Do you get a relief from a fallen tree? Can you play a shot out of the clubhouse window, and what happens if your club snaps while you’re taking a shot?
If you can think it, the chances are it’s probably happened on a golf course and there is something in the Rules of Golf to cover it.
That said, having spent years thumbing through the 500-plus-page Official Guide to the Rules of Golf, there are still wacky situations that can even catch me off guard.
We’ve already looked at what happens if your ball is stuck in fruit, why you need to be careful if you’re carrying a Coke bottle around the course, and how to protect yourself from a thorny problem but stay within the rules.
Yes, they have been strange and they have been odd. But this final trio to end the series are just as wacky. So let’s get cracking on these bizarre golf rules…
Bizarre golf rules: Have any of these happened to you?
Beware the fallen tree!
Trees are sturdy but even they can’t always stand up to everything Mother Nature throws at them. A wild storm can bring down even the strongest spruce.
They can take a bit of shifting too when they hit the deck, so what happens if they haven’t yet been removed and your ball, stance, or swing, is obstructed by the fallen timber? It’s just free relief, isn’t it?
Not necessarily. There is a clarification to the definition of Ground Under Repair that should strike fear into our hearts. It says a fallen tree – or even a tree stump – that a committee intends to remove “but is not in the process of being removed, is not automatically ground under repair”.
If it’s being unearthed, or cut up, that’s OK. The clarification adds they are “material piled for later removal and are GUR.
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But if they’re not, you might want your club volunteers to put something in place. If they don’t, you might be trying to hit out of fallen branches, or taking an unplayable ball for your pains.
Bizarre golf rules: Ball in the clubhouse? Play it as it lies!
This one has happened before – most notably at Moortown, in Leeds, when Nigel Denham’s approach to the final hole during the 1974 English Amateur, ended up on the clubhouse carpet.
A plaque marks the spot where, having cleared away the tables and chairs, and opened the clubhouse window, he somehow managed to get up and down.
Now, where your club has clearly defined their course boundaries, this shot will be off the table (pun unintended) as the clubhouse will probably be beyond some out of bounds markers. That’s the case at Moortown these days.
But if it doesn’t say it in the Local Rules, or there are no white lines or stakes to prevent it, then there is – theoretically at least – nothing to stop you playing it as it lies from the Axminster, Tin Cup-style, and trying to fashion the most unlikely of pars.
Just try not to hit it out of someone’s pint glass.
The club is in pieces – how can that be a stroke?
Modern clubs are marvels of science but even the best efforts of a manufacturer’s aerodynamic aces can go wrong from time to time.
And while clubs fail, they tend to do so in spectacular style – as we’ve seen when a clubhead cracks, or goes flying, on the various tours.
With adjustable heads, there is even more scope for user-inflicted error. We really should just stop fiddling, but I have seen occasions in club competitions where clubhead and shaft have separated during a swing.
If you think that’s an automatic mulligan, though, you’re about to be disappointed. The key to whether you’re judged to have made a stroke or not is found in a clarification to the definition of the term.
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So…
What’s important is where you’ve got up to with your swing and your intent. If you’ve started a downswing and you intend to strike the ball, it’s going to be a stroke if the club separates from the shaft and you continue the downswing. It doesn’t matter if the shaft hits the ball or not.
It’s the same result if the clubhead falls from the shaft and strikes the ball. A bit unfair? You’re being punished for equipment failure after all, but those are the rules.
If it happens during the backswing, and you can stop yourself, or pull out of the stroke on the downswing, then you don’t have to add one on to the scorecard. But, be honest, how many of us amateurs can pull that off!
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 of these bizarre golf rules? Let us know some of the oddest decisions you have had to make on the golf course. Drop us a line on X.
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