Monday, March 24, 2014

Ask Linda #815-Out of bounds in the air


Dear Linda,

Great work clarifying the bizarre situations you can get into on a golf course. Here is a situation that made me chortle.

We were playing a match against another club and we were on a dogleg left par 4 with out of bounds all down the left side of hole. The dogleg was quite pronounced and I thought a good risk and reward hole – I got my driver out and hit a great drive over the dogleg onto the front of the green, at which point my opponent told me my ball was out of bounds. I looked bemusedly at him and told him my ball was on the green. He was quite unrepentant when he said that my ball was out of bounds in the air and it was a rule of the course?? It was on the back of the card?

Is this allowed by the rules of golf?

Lou from Manchester, UK

Dear Lou,

Just when I thought I had heard everything…

A golf course is not a country; it may not regulate air space. Where a ball travels through the air cannot be legislated! Where the ball lands is another story.

Sometimes a golf course will have a dogleg hole where a player attempting to cut the dogleg could try to hit onto the fairway of an adjacent hole. This can pose a danger to players on that fairway. In order to protect those players, a course may install interior out-of-bounds stakes that are in play only for golfers on the dogleg hole. A ball would be out of bounds (OB) if it were driven onto the fairway of the adjacent hole [Decision 33-2a/12]. The key word, of course, is “onto,” which implies landing on the fairway. A ball that travels through the air and lands on a green is on the green. Period.

By definition, a ball is out of bounds when all of it lies out of bounds (“lies,” not “flies”). A ball must be on the ground and beyond the OB stakes or lines to be deemed OB. A scorecard may declare that balls landing on a fairway adjacent to a dogleg are OB, but it has no jurisdiction over where balls may travel through the air.

Linda
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