Graeme Scott is a rules official for the PGA Tour of Australiasia. If you would like to ask Scotty for some advice on a rule please email him here While working on the Logistic Review for the Queensland PGA Championship next month I began to look over my notes from last year’s event and the various situations that arose that may need to be addressed for this year.
Highlighted in my tournament report was the need to review the course marking and Local Rules relating to the sloping, wood chipped area of ground behind the 16th green at City Golf Club.
I was called to a ruling in that area last year and the decision that was reached by applying the Rules of Golf resulted in a less than favourable outcome for the player concerned.
The area of ground itself extends up to the cart path behind the green and has retaining logs down both sides. However, the area also extends down to the boundary fence and this is quite important in terms of how we defined the whole area.
On our Tournament Hard Card, any area of landscaped garden that is completely surrounded by an obstruction is deemed to be part of that obstruction and relief without penalty may be taken under Rule 24-2. As a boundary fence is not an obstruction under the Rules of Golf, the area was deemed to be through the green with individual woodchips between the bushes deemed to be loose impediments.
The player’s ball had come to rest on the woodchips down the slope, less than two club lengths from the boundary fence. As the area was deemed to be through the green, no relief without penalty was available from the lie and other than playing the ball as it lay, the only alternative was to invoke Rule 28, Ball Unplayable and go back to where he played his previous stroke from.
Deciding to play the ball, his third stroke failed to quite make the safety of the grass behind the green and bobbled its way back down the hill to within a few centimetres of the boundary fence. This is where the options available became a little bit hard for the player to swallow!
The boundary fence made it impossible for the player to play a stroke towards the hole and since there is no relief without penalty from such a fence, any drop would have to be taken under Rule 28. The only two options available to him under Ball Unplayable were to drop within two club lengths, not nearer the hole or drop a ball at the spot where the previous stroke was played. Dropping behind the spot was not possible because of the out of bounds.
Unlike when taking relief from an obstruction or from an abnormal ground condition, in which case full relief must be taken and if the situation still interferes after the first drop the ball must be redropped, if you drop a ball away from an unplayable lie and the ball returns to that lie or finds another unplayable lie, you are penalised a further stroke for taking a subsequent drop.
In view of the sloping ground, whether the player dropped a ball relative to the position next to the fence or at the spot where he played the previous stroke from it was inevitably going to come to rest against the boundary fence with no rights of a redrop.
Hindsight is a wonderful thing and almost certainly the best option for the player would have been to take an unplayable for the initial lie and go back to the fairway and play four. After contemplating the situation he manufactured a shot at right angles to the flag, giving himself some kind of shot to the green for his fifth stroke.
Rule 28 does not allow you to regress back past the point of your last stroke and so by attempting to play the ball from an unplayable lie can result in limited relief options being available should you fail to extricate the ball.
Sometimes when applying the Rules we can sympathise with the anguish that the player is feeling but this cannot influence the way that the Rule must be applied.
I certainly did feel afterwards that the position the player found himself in and the options available were not really equitable and so we will definitely have a look at the area before the tournament starts and, without trying to circumvent the Rules, consider how the ground should be marked before the first ball is truck on Thursday.