Dear Linda,
Great work clarifying the bizarre situations you can get
into on a golf course. Here is a situation that made me chortle.
We were playing a match against another club and we were on
a dogleg left par 4 with out of bounds all down the left side of hole. The dogleg
was quite pronounced and I thought a good risk and reward hole – I got my
driver out and hit a great drive over the dogleg onto the front of the green,
at which point my opponent told me my ball was out of bounds. I looked bemusedly
at him and told him my ball was on the green. He was quite unrepentant when he
said that my ball was out of bounds in the air and it was a rule of the course??
It was on the back of the card?
Is this allowed by the rules of golf?
Lou from Manchester, UK
Dear Lou,
Just when I thought I had heard everything…
A golf course is not a country; it may not regulate air
space. Where a ball travels through the air cannot be legislated! Where the
ball lands is another story.
Sometimes a golf course will have a dogleg hole where a
player attempting to cut the dogleg could try to hit onto the fairway of an
adjacent hole. This can pose a danger to players on that fairway. In order to
protect those players, a course may install interior out-of-bounds stakes that
are in play only for golfers on the dogleg hole. A ball would be out of bounds
(OB) if it were driven onto the fairway of the adjacent hole [Decision
33-2a/12]. The key word, of course, is “onto,” which implies landing on the fairway. A ball that travels
through the air and lands on a green is on the green. Period.
By definition, a ball is out of bounds when all of it lies out of bounds (“lies,” not
“flies”). A ball must be on the ground
and beyond the OB stakes or lines to be deemed OB. A scorecard may declare that
balls landing on a fairway adjacent to a dogleg are OB, but it has no
jurisdiction over where balls may travel through the air.
Linda
Copyright © 2014 Linda Miller. All rights reserved.
