The Devil is In the Details: Understanding the finer details of the 2019 golf rules

Isaac Nguku drives during the Johnie Walker series played at the par 72, Thika sports clublast month. The game’s rules change next year. [Mose Sammy/Standard]

In a sport where driving the ball 300 yards is awarded the same score as a one inch putt, every shot counts. It is therefore imperative for golfers to know each and every hair-splitting rule that might cost, or save her a shot. Even more important is being aware of situations where the rules provide them with relief and some advantages. To do this, golfers will need to dig deeper into the finer rule details to extract the gems that lie within. 

It never ceases to amaze me when a golfer makes a careless blunder that costs him a penalty. And not just your common amateur, we also see professional golfers getting flummoxed by a rule, getting penalised, or having to call a rules official to clarify or made a decision. The 2019 revised and simplified rules of golf have some hidden details that golfers need to be aware of. Minor details, yes, but equally important. 
Come January 1, 2019, I foresee some golfer in the betting brigade screaming, “penalty!”, when he sees his fellow competitor lifting his ball without informing him. The current rules requires a golfer to make that announcement, but come New Year day,  you will no longer need to announce that you are going to lift the ball to check if it is damaged.

 But the location of the ball must first be marked, the ball must however be returned to exactly the same position, and must not be cleaned more than needed to identify it. While the idea is to save on time and increasing pace of play, I do not like this rule change since it has a potential of being abused. If a ball is sitting badly in the rough, a crafty golfer could just lift it, pretend to check it, and then return it to a suitable location an inch away. Anybody from more than a few yards cannot notice the chicanery. I see disputes coming up. An honest golfer would be advised to announce before picking up. 

Language
The golf language is also morphing to make is easier. The expression water hazard has been replaced with penalty area, perhaps not to suggest the presence of crocodile and tarantulas, but so that the broader use of “penalty areas” would allow Committees to mark certain areas that pose similar challenges as water hazards, to be marked with red stakes even when such areas never contain water. The term “through the green” which means anywhere on the course except the tees, greens, bunkers, and water hazards (now called penalty areas) has been renamed “General Area”.

This is a more sensible name since the old “through the green” used to confuse golfers with its reference to the green. A rule change affected by that is the reversal of the definition of areas where a golfer could take relief for an embedded ball. Previously, this was only allowed in “closely mown areas”, meaning the fairway. From January 1, 2019, you can take relief from anywhere in the General Area, as the default rule, unless a local rule is passed against it.
  
Devices

My favorite topic is Distance Measuring Devices, DMDs, whose use I have advocated profusely, and defended against those who claim that these gadgets give some golfers an unfair advantage. The new rules have reversed the framing of the previous rule such that permitting the usage of the devices is now the default. Golfers are therefore allowed to use the devices without the clubs having to pass a local rule. This reversal came about after the Rulers realised that a lot of clubs were simply not bothering with passing the rule, yet usage of the devices was increasing. This reversal also serves to alleviate the confusion that sometimes exists today when some golfers do not realise that DMD use requires adoption of a local rule by Clubs, which has been known to cause some acrimonious disqualifications.

Clubs that are not comfortable with use of these devices can still pass a local rule against them for some competitions, or totally. Now, let’s see who are the sadists among us! 
An interesting change in the 2019 rules is a restriction on golfers who use their caddies for alignment on the fairway or green.

 According to the new rule, when a player begins taking a stance for the stroke and until the stroke is made, the player’s caddie must not deliberately stand in a location on, or close to an extension of the line of play behind the ball for any reason.

Penalties

Also note that if the player takes a stance in breach of this Rule, he or she cannot avoid penalty by backing away, except on a putting green. The key issue is here is on taking a stance. Since taking a stance anywhere apart from the green is defined as setting your body in such a position as to play the ball and grounding your club, this means that the caddie can no longer help you align your body, club or putter face.
This makes a lot of sense. Ronaldo would be of no use if he was able to slug out a hard banana ball, but needed someone to align his foot to the goal posts! Similarly, the legendary Joginder Singh of Safari Rally folklore would never have made history had he needed his co-driver to not only read pace notes for him and warn him when approaching a hard-right turn, but also needed him to time when to pull the hand brake and turn the steering wheel to execute a drift. The latter is clearly a driver’s work.

Similarly, alignment is a basic aspect of any sport. Aligning yourself and your equipment is a fundamental requirement in golf, no different from taking the proper posture or gripping the club properly. A golfer worth winning at this game should know how to aim at the hole. Finally, somebody has caught up with those ladies on the LPGA tour who rely on their caddies for alignment. 

