Is it in or out? No, it’s not a tennis poser. This week I’ve been asked to consider a boundary question.
“A player hit his tee shot, which looked to have gone into a nearby garden and out of bounds. He then played a provisional.
“We went to look over the garden fence, the owner appeared and asked, ‘are you looking for your ball?’ The player told him that he was, at which point the owner went away and returned asking if it was a [particular brand].
“The player told him that it was and the house owner threw the ball back onto the course.
“The player then said to his playing partners that he had not asked him to throw the ball back onto the course and therefore the ball was back in play without penalty – that ball should be considered in play and played as it lies.”
What’s the course of action here?
What happens when a ball out of bounds is moved by an outside influence?
In my view, the ball is out of bounds. Rule 18.2a (2) says a ball “at rest is out of bounds only when all of it is outside the boundary edge of the course”.
You’re probably concentrating on the ‘outside the boundary edge’ bit and I don’t blame you. But what’s key here is it was also at rest. The owner of the garden appeared, retrieved it, and then put it back onto the course.
So as soon as that ball was at rest, it was out of bounds, because all of it was also outside the boundary edge of the course.
Make sense?
If this ball had gone into the garden and cannoned off a roof before pinballing and finally stopping back on the course, it would be in play – even though it had crossed the boundary. That’s because it had not come to rest.
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There is a clarification in the rules which explains this more succinctly. It’s found in 9.6/4 and it’s when a ball at rest is played having been moved by an outside influence.
This clarification says: “If a player discovers, after playing their ball, that it had been moved onto the course by an outside influence after the ball had come to rest out of bounds, the player has played a wrong ball.”
In that particular clarification, the player did not know or wasn’t virtually certain that was the case before they played their shot so they escaped a penalty.
But that’s not what happened in our query, where the owner is the outside influence. Here, we know the ball had gone out of bounds.
If the player hits it they will get a two stroke sanction for playing the wrong ball. If they don’t correct the mistake, by playing the provisional which is now the ball in play under penalty of stroke and distance, it could get worse.
Tee off at the next hole without doing so and the penalty in a competition, or a round that counts for handicap, is disqualification.
Got a question for our expert?
Despite the changes to the Rules of Golf in 2019 and 2023, there are still some that leave us scratching our heads. I’ll try to help by featuring the best of your queries in this column.
What do you think about this ball out of bounds situation? Let me know by leaving a comment on X.
