Technicalities of Golf

August 16, 2010 by DickH Posted in Current Events 2 Comments

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I don’t play or follow golf, but all the stories about the controversial ending to yesterday’s PGA Championship caught my attention. A golfer named Dustin Johnson was leading by one stroke on one of the final holes. All he had to do was shoot par and he would win the tournament. But one of his shots went off to the side of the fairway, landing in what looked on TV like an area overgrown with grass. Johnson stood next to the ball, placed his club on the ground behind it, and made a nice shot which landed within feet of the green. He chipped on but two-putted which put him over par. While he was on the next hole, a tournament official approached Johnson and told he that he’d been assessed a two shot penalty for “grounding his club in a bunker.”

Golf rule 13-4 “does not permit grounding the club in a sand bunker or water hazard” which means you can’t let your club touch the ground when preparing your shot – I guess it’s meant to prevent players from purposely or inadvertently improving the position of the ball before taking the shot. While Johnson undoubtedly knew this rule, he didn’t realize the place where his ball landed was considered to be a bunker. It was a costly lesson for him because it kept him out of the playoff and the opportunity to win the tournament.

2 Responses to Technicalities of Golf

  1. JoeS says:

    I believe it was the last (18th) hole of his round, so he went from a 1-stroke advantage to even (by getting a bogey) and then to 2 shots behind after being penalized.

    It is strange to have a sand area called a sand hazard in an area where spectators walk, but apparently the rules were pretty clearly spelled out ahead of time. That is a situation when an experienced caddy should prevent his player from making that type of mistake by reminding him of the rule before he approached the ball. But the player, to his credit, blamed only himself.

  2. Bob Forrant says:

    Tiger would have blamed everyone but himself, including his caddy, his kids, his soon to be ex-wife, and all sorts of characters in an out of his liefe over the past three years!