Here we are - another hole that'll take your breath away - the 106-yard 7th at Pebble Beach. If someone had to twist my arm I'd probably play this one rather than #12 at Augusta National. Sam Sneed once teed off with a putter in the Crosby here - he was the only one to make par that day.
It's a new year, but we go back to the rule book once again – picking up from whence I left off last year. It’s on to Rule #7: BALL SEARCH!
Another riveting topic. When I write these entries, I often find myself saying “God - this must be boring…”, and “Nobody in their right mind is going to read this!”, and “This is probably a complete waste of time!” And then I find myself out on the course in league play and someone will say “Hey, good post last week!”, and that will be all the motivation I need to continue writing.
Stuff gets lost – that’s just a fact of life. When you can hit a tiny little golf ball more than 2 football fields from a tee it’s inevitable that its going to go far enough to find shrubbery, tree limbs, penalty areas and the dreaded out-of-bounds. In this edition, I’ll talk about the rules governing how to conduct a proper search for a golf ball, and then what to do about it if you find or don’t find your ball.
For every stroke, each player must find and identify his ball. So, if you have 50 strokes in nine holes, you’ll have to find your ball at least 41 times. I know I’ve emphasized this a lot in prior blog entries, but companies make a lot of balls that look just like yours – unless you personalize your ball. Before a round I will check my bag to make sure I have marked up at least 3 balls I intend to play during the round. I always inscribe them with a permanent marker, and I put the “Team 39” logo on each ball (a bit capital T with a 3 on one side and a 9 on the other). I also tend to play a neon green color that isn’t really popular at the moment to help keep track of my ball in play. It also discourages my opponents and teammates from picking it up to identify it. Play the wrong ball? That’s a two-stroke penalty in stroke play for every time you hit the wrong ball, and you have to cancel all of the strokes and replace the ball to allow the ball’s owner to complete his hole with it (or he can elect to replace the ball with another).
Sometimes your mark is on a section of the ball that is touching earth – in this case in order to identify the ball you do have the option of lifting the ball to see the mark – but you must FIRST mark the ball. If you do not mark the ball you’ve gained yourself two penalty strokes. If there is mud on the ball when you lift it, (on any location other than the putting green – you can always clean your ball when on the green) you can only remove the minimal amount of mud necessary to identify the ball as your own. Removing more than the minimum amount of mud results in that dreaded 2-stroke penalty.
Occasionally you’ll find a ball that looks like it might be yours under a thick bush or snarled up in some deep grass. In those cases, you are entitled to do what is necessary to get to the ball (including bending or (if necessary to get to the ball) breaking branches, removing loose impediments or moveable obstructions). Once again, you’ll mark the ball before lifting it, and once identified the ball must be replaced in its original location and lie. Failure to mark the ball or replace it in the original condition results in a 2-stroke penalty.
There once was a time (not so long ago) when if you accidentally moved your ball during a search resulted in a 2-stroke penalty. Back in those days if your playing competitor moved the ball, there was no penalty. Those bad days are over. If you move your ball WHILE SEARCHING, you must replace the ball in its original location and replicate the original lie to the best of your ability. The word “Accidentally” is important here – deliberately kicking a ball out from under a bush before marking would earn you two more penalty strokes.
Once you’ve found your ball, accidentally moving it results in a one-stroke penalty. That happened to my playing partner a few years ago. We’d found the ball under a tree and Steve went in to try to swat it out. Unfortunately, as he backed in under the tree he kicked the ball – adding insult, injury, and one more stroke to our score. Additionally, we had to replace the ball in the original location.
You are always entitled to identify your ball – even if the thing is buried in a bunker. If you can move sand to find it, all well and good. However, once you do find the buried ball, you must recreate the burial, but it is permissible to leave a small portion of the ball uncovered.
