Yesterday during the final round of coverage we saw DJ hit a ball OB. This of course leads to a different penalty than that of the water hazard. One ball was playable, one was not.
There was a social media firestorm with tweets such as this and many others like it.
Now clearly this tweet forgets that sometimes OB is set in place, because it means no longer on the property of the golf course. Retrieving one’s ball might not be applicable in these instances.
Yet that still brings many questions regarding the rules. Should they be changed? Sound off below.
That’s exactly where the "protection" argument falls apart for me. Most golfers don’t intentionally hit OB – for me, it’s invariably the unintended result of a bad shot. The penalty could be zero strokes or twenty strokes, it’s not going to "protect" anything, nor is it going to do anything to influence the chances of me inadvertently doing it once in a while. I wasn’t aiming there and didn’t intend to go there, but no matter how many penalty strokes it costs or how much I aim away from it, my ball will still occasionally end up there. In most cases it’s penalizing lack of skill/talent more than shot choice – better golfers aren’t going to hit that nasty pull/snap hook or banana ball slice as often. If anything, hazards within the course boundaries should carry a heavier penalty because golfers intentionally take those on a lot more often than they do OB.
IMO, designing courses where some players may intentionally try to hit over OB, such as cutting the corner on a dogleg over houses, is poor course design and a product of greedy developers. Don’t want people cutting corners and hitting houses? Don’t design the course that way and don’t put houses there, because you know some golfers are going to try it no matter what. Put a water hazard on the dogleg, or some particularly nasty bunkers, or tall fescue rough – that would probably discourage more golfers from trying it.
Hazard – obstacle on the course
OB – you are off the course
It is quite obvious what the difference is, and therefore is perfectly reasonable to apply a different penalty to the situation
As for your pond argument, what about the times when a player has played from just within the hazard where the ball is submerged – if you want to argue a point, that ball is still submerged and has been played
Couldnt agree more. Over 90% of the time I hit it OB, it’s because I’ve missed my aimline by over 50 yards. It doesn’t really matter what the penalty is, If I hit my big miss it could go anywhere on or off the course.
On a similar note, interior OB is total ********. It’s almost always the result of poorly designed holes and in my experience most of them could fixed by planting a couple small trees eliminating the ability to take ridiculous lines off the tee.
I agree with that.
DJ never should have hit the ball over there anyway. He had a 3 stroke lead. Club down and play the percentages. If he was mad at the rule/penalty, then he should have played smart. That was his fault, not the rules.
It’s at the point now, guys like DJ, Brooks, DeChambeau and other long hitters will hit it as long as they can. These guys are so good now that hazards are not hazards (except for OB and water). They can typically hit out from trees, hit opposite-handed, they practice for all the scenarios.
Most everyone on tour has no problem hitting out of bunkers. In fact, they aim at them. When they know they can’t land it on the green (too much slope or too fast) they land in the sand to stop it green high because they know they can get out of the bunker easy enough.
Also, now with COVID, you see other things happening. Because there are no fans on the course, they don’t need the grandstands. So any pros who are now overhitting greens, are finding their ball is usually in a terrible lie because there are no grandstands to stop their ball. I would play for every pin location from any distance if I knew my ball was going to stop 10 yards past the green, typically still on good grass.
They get relief if their ball was up against any grandstands but now they aren’t there, so they have to be more careful.
If anything should change, they should not wrap the bottom of the grandstands and if their ball goes under they are either penalized or they have a drop zone that is not a manicured area. Or move the grandstands back further, but that won’t happen as it will not look good on TV and fans paying will be too far away (but not really).
The pros are just too good, to have the extra backstop behind greens is not good for the game and not penalize them for marked out of bounds. Again, DJ could have hit 3W off the tee and not been in trouble.
My 2 cents.
I love seeing this, BTW.
Disagree. I definitely play away from OB when it is within 15 yards of the edge of the fairway and I rarely aim away from a lateral hazard to the same degree. OB costs me two shots and dumping it in a lateral hazard is only 1 shot.
But the courses here on LI are often very woodsy, with deep tree lined fairways, this is an affordable golf course setup, they’re not removing all the trees and planting grass that needs to be watered constantly. But OB/Lost ball is in play very, very often and it’s not uncommon to see trouble left off the tee and then right for your approach, or vice versa, so this rule often hurts us bad.
The Pros don’t often play courses like this, they need room for the large galleries, deep woods around every hole wouldn’t work. So once again the Pros often get an advantage over us. But I guess I’m still on the fence, I really hate losing 2 strokes after hitting a decent shot that just trickles out or can’t be found in the rough.
I would guess you are in the small minority.
Depends on how deep the pond is.
fair enough. enjoy your pedantry. in the meantime, i’ll keep championing my suggestion to streamline the rules while protecting pace and property within a passable perversion of pageantry.
I don’t imagine that most people who hit OB were intentionally aiming there.
Not sure if serious….
Desired effect achieved.
Ya usually hit it where you’re thinking about. Wherever that may be.
I don’t really get why this isn’t obvious. I’ve changed my approach to a ton of holes because of this. Deterrence is a thing.
