[Photo: Dylan Buell]
Whether you’re taking free relief from things such as immovable obstructions, or you’re taking a penalty relief such as for an unplayable lie, you might have it ingrained in your memory that the area to drop the ball is a semi-circle mapped out by the longest club in your bag that is not your putter. It looks like this:
[Illustration courtesy of the USGA]
As you can see, you’re taking a legal drop (don’t forget to do it at knee height) if your ball lands in this half of a pie and stays in it. It doesn’t matter if the ball winds up closer to the hole from the spot where it was dropped provided it stays in the semi-circle.
Where the drop area changes from a semi-circle to a full circle is when using a relief option known as “back on the line”. It’s a useful alternative, for example, when you hit a ball into a penalty area and would rather have a full swing into a green rather than some awkward half-wedge shot. It works like this:
First, you determine where your ball last crossed the edge of the penalty area. Then you use that point and the hole to visualise an imaginary straight line between the two. Finally, you continue that line behind you letting it run as far away from the point where your ball last crossed into the penalty area as you want. You can drop anywhere on that line and (with a few limits, which we’ll cover momentarily) the ball is in play if it comes to rest within one club-length of that spot in any direction.
That last part is key, especially when understanding what happened in the headline of this article. The ball can wind up closer to the hole than the spot where the relief area was first determined. If you don’t understand why, it’s simply because the ball remains further from the hole than where it last crossed into the penalty area (that satisfies the “no-closer-to-hole” edict most golfers are familiar with).
Here are examples of good/bad drops using back-on-line relief:
[Illustration courtesy of the USGA]
The limits to this relief area: (1) It can’t be closer to the hole than where the ball last crossed the edge of the penalty area. (2) It can be in any area of the course except the same penalty area. (3) The dropped ball must remain in the same area of the course as where it first touched when dropped.
Back-on-the-line relief (Rule 17.1d(2)) is a good one to remember as it might save you a stroke or two by possibly making your next shot after a penalty easier.