While we are used to the two types of competitions, Strokeplay and Stableford, the new rules have introduced a new form of stableford called Maximum Score. It is a form of stroke play where a player’s or side’s score for a hole is capped at a maximum number of strokes set by the Committee, such as two times par, a fixed number or simply net double bogey.

The intent is to improve pace of play instead of requiring everybody to hole out on every hole during strokeplay or medal competitions as they are popularly known on this side of the planet. A player who does not hole out under the Rules for any reason, gets that maximum score for the hole. To enhance pace of play, players are encouraged to stop playing a hole when their score has reached the maximum or are certain to reach it.

New Format

It is the same thing as picking up in stableford. This new format makes lots of sense and I would urge Captains to adopt it as standard during strokeplay competitions. It will have no effect on handicap calculations since the player will already be outside scoring range, usually par plus strokes plus one.
Those self-shaming souls who are given to insane flights of raving anger and fits, that sometimes sees them bend or break their putter after missing a gimme putt, have been awarded some head cooling relief in the new rules.

 Currently, a golfer is allowed to play on with a damaged club if it has been damaged in the course of normal play, but not if damaged or broken in a fit of rage, by for example, slamming the club into the ground after making a shot that veers to the bundus.

The revised rule now allows a club damaged in any way to continue being used. Unfortunately, such a club cannot be replaced during the round, just like in the previous rule, except if the damage has been caused by any other person, outside influence or natural forces.

One of the worst breaks one can suffer in golf is driving long and splitting the fairway then finding the ball seated in a divot. One would expect that a rule would be enacted to move the ball away from the divot and indeed several proposals were made to that effect. On the other hand, maintaining the traditions and fundamentals of any sport is crucial when it comes to comparing records from different eras of the sport.

Changing technology

At the same time, any sport should learn how to take advantage of changing technologies that make the sport easier and more enjoyable. For a long term, baseball was played with wooden bats made from maple, ash and birch trees. However, aluminum is the material of choice at junior leagues and softball today because it is lighter and hence easier to handle for young boys and girls. Similarly, golf club heads and shafts were made of persimmon wood and hickory shafts respectively.

With innovations in materials, these golf materials have now been replaced with steel, graphite and nanotech material shafts, while the heads are now made of steel, titanium, tungsten and composite carbons. The resulting high clubhead speeds from these changes were therefore tamed by limiting the coefficient of restitution of the face to 0.83.

 While some may see it as archaic, this maintenance of traditions and fundamentals was the reasoning used in rejecting the proposal to provide relief for a ball found sitting in a divot on the fairway, the fundamental principle in golf being that the ball should be played as it lies. This Traditions argument was the same one used to ban Sam Snead’s croquet style putting.

Talking of traditions, I am amazed that the very untraditional long putter never seems to go away. On our scene, I don’t see many of us using the long, or broomstick putter, the one that is anchored on the chest, like Scott McCarron or on the tummy like Vijay Singh used to. There has been a lot of debate whether to ban or retain these long putters.

 Nerves

It was argued that anchoring eliminated the disconnect between putter and body, that was seen as a crucial test on a golfer’s nerves when executing crucial knee-knocker putts. It was also argued that due to their extra length, and the inherent method required to use the putter, they did not meet the criteria for maintaining traditions in golf.

 It was also noted that Golfers who got hot with the long putter got so good that they would win several tournaments in a row. When Adam Scott won the 2013 Masters using a long putter, he put the second last nail on the coffin to the demise of the long putter. He was the fourth winner in the last six major championships to anchor a long or belly putter.

 On the other hand, it was noticed that, apart from Bernhard Langer, most of these golfers soon lost their putting mojo after a streak, ditched the long putter and never went back to it. These long streaks are the ones that led to a partial ban of the putter by banning anchoring only, which was announced in 2013 and implemented in 2016.

The argument for banning the long putter has not gone away yet. It looked like the ruling bodies are just waiting for the three guys using it on the main golf tours to fade away. But after a previous two-time Masters winner, a former Kenya Open contestant by the way, won a record number of competitions on the Senior’s tour last year and was accused of cheating by anchoring the grip on his chest and hiding the fact by wearing oversize shirts, the debate has revived.

