets say a leaf comes blowing across the green and hits your ball. You then are required to replace the ball because the leaf was an outside agency. 

It is nothing new. 

[SG11118]

Not a fan of no penalty for accidently kicking your ball.  Not a fan of no penalty for accidently hitting the ball with your putter on a practice swing. 

[Groucho Valentine]

I think this rule is mostly aimed at professional tournament play that have cameras capturing most of the play. I don't think it has a bearing on the other 99% of us.  Im sure all of us have had the ball move from its placed position on a green before and not even known it. How stringent do they want to be about lies in a situation where players are lifting cleaning and replacing a ball in play, anyway? 

[DaveP043]

I've thought about this overnight and I see this as complicating the rules, not simplifying them.  Before, any time a player accidentally moved the ball, it was a penalty, pretty dang simple.  Now, the difference in location of just a couple of inches (on the fringe vs. on the green) makes a difference in the rule.  The new rule doesn't simplify procedures either, you still have to make the same determination you always had to make, did the player cause the movement, or was it some other "natural" cause.  You still replace the ball in its original position if the player moved it, but use the new position if nature moved it.  The only change was the removal of a penalty for the player who accidentally moved the ball, and I don't think that's appropriate.   I really don't think this needed to be changed.

[iacas]

@DaveP043, yeah. The only way it "simplifies" the rules is that players will no longer protest that they were the cause. It will "simplify" the post-ball moved discussions.

I too don't like that you can be careless around your ball.

[saevel25]

4 minutes ago, iacas said:

I too don't like that you can be careless around your ball.

I agree.

It was one of the first things I learned in golf. 

[DaveP043]

In 1960, Richard Tufts wrote an article for the USGA Journal titled "Is Golf GEtting Soft?"  Apparently, we golfers have been increasingly coddled for over 56 years.

http://gsrpdf.lib.msu.edu/ticpdf.py?file=/1960s/1960/601112.pdf

[SG11118]

 

1 hour ago, SG11118 said:

Not a fan of no penalty for accidently kicking your ball.  Not a fan of no penalty for accidently hitting the ball with your putter on a practice swing. 

I do like that a golfer can take practice swings near their ball (without touching it) without fear of penalty.  I do like that a golfer can address the ball on the green and lightly ground their club near the ball (without touching it) without fear of penalty. 

I do agree with others that we are going to see this local rule do more to complicate the rules than simplify them.  I'd be willing to wager we'll see some issues with the rule this year, and it will be written differently when it is incorporated into the rules during the next revision.

[Golfingdad]

43 minutes ago, iacas said:

@DaveP043, yeah. The only way it "simplifies" the rules is that players will no longer protest that they were the cause. It will "simplify" the post-ball moved discussions.

Actually now that you mention it like this, I tend to agree.  In fact, would this even change the outcome of the DJ ruling that presumably inspired this change?

Assume that everything that happened on the course at the time remained the same; ball moved, DJ didn't think it was him, he consulted LW and RO, they both concurred, so he played from that spot.

Since it still matters that you play your ball from the correct spot, would the USGA not still scrutinize this with video, "confirm" that it was DJ that caused the ball to move, and then penalize him for playing from the wrong spot?

---

Now that I wrote all of that, I'm remembering that he wasn't penalized for playing from the wrong spot originally, just for causing the ball to move, so now I'm thinking that this wouldn't be an issue.  I'll leave it anyway since I spent a lot of time on it. 

[iacas]

Just now, Golfingdad said:

Now that I wrote all of that, I'm remembering that he wasn't penalized for playing from the wrong spot originally, just for causing the ball to move, so now I'm thinking that this wouldn't be an issue.  I'll leave it anyway since I spent a lot of time on it. 

Right. He played from the wrong spot because the official told him to. He was penalized for causing the ball to move. The only difference is that he'd have replaced it OR that he'd have not gotten a penalty, depending on which way you want to look at it if you keep "he caused it to move" a constant.

But… it's an interesting point, because as I've noted a few times the cause still has to be determined. Now, most of the cases like the ones they demonstrate in their videos and such are obvious, but what if you're Billy Horschel at the Masters and your ball is on a slope, and you don't cause it to move, and it goes off the green and into the water? What if it goes down the slope and goes in the hole?

Even with the same two sets of conditions before-hand, you have a situation where in one case the player is going to say "Yeah, I thumped my putter hard, it must have caused the ball to move" and another when the player is going to say "I didn't do anything at all!"

Is that going to be a common occurrence? No.

[DaveP043]

12 minutes ago, iacas said:

Even with the same two sets of conditions before-hand, you have a situation where in one case the player is going to say "Yeah, I thumped my putter hard, it must have caused the ball to move" and another when the player is going to say "I didn't do anything at all!"

