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If you have the means to put in full time practicing golf, it's a choice. The kids whose parents have the resources (or interest) to put them through those camps are a relative minority, at least in many parts and perhaps most of the country. Had Tiger been born into a family where he needed to work part time jobs after school to keep the family going, or had his father not encouraged him as strongly as he did, the outcome might have been different. Tiger is a funny case, though, and really not a good example for this discussion. I used his recent struggles as evidence that even the best golfer alive can't just walk out one week and win golf tournaments. But the best golfer, and best few golfers year in and year out are simply good enough that they'd probably have found their way to the Tour almost no matter what. As long as they had the interest in the game, they'd find their way there. The guys where luck is a bigger deal are the journeymen, the guys who do well enough to score well, but are missing as many or more cuts than they're making. There are many, many golfers who are as good or nearly as good technically, but who aren't on the Tour and may never be, simply because they don't peak at the right time in Q-school or don't put together enough wins on the junior tour to get called up.

I agree with this. There is luck involved in every round of golf, so at some level, it has an effect. The guys who are successful, who reach the Tour, and who stay there more than a year, are almost by definition good enough that they'll be in a position to take advantage of breaks when they turn their way. It's at the previous stage where the luck enters. There are undoubtedly many, many people who have the athletic and psychological skills to play Tour caliber golf, but who aren't golfing or who aren't golfing seriously. Even for someone with Tiger's talent, it takes an enormous amount of preparation and effort to play at a winning level. We've seen that with the years he's been struggling to regain his footing. And this is one of the best golfers ever to play the game. The "lucky break" in golf, IMO, is getting a chance to put everything on hold and give the game 100% of your attention for a period of years. Most people can't do that, it takes a bit of luck to either have the resources to fund that yourself, or to find someone who is willing to take a chance that you can develop beyond just being really good.

That's the key, in my opinion. If you agree to waive the rules of Golf, you're not competing in a Golf tournament. The rules are plenty flexible in a match play situation, as Fourputt went on to explain. To pick a relatively innocuous example, I agree that, say, waiving the rule about who plays first in a match doesn't materially harm anyone outside the match. It may affect the outcome, but the players would be free to independently not enforce the stroke cancellation. In that sense, it is a little silly to DQ for simply agreeing to do this beforehand. However, as is often the case, there's more to it than that. Where do you draw the line between rules that may be waived and rules that are integral to the game? Without that, the golfers could just agree to play croquet instead. While no one is technically harmed, that's making a mockery of the competition. Golf is not alone in banning that. Finally, there's a huge can of worms that opens if you allow modifications to the rules: what do you do in the case of a dispute? There is a formal claim resolution procedure for golf for a reason: disputes can and do occur, and sometimes an outside decision is needed. That's not going to work if the rules are changing at the whim of the golfers. It's setting up for a disaster when there's a misunderstanding about the agreed upon exceptions, or when a shady player reneges on a rules change. WIth the rules as they are, this can't happen because a player who knows the rules can always insist they be followed, even if it means making claims to the committee and resolving the disputes after the match.

It's like an officially codified incentive to practice ball-first contact.

Heck, if you're just standing around, you might be guilty of unduly delaying play!

I think the problem is that placing is likely to create a better lie than you had to begin with. In most cases, a drop is likely to give you a similar lie, and since it's less precise, doesn't let you choose the best available spot. It can be annoying in the bunker, but the rules don't generally take much pity on people in bunkers. :-) I do think that the rules require you to try to hit the exact spot on a stroke and distance play from outside the teeing ground. I think it'd be better if you were allowed to fill in your divot and restore the area to its condition from before your stroke, but that has its own complications.

Ok, well given that picture, it looks like relief might well have been warranted (still hard to tell with certainty). As far as choice of direction when you decide whether your stroke is interfered with, I believe you can consider the totality of the circumstances when deciding whether a direction of play is "reasonable." I.e., though you don't get to consider the bush when you're finding the NPR from the cart path, its presence does affect which directions of play are reasonable. Directions that would require you swing or play through it (assuming it's dense) would probably not be reasonable---or at least, you could play backwards or away from the green because of it, then decide if you are interfered with.

If, by your comment about the ball being unplayable, you mean that it was clearly impossible to make a stroke at it, then you do not get free relief from the cart path. From rule 24-2, regarding interference from an immovable obstruction: Exception: A player may not take relief under this Rule if (a) interference by anything other than an immovable obstruction makes the stroke clearly impracticable or (b) interference by an immovable obstruction would occur only through use of a clearly unreasonable stroke or an unnecessarily abnormal stance , swing or direction of play. If your ball is under a bush and there's no way you can make a stroke at it, then the fact that you are standing on a cart path is immaterial. You have no choice but to take the unplayable lie and either take a drop or return to your previous location. If you're able to make a drop within two club lengths and then find yourself in a position where the cart path interferes and you can reasonably make a stroke, then you can take free relief. But you would still incur the unplayable lie penalty.