Club lengths

 No solution was found to resolve the cheating allegations, other than him having to putt shirtless! This time around, a ban has been slapped on using this long broomstick putter when measuring club-lengths, as is allowed currently.
The case of a ball hanging above the hole has been redefined. The rule at present requires that the entire ball must be below the surface of the green to be considered holed. The revised rule is friendlier and considers the ball holed if a ball comes to rest against the flagstick left in the hole and any part of the ball is in the hole below the surface of the putting green, even if the entire ball is not below the surface. 

 If no part of the ball is in the hole below the surface of the putting green, the ball is not holed and must be played as it lies. This rule puzzles me due to the references to “touching the flag stick” and “no part below the surface” because it goes against the existing decision on the unique case where a ball is hanging above the hole, but not touching the flagstick, as would happen if it’s held by a twig. You must have seen that image on social media recently. Going by the previous decision, that ball was considered holed. The latter is indeed a rare case, but should it happen, expect a controversy. 
New golfers have always been dismayed that the rules of golf provide only one recourse against cases of misconduct: disqualification. There is no yellow card or two-stroke penalty for misconduct, just a red card.

Penalties

. One strike and you are out. In this wonderful game played by Ladies and Gentlemen, one would hope that there is no misconduct, however for those who may find themselves in violation, the new rules are more kind and offer a gentler punishment. The Committee may set its own standards of player conduct in a Code of Conduct adopted as a Local Rule. The Code may include penalties for breach of its standards, such as a one-stroke penalty or the general two-stroke penalty. The Committee may also disqualify a player for serious misconduct in failing to meet the Code’s standards. 

Revised rules
Integrity being a major aspect of the game, despite what you may think when you observe the conduct of some of our golfers, has further been reinforced by reiterating a reliance on player integrity: A player’s “reasonable judgment” when estimating or measuring a spot, point, line, area or distance will be upheld, even if evidence later shows it to be wrong. 
Going back to the past seems to be a recurring theme in the revised rules. While soccer has advanced to the future and adopted goal line technology, golf has opted to ignore the advantage of video evidence and gone back to the past. There has always been a question of equitability in refereeing when we have TV cameras zooming on a tournament leader’s ball continuously, while nobody is watching what the other 140 competitors are doing. It gets worse if the ball moves, for example, and the infraction is reported a day later, thus earning the golfer a multi-stroke penalty or getting him disqualified?

At least the disqualification was changed a few years ago and replaced with a two-stroke penalty for signing a wrong score, which shall also be eliminated next year. But the fact remains: there is no TV footage on the others.
After being slapped with a four-shot penalty a day after play, which resulted in her losing the ANA Major last year, Lexi Thompson can take some solace from the announcement made last month by the USGA and R&A, that Starting Jan. 1, 2019, these associations will no longer field rules inquiries from viewers watching golf-tournament broadcasts on TV or streaming online, as part of a new set of video review protocols.

 Tiger almost suffered a DQ at the 2013 Masters, when a former PGA Tour and USGA rules official, called in with a claim that Tiger’s stationary ball had moved a few millimeters under his influence. After reviewing the tape, Augusta’s Green Jackets deemed the almost imperceptible movement insignificant and ignored it. Otherwise, Tiger would have missed the cut. 
Knowledge of golf rules is a major advantage.

 

Tiger Woods

 We saw Tiger argue his case at the 1999 Phoenix Open, that a half-tonne landscaping boulder was a movable obstruction, then calling on the Tiger brigade to Harambee it out of the way, thus offering him a clear shot to the green. When Anirbai Lahiri realised that there was trouble guarding the front of the 72^nd hole, and that he was between clubs, instead of pumping the shorter club, he deliberately played the longer one into the grandstands, knowing that he would then be given a free drop on the other side of the green.

That is smart play borne of understanding the rules of golf and local rules. We also saw this at the 70^th hole of the British Open last year, when Jordan Spieth realised that his divergent ball had landed in an area that was so off the way that the greenskeeper had not bothered marking it as OB, thus making it part of the course. He took advantage of the break and saved boggie, almost aced the next hole and finally won The Open. 
They say that golf is a game of inches: the six between your ears, the one inch behind the ball that you chunk and chilli dip, and the half inch that your ball did not roll, rendering your on-track ball a Central American putt: it needs another revolution.

The smart golfer is the one who takes time to read and understand not just the common rules, but also the finer hair-splitting ones that could give him an advantage.  There are exactly nine months before the new rules kick in on New Year’s day 2019, enough time to prepare for the new world of fewer, simpler golf rules. This is particularly so for our Pros who by now, I hope, have realised the need to play as many competitions on Tours as possible and earn invaluable experience. Understand the rules, enjoy your golf. [email protected]