Is the intersection of the set of people that want to play by the rules and the set of people that totally disregard the strategic risk/reward of a shot all that big? If someone doesn’t care enough to try to avoid the possibility of a harsh penalty then why do they care that the penalty is harsh?
The two stroke fairway drop thing is an elegant solution to the one valid objection to the OB rule. Which is that having to go back to the tee during casual play is a huge drag. The rest is just whining about the score IMO.
It is the utter illogic in applying a harsher penalty for the same bad swing.
It isn’t the same bad swing unless it is totally divorced from context. If I’m driving and take too much speed into the turn it matters as to how bad I’m driving if I end up maybe skidding off into a field as opposed to if I plunge over a cliff.
Also, if the reason that a lateral water hazard is different because sometimes a “submerged” ball is still playable, then logically OB should be given the same sort of conditional relief, i.e if an OB ball is still payable, you should have the option of playing it where it lies and taking a one stoke penalty.
Besides, does having to hit a provisional or add the extra penalty really decrease the frequency of my drunk buddy stomping through someone’s backyard looking for and/or hitting his ball?
Life and golf are not fair. I lost a total of 5 or 6 balls last summer at my home course and two or three of them were drives that were less than 10 yards off the fairway but the fall leaves made them impossible to find in 3 minutes. Same penalty as OB on well struck shots that were not very far offline.
One of the courses I play 30+ times each summer finishes with forced carries on the 17th and 18th holes over 220 yards often into a prevailing wind. The carry was 255 yards off the back on the 17th when I played it off the tips a few weeks ago. A slight mishit that doesn’t carry the hazard is the same penalty as a ball OB. I find it humorous that so many b*tch about the OB penalty when the water hazards I commonly deal with and a lost ball carry the same exact stroke and distance penalty. Find a different game or just take a mulligan if you don’t like to play by the rules.
Your first mistake was not driving up to that tree area and checking to see if it was red stake or white stake. That way you could have driven back to the tee box, determined your best line considering all probabilities, and then aim for the nearest water hazard.
No. That might make it more of a deterrent, but so would an automatic disqualification. Or having your hands cut off.
If two strokes doesn’t deter someone, then they get to add two strokes. No moral judgement here. Deterrence does not have to be about totally eliminating a behavior. Just discouraging it somewhat is fine.
Having the option of playing a ball that is OB literally opens a person up to a variety of adverse legal consequences.
Maybe if two strokes isn’t a deterrent then a destruction of property misdemeanor for taking a divot out of a neighboring lawn might cut it?
The problem though with the deterrent argument is that if most golfers treat OB the same as a water hazard from a course management perspective (even if though they shouldn’t), than the two shot penalty is not actually doing anything to deter them anymore than the one shot penalty from a water hazard.
Although I’m not a fan of stroke + distance penalties mostly due to pace of play, having two stroke penalties and one stroke penalties does make strategy a little more interesting. There’s a hole on a course that I play that has OB right and water left, and you better believe I hit favor the left hand side. People who don’t are just losing strokes unnecessarily.
If deterrence is the reason for the rule (and not elimination for the protection of life and property) then aren’t hazards also a deterrent? Seems to me like they should be treated the same.
First, not all OB is on someone else’s property. Often, it’s on golf course property. I suppose it would be similar to a ball being in the middle of a lake or at the edge of it. Second, are people really getting arrested for hitting golf balls off someone’s lawn? I feel like that is a bit of an overblown scenario.
If you lessen the OB penalty without lessening the lost ball penalty, wouldn’t now the burden be on the player to prove the ball went OB rather than lost in the course since it is the lesser penalty just as it is now with a water hazard? That could be a big problem as there aren’t a whole lot of OB areas that are closely mown, and not all are in a direct line of sight. In some cases it would require trespassing to ID the ball.
However, if we, to eliminate this problem, lessen the penalty for both and allow a stroke/drop in the area where you think a ball is lost and/or OB, then there is the issue that you could be better off not finding the ball as not all unplayable lies are mitigated by two clublengths.
Then there would often be a huge issue as to the general area. A few feet can be highly significant if there are trees or patches of high grass.
I’ll start be reiterating that I’m in favor of the rule being changed. But with that said, I’m also a realist – and yes, there are definitely golfers who would be rude/stupid enough to play a ball right off somebody’s lawn. Granted, not a lot of them, but they definitely exist. I’ve seen guys climb over fences/walls into back yards to retrieve errant balls while the residents were home, and I have no doubt they would have played their ball if the fence/wall wasn’t in their way. Society is full of inconsiderate and stupid people, and some of them play golf.
You really think there needs to be an option to play the ball out of the middle of an interstate highway?
Oh I have no doubt. What I was saying is that I can’t imagine a bunch of people getting arrested for property damage for hitting a ball off grass.
There is technically an option for playing a ball from the center of a lake, so…
But no, I do not think so, and that wasn’t my point.
Sure reads that way.
Sure. So they pay the price for not caring by having extra strokes. We aren’t talking murder here. Just giving less of a crap about hitting a ball into a place they shouldn’t.
