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Showing posts from October, 2019

Movable Obstruction?

This one is courtesy of Peter Rigsbee on the Island of Hawaii. The wind was blowing really hard.  How hard your ask?  Hard enough to blow the flagstick out of the hole.  The question becomes  --  is the player penalized if:      His/Her shot from the fairway hits the flagstick laying on the green?          His/Her chip shot hits the flagstick laying on the green?      Her/His putt hits the flagstick laying on the green? My immediate response to Peter turned out to be wrong, as I found out after querying the USGA Rules Department. A dozen (cheap) golf balls to the first person responding with the correct answer and the cited rule/interpretation.

I got a lot of Penalty Strokes, too

On the European tour the day after Lee Ann Walker's issue, a player was playing under the "Lift, Clean and Place" rules.  Unfortunately for him, the rest of the players were not.  After five times of lifting his ball in play, cleaning it and placing it (in a different spot than he lifted from) he got a total of 10 penalty strokes.

You Got HOW MANY Penalty Strokes?

Aloha, after a brief absence, I'm back. A couple of weeks ago a young lady (Lee Ann Walker) playing in the LPGA Senior Championship ran afoul of the new rules.  On the second day of the event, her fellow players noticed she had her caddy lining her up on her putts -- on the fifth hole they played that day.  Lee Ann immediately called for a referee to see what she should do. She admitted to having her caddy line up her putts on the first day, also.  After counting up the number of times that happened on day 1, she accepted her 42(!) FORTY TWO penalty strokes, turning her 84 into 126.  Then she had another 14 strokes added to her second round, which turned her 74 into 88.  Instead of missing the cut by one shot, she missed by only 57 shots. Lee Ann was on the LPGA tour in 2008, but now is in real estate and her intention in playing in the LPGA Seniors was to meet and greet some of her old friends.  Turned out well on that front, and she gracefully accepted her punishment for n