[Photo: microgen]
Here’s a golf rule you might not know that comes into play on nearly every hole of every round: you can mark your ball on a putting green, or anywhere on the golf course if it interferes with someone else’s play, using virtually anything you choose.
You can use your hat, your glove, a tee, a rake, a 7-iron – get crazy with it. The only catch is the marker has to be artificial (no leaves or pine cones allowed). The reason the Rules of Golf recommends you use a coin or a similar small object is because it’s difficult to accurately replace a marked ball with a toaster.
RELATED: Here’s a quick guide to putting-green rules
That brings us to the main topic: putting the ball back in the correct spot from where it was marked and lifted. It’s a must. If you don’t, you’re playing from the wrong place and that is a violation of Rule 14.7 (loss of hole in matchplay/two-shot penalty in strokeplay). How you proceed after playing from the wrong place in strokeplay depends on if it was a “serious breach”.
If you putted out after failing to replace your ball-marker in the correct spot, and it didn’t give you a “significant advantage” in the competition, add two strokes to whatever score you made after holing out. If it did give you a significant advantage, say you intentionally foot-wedge your ball out of the rough and onto the fairway, you’d be disqualified if you didn’t correct the mistake before making a stroke on the next hole or before turning in your score if it happened on the final hole of the round. You literally have to put the ball back in the correct spot and play out the hole from there (plus the two-stroke penalty).
In matchplay, none of this matters since you lose the hole no matter what.
That’s why it’s crucial to get it right when you’re asked to move your ball on the putting green or elsewhere. It’s so important, in fact, the Rules of Golf has specific recommendations on how to do it under Rule 15.3/1. To summarise:
When moving a ball or ball-marker, it should be placed to the side by measuring with a club. You can use the clubhead or the entire length of the club to measure and move. You can do it either directly from the ball or by marking it first and then measuring from the ball marker. Also, you need to find a fixed object to align the clubhead or club with to make sure you reverse the steps correctly when you replace your ball in the right spot. You could line up the point with a tree, a golf cart, a sprinkler head, etc.
To finally tackle the issue in the headline, the Rules of Golf is only recommending how to determine the spot where you move your ball. It’s not a penalty if you measured with your shoe or the flagstick, for example. The key thing is that you replace the ball in the exact spot from where it was marked and lifted.