I thought about this same thing, and decided not to mention it at the time.  The rules should be written with the expectation that the player will do his best to be honest.  Sure, the temptation will be there, for the player to claim that he did (or didn't) cause the ball to move based on the outcome of the movement, we just have to expect the players to be honest.

[iacas]

9 minutes ago, DaveP043 said:

I thought about this same thing, and decided not to mention it at the time.  The rules should be written with the expectation that the player will do his best to be honest.  Sure, the temptation will be there, for the player to claim that he did (or didn't) cause the ball to move based on the outcome of the movement, we just have to expect the players to be honest.

That's true. But you still have to determine the cause, and it's still going to lead - in those cases or cases where the amount of movement is either positive or negative - to a discussion.

Most situations the ball will either obviously be moved by the player or moved so little it's almost inconsequential except procedurally, and the player will likely just say "I must have caused it to move."

[Lastpick]

The rule 18-2 was a bad rule as evidenced in the US Open.  DJ should have been immediately penalized.  This would have put DJ on notice and the rest of the contenders on notice.  I however do not agree that there was 51% of the evidence that DJ caused the ball to move.  The USGA screwed up in both the men's and women US Open.  

When I say bad rule, it was obvious that the official following the groups did not know what the expectations of the new rule was.  The original intent of the rule as I understand it was to clarify and simplify rulings from the past.

I am one that also thinks that for the most part, the USGA screws up much more often than they get it right when setting up courses for their championships.  

Edited December 9, 2016 by Lastpick

[DaveP043]

15 minutes ago, Lastpick said:

The rule 18-2 was a bad rule as evidenced in the US Open.  DJ should have been immediately penalized.  This would have put DJ on notice and the rest of the contenders on notice.  I however do not agree that there was 51% of the evidence that DJ caused the ball to move. 

I think the DJ case at the US Open was a problem with the application of the rule, not with the rule itself.  You say the same thing with the second bolded sentence above.  Its still hard for me to believe that it took the USGA rules people the better part of an hour to examine all the evidence and make a determination.  It still seems appropriate that if you cause your ball to move accidentally, you should be penalized, no matter where the ball is sitting.  With the new local rule, you still have to be careful when your ball is in play, until you get to the green.  Once you're there, you can be as careless as you want, with no penalties.

As has been said before, most of us will never have the issue come up, unless we do something boneheaded like kick our own golf ball.  I'm sorry, but if you're boneheaded, you deserve a penalty.  This rule seems to me to be designed to give the rules officials for televised professional golf an easy out from a difficult situation.  If the movement of the ball is minor, and there's no penalty involved no matter what caused the movement, there's very little pressure to get things absolutely right.

[iacas]

30 minutes ago, Lastpick said:

The rule 18-2 was a bad rule as evidenced in the US Open. DJ should have been immediately penalized.

Disagree. Agree. The rules official on the scene botched it.

30 minutes ago, Lastpick said:

The USGA screwed up in both the men's and women US Open.

Off topic, but they didn't botch the USWO. They applied the proper rule correctly and expediently.

29 minutes ago, Lastpick said:

When I say bad rule, it was obvious that the official following the groups did not know what the expectations of the new rule was. The original intent of the rule as I understand it was to clarify and simplify rulings from the past.

He probably had a hand in writing the rule. The RO with the group is (I forget his official title) something like the head of the rules committee within the USGA.

29 minutes ago, Lastpick said:

I am one that also thinks that for the most part, the USGA screws up much more often than they get it right when setting up courses for their championships.  

Let's stick to the topic, please.

[Lastpick]

Slow morning so I will comment.  If DJ had caused the ball to move with 51% of the evidence, it would not have taken an hour to determine this.  Bad move by the USGA.  The USGA also screwed up badly in the women's US Open.  The timing of the notifications of a penalty put one of the competitors at a disadvantage.  The goal of the USGA is to present equal opportunity by enforcement of the rules.  In the women's tournament they failed but the exact scenario had probably never been addressed.  I don't have an answer, but the US competitor did receive a strategic advantage on the final hole.  

[iacas]

6 minutes ago, Lastpick said:

Slow morning so I will comment.  If DJ had caused the ball to move with 51% of the evidence, it would not have taken an hour to determine this.

It didn't take an hour to determine. Once they had everyone together it took two minutes. Then they gave Dustin the chance to say it was something else.

6 minutes ago, Lastpick said:

The USGA also screwed up badly in the women's US Open.  The timing of the notifications of a penalty put one of the competitors at a disadvantage.

How? They notified as quickly as they could have.

Even though it's off topic I'm going to allow a one-reply each diversion.

I think I know what you think with the "disadvantage" stuff and that was discussed several times already.