I've played at a course that had a little bucket of souvenir-type ball mark tools by the front desk. There was a sign indicating that they were free, but by taking one you promised to repair your own plus one other ball mark on each green. Seemed like a nice idea. I like yours as well, but I think it's a bit heavy-handed to be practical. It's good to encourage proper repairs, but probably not at the expense of driving away much-needed business.

You're thinking about it the wrong way. When I clean up a ball mark, I'm not doing a favor for the jerk in the group ahead of me who left it. When I clean up a ball mark, I'm doing a favor for the nice guy in the group behind me. Or maybe for the guy tomorrow, who won't have to try to do an impossible repair on a dried out ballmark. Fixing the mark does some good. Who do you think you're teaching a lesson by spitefully refusing to invest 10 seconds of your time for the betterment of the course? The guy who left it doesn't care, but the guy who doesn't have to chip through it might be very grateful. I disagree with the comment above about being a douche, but your attitude here is unjustifiably selfish. It's not so different from the attitude of the guys who don't clean up their own ball marks---after all, nobody else does, so why should they even bother cleaning up after themselves ?

+1 I always fix my own ballmark. If I'm doing well on pace, I will generally fix any others I find. If someone is close behind, I'll usually only fix one or two per green (i.e., just my own, or my own and one other one). If I didn't leave a mark, I still look around for any that are in need of attention. There's no need to fix every mark on the green, but if most golfers fixed their own plus one other, we'd almost never have problems with ballmarks, even if not everyone bothered. Even if you're conscientious, sometimes it's harder than it should be to find a mark. So just a little bit of "generosity" would cover for the inadvertent missed ones and give us a little defense against hooligans who don't even make an effort.

I agreed earlier that conditional OB has its own problems. It's allowed, though discouraged, so even that is viewed as acceptable in some conditions. But I'm not really talking about that. A maintenance yard is not that different from an enclosed area of OB that contains something other than maintenance equipment. It's a part of course property that for one reason or another has been deemed not to be part of the course for purposes of the play of the game. To me, if the committee says, "This ground is not part of the course," that's all they need to say. Any expectation about where you can play your ball from goes away when you see the white stakes. It's not something I would want to see used very often, but I fail to understand the logic being applied.

110. Started off with a fairway, "fringe in regulation," par, then a decent bogey and an ok double bogey (though I realized later I may have played to the wrong green, I'm not certain). On the 4th hole, though, the wheels fell off spectacularly. My tee shot was ok, but a bit right, and (of course) under a small tree. Fortunately it had room underneath to stand, and I tested my backswing and there was no interference. I set up, swung, and I guess I go back a bit farther on a real swing than on my test swing, and I got hung up a little bit on a branch and whiffed the ball. So I set up again, took a 3/4 backswing, and somehow got hung up again and whiffed. At that point I might as well not have played out the hole because with all the effort it took not to wrap my 9I around the tree, I didn't have anything left to put into the golf. The rest of the round wasn't much better. Was rewarded on several fantastic approach shots with lost balls that are probably in the muddy crap that was near the green on a couple holes, and couldn't putt my way out of a paper bag. So, I dunno, this might be it for me for a while. I haven't had any fun on the course in a long, long time, and I'm playing worse each time out, not better. Between those two things, I really don't know what the point is. I play enough good holes that I know I can do better than I'm doing, but somehow, without fail, there are always 4 holes where I'm just not playing golf and I put down 8s or 10s. If I'm playing for fun, and I'm not having fun, I think it's time to find something else to do... we'll see.

I don't give a damn about cycling, and I really don't care one way or the other whether Armstrong doped. However, as was said upthread a bit, he had nothing to gain from continuing his "defense." The best possible outcome is that he's cleared... AGAIN... and the people who already believed he was guilty go on believing he's guilty. Like he said, he knows that (or whether) he won those Tours, so if he doesn't need the prize money, then I completely sympathize with and respect dropping the fight and flipping a giant bird at the USADA. Good for them. Glad they're cleaning up those old wins. From where I'm sitting, they've just shown that there's no reason to bother watching cycling because the whole sport is made up of cheaters. Good job guys. But, well, I guess I should just shut up and listen to Shorty, because he alone knows the Real Truth. Why do any of the rest of us bother posting when he can just tell us what we need to know?

Insightful. People who will cheat will cheat regardless of the rules. The rules now are clear and easy to apply and relatively easy to police. If you play a round, you post the round. In a match you have the opportunity to mark your opponent's score carefully, moreso than in stroke. If their score doesn't add up, be a good peer reviewer and do your job. If someone is fudging putts, tell the committee. Your solution seems to be that we should all lowball all our scores because people who don't are cheaters. At least, that's all I can get out of your comments.

