If you know the rules well, you can often use them to advantage. Or not.
Today we had a real breeze. Not a South Texas breeze. That means it was what most of you would think was a high wind. Only about 5 MPH at the start. And it was coming out of the north. By the time we reached the back nine, it had returned to SE, and picked up a little. It was one of those days where a rules issue came up which I don’t agree with.
Blogger Vance has a piece on one rule I think needs to be changed. Many of the women on the LPGA Tour have their caddies line them up on every shot. The rules have nothing to say about this practice except that nobody can be behind the player helping with alignment during the stroke. So, the caddie simply moves to the side before the player begins her swing. Every Tour pro and instructor talks about alignment as being one of the most important things they work on regularly. Yet the rules allow you to completely disregard this part of practice on the range if you trust your caddie. If alignment is key to the swing, nobody should be allowed to get assistance with it during a round.
I had my own rules problem on the 15th today. It is a par five, and I needed to hit an easy wedge over a large palm tree on my third shot. I just wanted to get it high enough to clear the tree and drop the ball on the front edge of the green and let it roll toward the hole. So I hit it high and it came down shorter than I wanted–right into the top of the palm. There it stayed.
With an unplayable lie, I could take drop within a clublength of the tree with one stroke penalty. We could all see the ball plainly 30 feet up, but there was no way to identify it as mine. For that reason, it is considered a lost ball, not an unplayable lie.
27/15 Ball in Tree Visible But Not Identifiable
Q. A player is certain that his ball is lodged high in a tree. He can see a ball in the tree, but he cannot identify it as his ball. Is the player?s ball lost, in which case he must proceed under Rule 27-1?
A. Yes.
Which means I had to drop and replay the shot from the original position. I did, landed on the green, and two-putted for a double bogey. Had I been able to drop next to the tree, there is no guarantee I could get a lower score, but I have enough confidence in my short game that I would have chipped it close, if not in. At best, a par, At worst, a bogey.
What bothers me about the decision on the rules I cited is that we all knew precisely which tree my ball went into, and all agreed that the ball we saw was mine. And unlike Tiger Woods, I didn’t have anyone in the gallery willing to shinny up that tree to find out.