If people don’t care, they don’t care. There are a whole heap of philosophical and practical problems with deterrence as a justification for punishment. It has to be geared towards people who both know better and have a realistic choice. A lot of golfers don’t care about the rules. So they aren’t deterred. This isn’t perfect. Probably better to put up trees or a net if the clientele is prone to not caring.
Yes, exactly. You have been deterred from risky behavior.
Others won’t be. Even so, overall risk is less than without the rule.
In your analogy, it would be the same result, off a cliff or off a bridge into the bottom of a lake. No valid reason exists to justify a harsher penalty fir OB, IMO
There is a big difference between the random unfairness of the natural features of a course, and the rules developed by people to apply to playing the game. The rules should not have inherent random unfairness.
The penalty for failing to carry a hazard is not the same as OB, unless the hazard begins immediately after the tee box, which in that case means you have a poorly designed hole.
Losing a ball and getting a penalty is plenty of deterrent. Adding an additional penalty is just irrational.
OB was only one penalty for most of the first 60 years the rules existed. It worked just fine. The rules already have provisions for making honest estimates if a ball went into a pond or not. The “virtually certain” standard. That is the exact same conflict you describe and it exists today already in the Penalty Area v lost ball context.
Many of the water hazards at the good resort courses here start right in front of the tees and some of these are courses that are ranked in Golf Digests Top 100 list. We have over 3,000 lakes within 30 miles of our home so water hazards are common, often on more than half the holes. Slope ratings from middle tees(6400 yards) are 140 and above at these courses. You would certainly not enjoy them because the hazard is just like having OB and most of the holes have woods on both side where finding a ball is next to impossible as the vegetation is super thick. Here’s a typical hole without water, 227 yard par 3(246 off the tips) The woods are not playable on either side and you are unlikely to find your ball without a machete so it’s basically OB on both sides.
Maybe I have zero issues with the OB rule because I grew up on courses with lots of thick woods and marsh so the possibility of a stroke and distance penalty existed on more than half the holes. I often have rounds where I miss only 3 GIR and two or three fairways but card a double if I make one bad swing. It often makes for par or better score for the day with a double or two on the card.
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Please show me examples of all these courses with 220-255 yard carries over water that starts right off the tee box. If that is so prevalent in your area, then my opinion is that your area has lots of poorly designed golf courses.
We have at least 3 in my area that I can think of. Hole 10 at Crandon, hole 18 at Emerald Hills and hole 18 at Grande Oaks. All of those are very highly rated courses in South Florida.
No, but a lost ball is the same penalty and those can be decent shots, this may not be a discussion about lost balls but I think most agree if OB is changed lost ball will be as well.
I’ve played Crandon. The water is a good 100 yards from the tee box, and it isn’t a forced carry as it is situated to the right, with the choice to play to the fairway to the left. I don’t know the others.
That is a fair point that it is not always a long forced carry, but it is also dependant on where the tee boxes are set up on a particular day. For those who are unfamiliar with the course, the layout is below. sometimes the tee box ends up more towards the #12 par 3 tee box (especially when the par 3 is playing short).
I think I’d have to put life jackets on my balls to play that course!
Here are some examples. The resort is Cragun’s Legacy(36 holes) and they are holding a Canadian Tour event there in August so the design is obviously highly regarded by many.
The first picture is a par three. You can see the back tees that play 245 on the far right. The next tees up play 146ish but a slight mishit is a stroke and distance penalty as there is no drop area.
You can see the 17th and 18th holes at the bottom of the second picture. They both have forced carries off the back tees of about 250 yards and 210+ off the 6,400 tees. The 14th hole on that course also has a 230 yard forced carry from the shorter tees if you want to have less than 185 yards to a very tight green.
The top left of the second picture shows a par 5 where someone like me who hits it 275 tee is left with a 225ish shot over the marsh and the carry is over 200. Numerous times I’ve lost a ball on my second shot attempting to hit a wedge in the proper place for a layup as there is marsh to the left and the fairway really necks down.
Directly below that hole in pic #2 is another par 4 with marsh right in front of the tee(just left of the green in the middle of the picture) with a 210 yard carry from the 6,400 yard tees.
The last picture is from the first 4 holes at a course half a mile away that is ranked #59 on the Golf Digest Top 100 you can play.
They keep the bent grass greens at these courses running right around 11 on the Stimpmeter but they roll them for tournaments and can get them to 12+. The medalist in a 10 team high school tournament a few years ago shot 3 over par for two days. Courses like these are common because there are over 12,000 lakes mostly in the Northern part of Minnesota. I’ve always thought of OB, lost ball, and these common forced carries with marsh/lake right in front of the tee or approach shot as the same penalty because they are all stroke and distance. I would lose a ball about every 12 rounds at my club in California and I’m averaging about 1 per round now that I’m a member at the Cragun’s Courses. Most of my buddies who are 10-15 handicappers will lose 5-10 balls if they don’t have their best stuff that day playing here.
I’m guessing you wouldn’t enjoy these courses but many of us do, lol.
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