The keepers of golf both here and abroad say they are trying — they really are — to surgically remove the stupid from their rule book.
Theirs is the work of angels — just ask Lexi Thompson, who last week got caught up in a rules-based controversy more convoluted than a politician’s confession, one that cost her an LPGA major. Changes are coming. Too late to help her, but changes are coming.
They are meant to loosen those stodgy codes and lessen the kind of regulatory confusion that so unnerved last year’s U.S. Open. In other words, they are trying to bring the rules more into line with how your average golfer already plays when no one else is looking.
Most of those who rank in the game seem to approve of the alterations brokered by the Royal & Ancient Golf Club and the United States Golf Association. (They are scheduled to go officially into effect in two years, but go ahead and start employing them now if you wish).
As far as the ancestor of the One Great Rule Follower is concerned, there is only about one drawback that he can see.
“If these rules had been in place in the 1925 U.S. Open we probably would not have a Bob Jones Award to this day,” said Atlanta’s Bob Jones III, the great man’s grandson. Each year the award is handed to the player who most reflects Bobby Jones’s spirit of sportsmanship.
“However, Bub would have had five U.S. Opens. There’s a trade-off, I guess,” Jones III said, employing his pet name for his grandfather.
Some of golf’s grandest gestures have been bows to the arcane rules of the game. Jones set that precedent in the ’25 Open when he called a penalty on himself, judging his ball to have moved ever so slightly in the rough as he addressed the shot. He subsequently lost in a playoff.
When lavished with praise for squealing on himself for a mere shudder of a golf ball — an accidental quirk of gravity that couldn’t possibly have given him any advantage, and one that no one else could have seen — Jones accepted none of it. “You might as well praise a man for not robbing a bank,” he famously uttered.
In that same spirit one Brian Davis cost himself a playoff against Jim Furyk at Hilton Head in 2010 when he called a penalty on himself for brushing a loose impediment on his backswing while in a hazard (it was a bit of reed in a marshy area).
“I could not have lived with myself if I had not,” he said at the time.
Under the proposed rules revisions, such incidental movements would not be penalized. A major thrust behind these changes is to eliminate those rules that seem to be there as much to test character as they are to regulate competition. Eliminate a bit of the soul search from the equation because, after all, this is not exactly a call-your-own-foul kind of world anymore.
The need for simplification of rules came to a head in 2016, when Dustin Johnson played the final six holes of his U.S. Open victory under the cloud of a potential penalty for a ball that shuddered slightly on one of Oakmont’s Teflon greens (No. 5). He eventually was assessed a stroke — amid howls of Twitter dissent from his peers and his fans — not that it mattered so much at the end. Johnson won by three strokes.
Also notably last year was the Case of Billy Horschel and the Evil Wind. As he stood near his ball on the 15th green at the Masters, a gust sent it tumbling down the sloping front and into the water. That cost him a stroke on the way to a bogey.
Under the proposed changes, both those cases would be remedied without penalty.
Those changes include:
- Requiring it be "virtually certain" that a player caused a ball at rest to move before assessing a penalty.
- Simplifying how a ball is to be dropped — no more from shoulder height, just anywhere above the ground (more placing it than dropping it).
- Shortening the time allowed to look for a lost ball from five to three minutes.
- Allowing removal of loose impediments in a hazard area. Bunkers may be cleaned of loose impediments so long as the player is found not to be testing the consistency of the sand.
- No longer using the "club-length" measurement for drops, replacing that with a fixed-distance standard.
- Easing restrictions on repairing spike marks and other damage on the green.
- Simplifying relief from lateral hazards.
There has been no specific mention for a rule change addressing a situation such as Thompson’s, in which she was penalized a day after she improperly replaced a marked ball on the green at the ANA Inspiration — after officials were alerted by email by a viewer. But all options remain on the table now, in what is described as a “discussion period.”
Discussing the rules of golf can be stultifying, even to those who live by them. When presented with 10 pages of summary on the changes, Furyk said, “Honestly, reading it was kind of boring, like going back to English class. I watched the videos and read the cliff-notes version — kind of like I did in school.”
“I think if you wanted to, you could stump me a hundred ways on rules questions,” Matt Kuchar said. “I do this for a living; I think I know the rules better than most.”
So, to simplify the simplification for all: They’re just trying to make stuff align with common sense. As Horschel said last year, “If the guy caused his ball to move, penalize him. But if he didn’t, don’t penalize him.” More benefit of the doubt would tilt toward the player.
Top to bottom, reaction to the proposed changes have been positive.
“I think it’s good for the game, any time you simplify the rules somewhat,” said Mark Russell, the PGA Tour’s VP of rules and competitions. “A great step in the right direction.
“If our staff argues about (the current) rules, what chance does the average person have?”
Said Kuchar: “I have tons of friends who fudge (on the rules) here and there. You want the game to be enjoyable, and simplifying the rules I think only helps make it more understandable, more enjoyable. It’s a good idea they are working on.”
But what of the One Great Rule Follower, the man who poured the foundation for the Masters, the symbol of propriety on the course?
Have these proposals, which at their core reduce dependence upon a player’s sense of honor, caused any rumblings over at Atlanta’s Oakland Cemetery? What would Bob Jones think?
Worry not, staunch traditionalists.
“I think he’d probably be spinning for joy, if anything,” his grandson said.
How so, Bob Jones III?
“When he came out with golf clubs, the whole purpose was to have clubs that were playable for the average player, that helped them get the ball up in the air so they could have a better time playing golf,” he said.
“It was the same philosophy he used when making the instructional films. Anything that makes the game more accessible, more fun, more easily understood I think is something that Robert Tyre Jones Jr. would be over the top about. I think he would be very pleased.”
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