This x 10. The USGA handicap rules require that you post rounds that are played entirely or mostly (at least 7 holes worth and you must post your 9 hole score, and 13 and you post your 18 hole score) under the "principles of the RoG." Whether you think this is the wisest approach or not, and regardless of your feelings about estimating scores on unfinished holes, if you have a USGA handicap, you are bound to follow these rules. If you do otherwise, you are cheating.

Well, it might force you to club down more strongly than rough or trees, I suppose. But I would think that in most cases that would be a poor design for the hole. With freedom comes responsibility---not to design a course badly. This is more or less my point (no, I didn't forget it, but it was a somewhat off-topic aside at the end of the post where I brought it up). The rules make sense in their own way, but I don't think their inflexibility on these matters is particularly logical. I've played desert courses where their illegal local rule permitting natural desert areas to be played like water hazards pretty unquestionably improves play on the course. (edit) Also, just to explain how this came from the original post about OB and the "50 yards from the edge of the fairway" business, the point was that, logically speaking, either using OB as a strategic element is valid or not. If it is, then if internal OB can be created without causing other problems (as it often can, e.g., for maintenance yards and what not), then why doesn't the USGA like it? If it's not, then why don't they try to avoid bringing it into play at all. The current situation is understandable, but not particularly logically consistent.

Interesting. While I wouldn't call nine inches past the hole "firm" either, it's decidedly different than I'd *ever* call a ball that "died" in the hole. Dying isn't just moving slowly, it's when you are groaning because you just left one on the lip, followed by a sigh of relief as it just barely drops in. It's more like a putt that would have stopped at the center of the hole, not a couple rolls past. But, if we're going to use it in a different way for this thread, that's fine with me. To the overall point, the math is great, but I see various assertions being tossed back and forth about how "most golfers" can or can't control speed and line to various degrees. These are not questions that can be answered just by thinking about your last round, or how it feels when you're out there. In contrast to questions about the optimal speed to maximize the size of the hole, I am skeptical that even an experienced coach can use his accumulated memory to answer that question correctly. To do this "constructively," what we need is a systematic study of how well golfers can control their distance as a function of the length of the putt, and how well they can control the starting line of their putt, again as a function of length of the putt or starting speed. The problem has been stated a few times above, but the goal of putting is not to maximize the size of the hole. The goal is to maximize the probability that a putt goes in the hole. Notwithstanding my above comment about needing real data for this, my own experience suggests that some distances are easier to putt than others. I think I'm probably better at hitting a 5-foot putt on line than I am a 2-foot putt, simply because hitting a putt that rolls 2 feet and stops requires more attention to pace, increasing the chances that I fail to let the putter square up. And, furthermore, I wouldn't say it's all that rare to leave a very short putt short, especially when there's a slope involved. So, that's my gut feeling response, which as I said above is not the correct way to definitively answer this. However, it's enough to make me skeptical of claims about particular paces being truly optimal when such claims contrast with my own experience. In the absence of a proper study, the thing to do is just to practice these many times and find out what works best for you. It's hard to generalize this, though, because I'm not sure how you'd reliably test whether a golfer is really applying a particular strategy on a given putt. You could ask a test participant to apply the "firm" strategy for a while, but if it doesn't seem to be working, he may quietly revert to the "9-inch past" strategy and it would be difficult to detect this. I think independently examining the ability to hit the ball with a given speed and line would be better, though even that ignores the subconscious ability of a person to make unknown corrections when presented with a hole to putt towards.

Yes, thank you for catching that.

Well, these problems aren't problems with interior OB, they're problems with "conditional OB," i.e., a region that is only OB for play on certain holes. It's not difficult to mark a closed interior area with white stakes all around, and this is done for maintenance yards and other obviously non-course regions, such as the houses that are either "islands" or narrow "peninsulas" in, say, the Pebble Beach course. Again, I understand the concepts here, but they strike me as contrived. First of all, yes, the words are "OOB," but it's not really a stretch to call it a "stiffer penalty." Nearly everyone in this discussion seems to have acknowledged the strategic value/importance of OOB on a hole. It's an indisputable fact that architects consider this and use it as a strategic element, and that (sensible) players respond accordingly. Ok, but that's silly. That's restricting the options of a course designer simply because they lack the budget to move the earth around, or live in a climate where extensive use of water would be environmentally or practically irresponsible. Sure, it's interesting that courses reflect the natural environment, and that courses in the American Southwest are often different than those in Scotland. However, the rules don't take any issue with an army of earth moving machines coming in and molding the landscape into the strategic form that a well-funded architect envisions, natural landscape be damned. This simply doesn't strike me as a logically defensible boundary.

