Hi Linda,
A player plays his 2nd shot to the left, towards a lateral hazard. It is raining. The co-competitors are hiding under an umbrella and you cannot hear or see anything. A tree is on his line of play and further to the left, as everybody knows, there’s a high rough. The player does not know whether his ball went into the hazard or is lost in the rough, so he plays a provisional ball, dead straight on the fairway. When going forward, right behind the tree on the left, in the ditch (marked as a lateral water hazard), the player sees a ball. He believes it is his, picks up the ball, takes a drop at 2 club-lengths (Rule 26 with 1 penalty stroke), and plays the shot. When he arrives at his ball he sees that it is not the ball he played into the tree/ditch and informs his co-competitors that it is not his ball. Believing he played a wrong ball, he picks it up, goes to his provisional and finishes the hole with that provisional ball. He tees off at hole number 3, play is interrupted, and he comes to ask for my advice on the number of strokes for that hole.
I believe that the answer in Decision 26-1/3.7 covers the situation, but I have had some different opinions since.
Eventually play was resumed but interrupted again in a later stage and the competition was cancelled altogether. Lucky for the player maybe? As you see, we do not always have nice weather in France!
I truly enjoy your emails with the Q/A’s, hope you find some time to look into this situation, look forward to hearing from you.
Have a nice day, kind regards,
Lulu from France
Dear Lulu,
The player’s ball that was hit towards the hazard was lost. When he dropped the ball outside the hazard, without virtual certainty that his ball was in the hazard, he was proceeding under an inapplicable rule and incurred a one-stroke penalty. (The inapplicable rule was the water hazard rule, Rule 26. The applicable rule was the lost ball rule, Rule 27.)
When the player hit the ball that he dropped outside the hazard, he played from a wrong place. The penalty for that is two strokes [Rule 20-7].
He must proceed with the provisional ball. His provisional is the actual ball in play, since it was properly hit for a ball that might be lost outside a water hazard, and the original ball was never found.
Here is how to score this hole:
1 – tee shot
1 – second shot hit towards hazard
1 – penalty stroke for proceeding under an inapplicable rule
2 – penalty strokes for hitting from a wrong place
1 – provisional ball properly hit from where he hit his second shot
When he hits the provisional ball a second time, he will be hitting his seventh shot on the hole.
If the player picked up his provisional before discovering that the ball he dropped and hit near the hazard was not his, he would incur an additional penalty stroke for lifting his ball in play [Rule 18-2a]. He would have to place a ball where his provisional had come to rest and continue his play. His second stroke with the provisional, now the ball in play, would be his 8th stroke on the hole.
If ever there were a perfect illustration of why players should identify the ball before hitting it, this would be it. This player would be hitting his fourth shot instead of his seventh if he had checked the ball he found, realized it was not his, and continued play with the provisional.
Linda
Copyright © 2012 Linda Miller. All rights reserved.