That leads to one general rule regarding searching for a ball – if the condition of the area of swing was improved during the search, there is no penalty assessed, but that improvement is only limited to the actions necessary to identify the ball – additional improvements made beyond those limits would result in the general 2-stroke penalty. Let me try to give you an example. A player sees a ball lodged under a barberry bush. To get his hand under the bush he breaks off a couple of low branches on the bush (if you’ve ever encountered a barberry bush, you’d know that those thorns are painful and thin enough to require a little minor home surgery). He marks the ball’s location, pulls out the ball, finds his mark on it, replaces the ball in the same condition, and determines that he could make a swing at the ball. He goes back to his bag, pulls out an iron, takes a stance, and pushes the club under the bush, breaking two more low branches on the bush. In positioning his club behind the ball he’s improved the condition (by breaking additional branches on the bush), thus he should assess himself a two-stroke penalty. If he would have taken his stance with the club behind the bush and then played a stroke and broken the branches during the stroke he would not be assessed any penalty.
Sometimes the wording of the new rule book is interesting. Rule 7 provides three ways for you to identify your ball:
1) By the player or anyone else seeing a ball come to rest in circumstances where it is known to be the player’s ball. (I equate this to hitting a ball right down the middle of the fairway when all the other players have hit their balls in the rough…You KNOW it’s your ball.)
2) By seeing the player’s identifying mark on the ball (probably the preferred method…).
3) By finding a ball with the same brand, model, number and condition as the player’s ball in an area where the player’s ball is expected to be (but this does not apply if an identical ball is in the same area and there is no way to know which one is the player’s ball).
The BUT thing in the third method is a big BUTT. Sometimes you’ll be playing with fellow competitors, and you’ll find out that you’re playing the same brand, model and ball number. And sometimes you’ll hit a ball within a few feet of another one. What happens if both balls are unmarked and neither competitor can definitively identify their ball? Both balls are lost, both competitors are assessed a stroke and distance penalty, and they must go back to the previous location and replay their shots (hopefully with uniquely identified balls!!). This is another good argument for establishing your own unique identification mark.
There’s another little quirk about identifying your balls – and that has to do with the provisional ball. Say you hit your drive down the right side of what was once #7 (now #16 at Ruggles). It looks like it might be in the woods. Unbeknownst to you, your ball struck the base of a tree and ended up out in the fairway. You hit a provisional ball (same make, model, number and identification mark) straight down the fairway. Arriving at the bottom of the hill you discover two balls (both yours) right next to each other. How do the rules of golf treat this situation? Since you cannot determine which ball was the first teed ball and which is the provisional, you must (according to Rule 18.3c) select one of the balls to be your provisional and must take the other out of play. Since you’re now playing the provisional, your first ball plus the lost ball penalty must be applied, so you’re now lying 3 playing the provisional ball. All of this could be avoided if you 1) played a different brand, model or number of ball as the provisional, 2) you mark each ball differently, or 3) you never played the provisional ball.
As many of you are already aware, there is a time limit on how long you’re supposed to be able to search for a ball. The limit starts when you get to the area where you believe the ball to be, and you start to search in earnest for the ball – you then have 180 seconds (that’s 3 minutes) to find YOUR ball. Should you start a timer? It’s not a bad idea. The old pre-2018 rule gave you 5 minutes, which I never really had a hard time with. If you didn’t find it in 5 minutes, you probably weren’t going to find the ball. 3 minutes? Your search pace better pick up if you want to cover some ground. For pace of play, it’s probably always a good idea to start a timer on your opposition. If they’ve been looking for 5 minutes, you can spur things along by saying “Guys, we’ve been looking for 5 minutes – the limit is 3.”, and that might be enough to force them to abandon the search and get back to play. At some point in the last 5 years or so REGL adopted “The Canton Rule” which allows you (with a one-stroke penalty) to drop at the point where you believe the ball to have been or at the edge of the out-of-bounds area or at the edge of unmown areas of the course to speed up play even if you don’t find the ball.