Arnold Rules!
By Tom Bedell
Speaking of Arnold Palmer, the King hit the ceremonial first tee at the opening of the Masters today, four days prior to the 50th anniversary of his first Masters win. Of course, he wasn’t the King then, but he did know the rules of golf, and he used them to his advantage in that tournament.
Augusta National had been pelted with rain the night before and morning of the final round, so players were permitted free drops from embedded lies through the green. But when Palmer overshot the par-3 twelfth hole rules official Arthur Lacey told him he couldn’t lift the ball from an embedded lie. Palmer protested, but he played the ball out of the lie for a double bogey, then played the shot over with a drop, and scored a three.
Palmer was playing with Ken Venturi that day, and in 2004 Venturi was still raising a bit of a fuss about the shot (and probably trying to boost sales of his autobiography) in suggesting that Palmer had misinterpreted the rule. But three holes later the officials ruled that Palmer had indeed scored a three, and he went on to win the tournament by one shot.
Palmer mentioned the incident in a book he wrote a few years ago called Playing By the Rules, and he recently teamed up with the USGA for a photo shoot to help illustrate the 2008 USGA Annual Rules Quiz, which anyone can take by following the link.
It’s a sobering enterprise, or was for me, at any rate. I thought I had a fairly decent grasp on the rules. I thought wrong. I missed more than fifty percent of the questions–and this was after I had started reading the newly revised The Rules of Golf, which became effective at the beginning of the year after four years of work by the USGA and the R&A.
There are only 34 rules of golf. However, they do span 79 pages of sometimes bewildering cross-referencing that a keen legal mind might find challenging. And there are further discussions and decisions regarding the rules on the USGA website. I guess I’d better keep reading.
There’s a handy golf bag pocket-sized flip guide for $9.95 that might help: Golf Rules Quick Reference 2008-2011. It’s waterproof, illustrated, with quick reference tabs keyed to parts of the course–the tee, the fairway and rough, bunkers, hazards and so on, so players can flip to a quick answer out on the course, rather than trying to parse the intricacies of, say, the actual Rule 26-2, b., (iii), Note 1, while holding up the foursome behind.
The author, Yves C. Ton-That, has a law degree, but he’s also a rules official. Of course, even rules officials get it wrong sometime. Ask Arnold Palmer.
