rollin
"Just playin golf pally"
- Joined
- Aug 28, 2012
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Someone is trying to convince me of the following:
Say you hit your teeshot for a par3 left of target. Behind a bit of a hill, everyone in the flight has seen it go behind the hill. Once you get there, it's very wet, some puddles and a lot of mushy grass. Ball is never to be found.
So options:
A. Sucks to be you, go back to the tee boxes and try again, with the appropriate penalty.
B. Yeah that's a temporary water hazard, guesstimate where your ball landed, avoid the temporary hazard and go on (possibly with a penalty).
C. Something else, also please elaborate on that.
I'm option A, the other dude is option B.
People answering "A" and I'd have to agree. But there is a problem with this. It wasn't expected to be the case nor a lost ball so therefore most are not going to hit a second tee shot provisionally and now only realizing the problem after we arrive. Option "A" is the correct thing to do but it means heading back to the tee box which is always (at least most the times) a no no for pace reasons. So what to do? I suppose in a casual round we can drop and take 2 strokes (one for a penalty and one to sort of make up for the distance part of the rule) at least its honest as possible without heading back to the tee.
But there is also another side to this. And are reasons many feel rules for amateur golf could or should be different from pro golf. The exact scenario played out above causes a problem in our amateur golf lives where playing the exact ruling leads to pace inconvenience and embarrassment. I mean who is really going back to the tee here unless you want a fight with the group behind. The other thing is that we don't have that enormous advantage of a hundred sets of eyes on our ball like the pros do. Almost 100% of the time that ball would never be lost even if unplayable so the player never has to worry about what to do and even if he had to re-hit or hit a provisional from the tee he'd probably know right then and there to do so before ever leaving the tee. We just don't have the same great advantage and can often get stuck in similar scenarios. How often have we hit balls to places where we really didn't believe for a second that we wouldn't find our ball or be in a situation where we only find out a re-tee is the only option after we honestly got to the area we landed? Imo for these scenarios they should allow amateur play to have a drop at nearest possible playable spot and penalty of 2 strokes (instead of one) in lieu of heading back to the tee.