Winds of change blow across courses as golf rules relaxed

Of all sports in the world, golf is the only one that, from the word go, hits starters on the face with a plethora of rules.

If one were to be honest, the rules can be intimidating and some simply suck. Compare golf to football. Every boy who ever kicked a ball knows the two basic rules of football: kick the ball away from your goalkeeper and do not touch the ball with your hands. Simple and clear.

Golf swings to the other extreme: There are 34 rules of golf. That should not be too hard. But each rule has several sections and each section has several sub-sections.

The rules are so intricately intertwined and cross referenced, that they require a whole 121 pages. And that is not all. The issues that emanate from golf have necessitated the creation of another book for clarifications and explanations, which also serves as a reference for the Rule book. This second book, Decisions on the Rules of Golf, runs to 752 pages.

Inevitably, with so many rules in play, and because golf is uniquely played on a non-standard court, so to speak, the rule makers themselves find it necessary to revise the rules every four years.

Midway between the revisions, the decisions book also gets revised. This can be exasperating to even the most patient of golfers. Can you imagine the havoc that would cause in soccer? Until FIFA allowed usage of Video Assistant Referee technology in decision making early this year, the last revision of soccer rules was ages ago when they raised the points for winning a league match from two to three. I can’t recall the rules for Tennis, Rugby or Cricket being revised recently either, and even if they have, certainly not with the frequency and intensity in revisions of golf rules. 
Some of the golf rules were downright silly, and others caused more trouble than solved the problem.  There was once the stymie, the equivalent of which you find in snooker. A golfer could refuse to move his ball that was on the green and in another golfer’s line, just to give him grief.

 Innovative tricks like chipping over it were sometimes employed, to the chagrin of the greenskeeper as the hallowed area that a green is was damaged. That rule was deemed nonsensical and had to go.

For a long time, the Blue Jackets were reluctant to make any major changes in the rules of golf, citing the need to maintain traditions and to enable future comparisons. Unfortunately, this rigidity had the effect of discouraging new players to join the sport, and the game was left to die-hards and stalwarts, who in the meantime, were advancing in age. 
While millions of letters have been written to the R&A and the USGA complaining against some rules, which were loathed by both Profession and amateur golfers, the Blue Jackets just wouldn’t budge.

 Seriously, what was the big deal about your golf club touching the sand in the bunker, which you were going to dig into anyway when hitting your ball out? If you stepped on your ball while searching for it, you suffered a penalty if it moved.

Doesn’t the word searching clearly communicate that you don’t know where it is?

The good news is that the rules of golf were revised and updated yet again last month, but this time with a huge difference. Faced with the possibility of this loved sport dying, the Blue Jackets realized they had no choice but to act fast on the changes golfers were demanding for. Beginning in 2012, the U.S. Golf Association and R&A started a process to modernise the Rules of the Golf and make the rules easier to understand and apply, while making the game more attractive and accessible for newcomers. 
If you belong to one of the better clubs that believe in involving their golfers in decision making and in educating them on the rules, you might remember some communication that was sent out in 2016 to all golfers requesting them to submit their suggestions of changes to the rules, directly to the ruling bodies by email.

 Those suggestions were analysed and draft revised rules released in 2017. These draft rules were then circulated for comments.  With input from those comments, the new rules were finalized and on Monday, 5^th March 2018, last month, the two governing bodies released the new Rules of Golf, which are set to debut on January 1, 2019.

 Yours sincerely had sent in a suggestion and I am humbled and glad to report that it was one of the ones, accepted. It helped that thousands of other golfers were of the same opinion on this rule. The proposal comprised of more practical and sensible relief for out of bound and lost balls, with intention to improving pace of play. 
I can report that this years’ rules revision is the most comprehensive, friendliest and probably the most sensible we have seen in the recent past and since the 2012 initiative for revision of the rules started. There has been a reorganisation that consolidates principles and simplifies the overall language to make it more practical to current golfers and more accessible to newcomers.

The major changes involve rules regarding interfering with a ball at rest or in motion, taking relief, advice and help during play, pace of play, decision making by referees, integrity and player behavior.  

For starters, the number of rules has been reduced from 34 to 24, simplifying them and making them easier to understand. Elly Callaway must be smirking as he recalls the Callaway ball he designed in the 1990s and named “Rule 35”, a dig on the blue tape hindering innovations in golf. 
The one complaint I hear against golf by non-golfers is that a round of golf takes too long. While the rulers have been harping about the slow pace of play, and even releasing a manual on Pace of Play in 2016, there has been nothing in the rules to enforce it. 

There is now an affirmative encouragement of “ready golf” in stroke play; the ruling bodies are also recommending that players take no more than 40 seconds to play a stroke. Pace of play is also enhanced by a reduction in the time allowed for searching for a lost ball from five to three minutes.

They have also eliminated the penalties for accidentally moving a ball during a search, allowing for an easier removal of loose impediments.  Elsewhere, a player will not be responsible for causing a ball to move unless it is “virtually certain” that he or she did so. A lot of time is spent and lost on the green as golfers carefully step around each other’s lines and balls to avoid touching the balls.  

Accidentally touching and moving a ball that is on the green, or the marker, will no longer be penalised. Note the key word, accidentally. Otherwise the one stroke penalty still applies. You are now allowed to fix and tap down spike marks on the green, not just pitch marks.

