[PHOTO: Steve Dykes]
They say bunkers are intended to be a half-stroke penalty to your score. Sometimes you get lucky and save par; sometimes you don’t. That said, not all bunker lies are the half-stroke variety. You might hit a high wedge into a green that plops down into the sand like it landed in a pudding.
A fried-egg or nearly completely buried lie might give you pause as to what to do next, especially if you have a high lip in front of you. Can you get under the ball enough with your sand wedge to loft it out of the bunker? It’s a dilemma that might leaving you wondering about your options.
Photo: Andy Lyons
One question you might be asking is: “Can I take an unplayable lie, add a penalty stroke to my score, and drop outside a bunker?” We’ll get to that in a second. Before we do, it’s important to point out that a plugged lie in the sand is different than a plugged lie in the grass face or layered sod wall that frames a bunker.
Under Rule 12, if your ball plugs inside the edge of a bunker (and that inside edge includes patches of ground whether it’s sand or not), you don’t get free relief the way you would if your ball plugged in a grass face. That’s a helpful thing to remember when you skull a bunker shot into the grass lip in front of you. If it plugs like this outside the bunker, you are entitled to free relief for an embedded ball (Rule 16.3). Drop within one club-length right behind where the ball got stuck so long as it’s in the general area and not nearer the hole.
Now back to the unplayable-lie question: the scenario is that you hit a shot into a bunker and it either came in hot or the sand is really soft and it plugged. You might be able to get it out, but the smarter play in some cases is to take an unplayable-lie penalty and proceed under Rule 19.3.
This is where you get a little wiggle room. If you take a one-stroke penalty, you must drop in the bunker on either back-on-the-line relief or lateral relief. The simplest thing is to find a good spot within a two club-lengths relief area, no closer to the hole, and drop. This option comes with a one-shot penalty. You also can go back and replay from the previous shot (stroke-and-distance penalty) but that’s probably going to sting more.
However, if you’re willing to take a two-stroke penalty, you can take back-on-the-line relief outside the bunker. If you’re not sure what back-on-the-line relief is, it’s outlined in Rule 19.2b:
“The player may drop the original ball or another ball behind the spot of the original ball, keeping the spot of the original ball between the hole and the spot where the ball is dropped (with no limit as to how far back the ball may be dropped). The spot on the line where the ball first touches the ground when dropped creates a relief area that is one club-length in any direction from that point.”
Obviously, the spot can’t be closer to the hole, but this option might make more sense than trying to get out of an impossible bunker lie.
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