RULES & HANDICAPPING
By Lorraine Thies
Rules of Golf get additional changes for 2018
of St. Andrews). First they announced the “modernization” of the Rules of Golf — the most sweeping changes since 1985. Last spring, they previewed some pretty far-reaching and drastic proposals and announced that they were looking for feedback from you, the golfer. From March until the end of August, they received over 22,000 responses from 102 different countries. Since then, the Committee has been “tweaking” their original proposals based on a review and evaluation of those responses. So what’s next? Now we wait. We
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probably won’t hear too much more about the changes until later in 2018, which is a good thing. Otherwise, we’d all be second guessing ourselves about which rules are actually in effect and should be applied. The rules are confusing enough (until next year of course) without adding that complication. The modernization has only been
one part of the Committee’s agenda in 2017. Rules call-ins and video reviews have become so prolific that last April, the Rules of Golf Committee created a working group consisting of representatives from the PGA Tour,
s it turned out, 2017 was a very busy year for the Rules of Golf Committee (USGA and the Royal & Ancient Golf Club
LPGA, PGA European Tour, Ladies European Tour and the PGA of America to discuss and evaluate two things — video review and the score card. The number of rules call-ins has
increased dramatically over the years. We all remember the situation with Tiger Woods at the 2013 Masters, Dustin Johnson’s fate at the 2016 US Open and the devastating four-stroke impact to Lexi Thompson during the 2017 ANA Championship. The result of a very comprehensive
review of video evidence by that group was the creation of a set of protocols that will standardize the applications of rules among all tours. The Committee decided that video review had become such an important issue that it needed to be addressed ahead of the 2019 release. As a result, the following procedures were implemented January 1, 2018: • Assign one or more officials to monitor the video broadcast of a competition to help identify and resolve rules issues as they arise (they will see what you see as a television viewer);
• Discontinue any steps to facilitate or consider viewer call-ins as part of the Rules decision process (this includes other video, such as from an individual’s smartphone or camera).
So what does that mean for you?
As Thomas Pagel, USGA’s Senior Director Rules of Golf and Amateur Status for the USGA stated, “Be a fan, enjoy watching the best players in the world tee it up but also know and have confidence that the committee is monitoring that coverage — so what you see at home, they’ve seen it also.” The second part of the group’s
decision has to do with returning a score card that failed to include a penalty because the player was unaware a penalty had occurred. In 2016 the USGA removed the disqualification penalty and instead, applied the applicable penalty plus a two- stroke penalty (per penalty) for signing an incorrect score card. Beginning this year, the tournament committee can adopt a local rule that eliminates the additional two-stroke penalty. “Rule 6-6d exception: If a competitor
returns a score for any hole lower than actually taken due to failure to include one or more penalty strokes that, before returning his score card, he did not know he had incurred, he is not disqualified. In such circumstances, the competitor incurs the penalty prescribed by the applicable rules, but there is no additional penalty for a breach of Rule 6-6d. This does not apply when the applicable penalty is disqualification from the competition.” Whereas, I’m completely on board
with the video review procedures, I’m not as comfortable, conceptually, with the removal of the additional penalty for returning an incorrect score card. I think there needs to be some recourse for not applying a penalty. Otherwise, what’s to stop a competitor from not applying a penalty during the round and then claiming he didn’t know about it if caught? No harm, no foul, just add the penalty. (I know, golf is a game of honesty and integrity, right?). n
What do you think? We’d love to hear from you. Email me at
lorraine@azgolf.org with your thoughts.
www.azgolf.org PREVIEW 2018 | AZ GOLF Insider | 35
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