A lot of Golfers were already fixing spike marks anyway, unknowingly breaking the rule. There will be no penalty if a ball played from inside the putting green hits an unattended flagstick in the hole. This means that players may putt without having the flagstick attended or removed. There is also no penalty for merely touching the line of putt.
In the same spirit, there shall no longer be a penalty if a player’s ball in motion accidentally hits the player, his or her caddie, the person attending the flagstick or the attended or removed flagstick. However, if a ball played on the green strikes another that is also on the green, the old rule remains and shall attract the usual two stroke-penalty.
If you have ever been penalised for touching the sand in a bunker before hitting your shot, you now have reason to smile:  you will no longer be penalized for generally touching or grounding the club while in a bunker, but away from the ball. But you still cannot ground the club when playing a bunker shot.

 There will also be no penalty for moving loose impediments or touching the ground or water in a penalty area. But be careful there: any action that can be deemed preparation of the ground so that you can make better contact is still deemed building a stance and will be penalized. You can now take an unplayable outside of a bunker, under a two-stroke penalty, but on a line from the flag.
One rule revision that will make golfers chuckle is on how to drop a ball. Remember the time when you were required to toss a ball backwards over your shoulder when taking a drop, ostensibly to avoid you dropping it on a favorable patch?

That changed to the front of your body later. This time around you will be required to drop a ball from your knee height. This is a clever way of increasing pace of play by avoiding dropping and redropping, which is sometimes necessary if the drop area is on a slope and the ball keeps rolling away.

 A lot of time is lost in those actions, hence it’s a welcome change. In effect you can now bend, and drop the ball on a dime, literally. But it’s still a drop, distinct from placement. 

Talking of dropping, in the past, smart golfers who read the rules with a fine toothcomb realized that one could gain almost four club-lengths when dropping if circumstances were favorable, without breaking a rule.  You did this by combining two clauses. The first one required dropping within two club lengths of a reference point. So, you deliberately dropped the ball to hit the ground just at the limit of the two-club length distance, towards the fairway, for example.

Next, you aimed the drop to a point where the ball would roll away, further into the fairway. The second rule says that the ball can roll away but no more than two-club lengths away from where the ball hit the ground. Note that: where the ball hit the ground, not the initial reference point. Of course, if it rolled away more than that distance, you would have to redrop. And if happened a second time, you had to drop two-club lengths of the initial reference point. That almost four-club distance could easily land you well inside the fairway thus availing you a clear path for your next shot.

On free drops, the same applied but the gain would be a total of three-club lengths. The new rule dictates that the final resting position must be within the initial two, or one club dropping area.
My favorite rule change, the one whose change I wrote to the USGA about, is on relief when a ball goes out of bounds or is lost. This is one of the worst time wasters on the course. Currently you must play a second ball if you are on the tee. If you are not sure it is out of bonds, you declare it a Provisional before you hit. Fairways sometimes swallow golf balls, as we say, so If the ball is lost somewhere on the fairway and you never hit a provisional ball, you must walk back to the last point you hit from and play another. In the meantime, the group behind you is cursing you as you delay them.

 In fact, you are delaying everybody on the entire course. The USGA and R&A have written a local rule that permits committees to allow golfers an alternative to the stroke-and-distance penalty for lost balls or balls hit out of bounds. Golfers will now have an additional alternative of dropping another ball at a point equidistant from the vicinity of where their ball has gone out of bounds, with a two-stroke penalty.

The drop must be within two club lengths of this point, inside the fairway, but not nearer the pin. I have seen some golfers doing this in the past. The golfer can also go back as far as he wishes within a zone defined by two lines:  one as defined above and the other from the point where the ball went OB or within which it may be lost, keeping that point between him and the pin, then dropping the ball within two club lengths.
Unfortunately, I can foresee disputes arising out of deciding where the ball got lost or went OB. We all know how golfers tend to overestimate their prowess, as captured in the adage that, “if you can’t find your ball, check fifty meters further back!”.  

This has been resolved by trusting a player’s integrity. Player Integrity will be relied on to the point where a player’s “reasonable judgement” will be trusted on things like estimating, measuring a spot, point, line area or distance.

This means that you cannot argue with a golfer on the point he chooses, just like you cannot argue with a golfer when he declares that his ball is unplayable. Go ahead and laugh, I am already! Given my experience with our golfers, I highly doubt the rule makers had in mind some of our golfers when they decided to lay so much trust on them.
What I also see happening is some clubs not bothering to pass the local rule, which shall result in acrimony as some updated members argue with the archaic. I say this because quite many clubs have, to date, still not passed the mandated local rule on Distance Measuring Devices, DMDs, yet golfers are seen wearing and GPS watches on the course, which is against the rule unless the appropriate local rule is passed. 
This local OB and Lost Ball rule, shall unfortunately, not apply to professional or elite-level competitions like selection of National Golf Champion or Kenya Open itself. Which is unfortunate since these long-driving flatbellies are the ones most likely to lose balls since they hit it longest, and sometimes, long and wrong into the bundus.

I have a feeling the rulers are just testing the waters to see how application of this rule will work. By the next two rule revisions, I expect the rule to apply to everybody. Watch this space. We cannot forget the debacle at the British Open last year, which clearly robbed Mark Kuchar a well-deserved first major.
Golfers with fast hands know the agony of double hitting a ball. This usually happens on greenside bunker shots and on pitch shots. You are in luck: The governing bodies decided to drop the penalty for a double hit, allowing golfers to simply count the one stroke they made to strike the ball. 
For sticklers to the rules, the updated Rules of Golf 2019 book is available now at usga.com and R&A.com. Remember, golf is about playing by the set rules, not choosing which rules to obey or inventing new ones.

 A golfer is required to know all the rules or else risk suffering penalties or disqualification. Ignorance is no defense either. The Kenya Golf Union runs several rules courses and would be a good starting point for clubs and golfers who desire a better knowledge of the rules.  Play by the rules, enjoy your golf.[email protected]