[PHOTO: Johan Rynners]
It’s bad enough that you pumped your tee shot into fescue so thick that it took you nearly the full three minutes to find it. But then comes the sobering realisation that there’s no way you can advance the ball from this lie.
Under Rule 19, you can take relief for an unplayable ball anywhere on the golf course accept in a penalty area. There are three options for what you can do next and they all come with a one-stroke penalty.
Of those three options (stroke-and-distance relief, back-on-the-line relief and lateral relief), you might think your best bet of salvaging a bogey isn’t to go back to the tee and hit another drive, and there is no good spot on back-on-the-line relief to drop. So you decide to take lateral relief, dropping in an area measured by two club lengths from where your ball was found (definition of a club length can be found here).
Remember that the area can’t be nearer the hole and when it’s dropped, the ball has to come to rest in the same area of the course where it first touched the ground. In other words, if you dropped it and it landed in the rough but then trickled into a fairway bunker that was within the relief area, you’d have to drop again. (This is different than having your relief area wind up being in a different area of the course, which we’ll explain below.)
It’s a fairly simple and straightforward procedure, albeit one that is tough to accept for a lot of golfers who stubbornly think it’s a wasted stroke. Even worse for those golfers, there is no guarantee your ball will be playable after the drop is taken (Rule 19.2/1). That’s right. You can drop into an even worse lie.
When that happens, and you again decide there is no way to play from this new spot, guess what you have to do? Yep. You have to take unplayable-ball relief again and add another penalty stroke to your score. Cruel as that might sound, you could have avoided the mess by considering the likelihood that dropping where you chose would result in a worse lie and that heading back to the tee shouldn’t have been so unappealing. It’s a humbling decision, but something you need to think about to avoid turning a small problem into a big one.
One other thing to consider about unplayable-ball relief is that one of the options might put you in position to drop in a much better situation than you’re in. You’re allowed to drop in any area of the course, so if one of your options moves you from tall fescue into a cleaner lie in a bunker, for example, you’d be smart to take it.