Yes. The difference is that, even without finding the ball, MEfree was virtually certain it was in the hazard. If there'd been even a small area of OB in the vicinity, he would know have that virtual certainty, and could properly play the provisional by not making any effort to find the original ball.

If you're playing a format that's not recognized by the rules, you probably didn't play any holes under the RoG. This might not be the case if the format "fits on top" of the normal rules, but if it leads you to play the game differently than you would under either stroke play or match play, it's not really the same game. I'm not sure how the handicapping rules handle this; it's possible they're lenient on the point, but you should look through the manual on the USGA website. Ignoring that, as we've said, if you finished a hole other than strictly by the rules, you make an honest estimate of your most likely score. This is not terribly well defined, but really, I don't think it's worth stressing over as long as you have a reasonable explanation for how you arrived at the number. From your last post, I take it you got a 5 on the hole as you initially scored it, and you say your real "most likely" score would be something like 5.5. You can't record a half-stroke, so just call it a 5. Sure, you might have made a 6 or worse from a bad lie, but I'd be very cautious about overestimating the number of strokes. Once in a while we take three chips to get 30 yards from a crappy lie, but even as a high-handicapper that was rare enough for it to be a serious consideration when estimating a "most likely" score. You might well have gotten a decent lie, put it near the green, chipped on, and one-putted. We're quibbling about probably 1 stroke out of a whole round, which will be averaged 10 other scores if it happens to be one of your best scores. Anyway, my argument for using the actual score as the estimate presupposes you played those strokes with typical performance. If you truly hit a phenomenal hero shot that you won't replicate in the next dozen rounds, then go ahead and add a stroke. Likewise, if you shanked three strokes, I'd choose a different method of estimating. The point is simply to be honest when you estimate what you really would have scored. In most cases, a score you actually recorded using an approximation to the rules will be pretty close to the "most likely" score. (Which, incidentally, there is no way to know with any certainty.) Wow... that's a lot of words... [edit] I got curious and looked in the handicap manual, and some of my statements above are incorrect. The rules about estimating the most likely score is to be used when you pick up in the middle of a hole. What we're talking about here is playing other than by the "principle of the Rules of Golf." Your match play format probably complies with the principles, unless it's really screwy, so I wouldn't worry about that. It's a little unclear whether you should treat the hole as "not played under the rules of golf" or as "started but not finished." I was inclined to argue for the former---in which case you just take par+strokes---but one of their examples is picking up in stroke play. That's not so different from here. I'm uncertain, but I'm now inclined to go with my original feeling: since you started with the intention of playing by the rules, treat it like you picked up at the point when you deviated from the rules.

Note that I was playing devil's advocate. The point was, Fourputt's characterization of the USGA position on imposing arbitrary OB regions within the course is that this is a bad thing. This implies that imposing OB for purely strategic reasons is discouraged. Think of it this way: why is it permissible to make strategic use of the edges of the course as OB, but unacceptable to simply declare a region to be OB for a particular hole for strategic reasons? The position that Fourputt describes strongly suggests that OB is, in the opinion of the powers that be, a necessary evil because courses are of finite size. I actually agree that strategic placement of OB is fine. In fact, I also don't like the rules limiting the declaration of water hazards for a similar reason: it prevents a course from using the rules to create a strategically interesting course, simply because they don't have water in the right places. I understand the concept that the course is what it is and the rules should be applied accordingly, but I don't think that is the only reasonable method. It certainly doesn't automatically lead to the best golfing experience, whatever that is.

Probably not, but golf doesn't have referees who are designated to make the calls, so probably a greater fraction of golfers have actually read the rule book as compared to players or fans of other sports. It is a bit odd, I can't say I completely understand the distinction. I suppose you still have the option, if you haven't found the ball and your five minute search has not elapsed, of continuing your search. In that sense, you have the choice to keep searching, find it, and play it as it lies without invoking the cited rules. This is correct, to my understanding of the handicapping rules. You have played part of a hole other than by the rules of golf, so I think you're supposed to estimate, from the point at which you "abandoned" the rules, your most likely score. For handicap purposes, I would just turn in the score you made, assuming you included the stroke-and-distance penalty for your provisional ball. Since going back to the tee and replaying your shot is one of your options from a water hazard, the only problem is that you played it as a provisional. That's against the rules, but only in a rather technical sense. You then played out the hole from that point, and I am of the opinion that the score you actually recorded, even if invalid on a technicality, is about as good a method of "estimating" your likely score as any.

Unless he found the ball, it was still lost. However, the rules are more lenient if you know or are virtually certain that your ball is lost inside a hazard. This is a bit pedantic, but hey, it's the rules forum. It is a wrong ball. The penalty is disqualification unless he goes back and corrects the error before teeing off on the next hole. If he goes back and corrects it by correctly substituting a ball and dropping in the right place, then it's a two-stroke penalty.