Moving boulders is not an option
Snap decisions relative to the Rules should never be made, no matter what player is involved.
HAL LENOBEL
Contributing Columnist
golf@lbknews.com
For those of you who are TV golf tournament aficionados, many viewers saw a most unusual problem several years ago, revolving around a dilemma in which Tiger Woods experienced. At the least, the occurrence was rare and required more thought than was given it at the time.
Tiger Woods hit a tee shot into a waste bunker. The ball came to rest behind a huge boulder, estimated weight in excess of 1,000 pounds. He was unable to swing at the ball because of the obstruction, leaving him with the choice of taking an unplayable lie, with a stroke penalty, or chipping in the general direction of the fairway.
A tournament official nearby arrived at the scene and decided, rather hurriedly, to allow Woods to invoke Decision 23-1/2, which involves easily removed stones as large as a watermelon. That Decision states, “stones of any size (not solidly embedded) are loose impediments and may be removed, provided removal does not unduly delay play.” Ken Venturi, the TV commentator at the time, showed great displeasure with the official, stating that the boulder was definitely embedded. Finally, nine spectators aided in rolling the boulder out of Woods’ way, doing so with a great deal of effort. Woods then proceeded to knock the ball on the green and registered a par 4, certainly avoiding a bogey or double bogey, which would have been costly from the aspect of prize money.
The official erred. I phoned CBS at the time and followed that with a call to the USGA. They concurred; the official on the scene should have resorted to Decision 24-1/1, relating to a movable obstruction (in this case, the boulder): “An obstruction is movable if it may be moved without reasonable effort, without unduly delaying play in contravention of Rule 6-7 and without damaging course property.”
This immovable object, the boulder, should not have been moved, least of all by nine spectators, to assist Tiger Woods in the playing of the shot. The official who made the ruling was wrong; therefore Woods himself was not in error and could not be penalized. Had an official not been present and the player, on his own, decided to have the boulder moved and continued play, he would have been disqualified for submitting a wrong score.
Snap decisions relative to the Rules should never be made, no matter what player is involved. I have been involved in quite a few decisions where the result of a hole, a round, even a tournament might have changed. I always used a stock response when queried by a player relative to a predicament in which he might have been involved. I would say, “Let’s look at the Rule book,” and/or “Let’s see if we can find the Decision.” In that way the player became a partner in the answer to the problem.
• • •
“Local Rules are a set of regulations that are ignored only by players on one specific course rather than by golfers as a whole.”
-Quote from “A Buffer’s Dictionary”
“Golf is a compromise between what your ego wants you to do, what experience tells you to do, and what your nerves let you do.”
-Bruce Crampton
“Golf is a plague invented by Calvinists Scots to act as a punishment for man’s sins.”
-James Reston
“Golf is a game whose aim is to hit a very small ball into an even smaller hole, with weapons singularly ill designed for that purpose.”
-Winston Churchill
