Golf is hard and, generally speaking, we’re not altogether great at it. Fairways might look wide. Greens might look big. But we’re not always adapt at finding the short stuff and that means we spend a chunk of our time searching for golf balls.
That’s brings with it all kinds of issues but this email question might be familiar to many of you.
“In a competition, three players all hit their drives into the thick rough, or trees, in different areas of the hole. There is a potential scenario here where all three players look for the balls one at a time – hence taking nine minutes plus the time to walk to each ball.
“Is there a rule that ensures a player is required to look for their own ball before assisting others to ensure the delay is restricted to a maximum of three minutes?”
There are variations to this question. For example, what if you’ve hit two balls, one off the tee and a provisional and are looking for both, or if there are golfers looking in the same area for their balls.
So what’s the deal? Is it a three minute search time all around, or are we going to spend ages tramping round the course looking for each ball?
Golf ball search time: How long can you have when searching for multiple golf balls?
Well, I hope you’re not in the group behind. The clock starts ticking on a ball search when the player begins the search for it. So in a situation where three balls are all in different areas, it is possible for the players to move from one to the other sequentially and go through the three minute search time for each.
There are reasons why golfers might prefer this approach – there is no such thing as too many cooks when it comes to finding a golf ball – but you’d also hope they would show some common sense as well. It’s clearly holding people up.
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Is it an unreasonable delay of play? It’s tough to argue as the rules are written and while golfers are encouraged to play at a prompt pace, they are only recommendations set out in Rule 5.6b.
Ready Golf etiquette would also ask golfers to go and look for their own balls, but they’re not required to do so.
Now, if, for example, the balls were all hit into the same area it would be possible to argue that players have begun the search for their own balls even if they say they are looking for their partner’s – because they’ve arrived in the part of the course where they would expect to find their own ball.
But you’d like to think that in a situation as described above, players would have enough nous to understand that a nine minute search just wouldn’t be cricket – never mind golf!
Let’s also look at when you’ve hit a couple of balls – say if you’re wild off the tee and then declare a provisional. How long do you get? The answer to that is revealed in a clarification to the definition of Lost.
If you’ve hit both balls into the same area “where they can be searched for at the same time” then you can only have three minutes to search for both balls.
If it’s likely the two balls are far enough apart so that you can’t search for them both at the same time then you get a three-minute search for each.
Even if the two balls are in the same area, there are some other factors that might give you a three-minute search for each.
It gives two examples, which many of you might recognise. The first is when your original ball goes into bushes and the “provisional is in rough nearby, but is clearly not in the bushes”.
The second is when a ball bounces on the fairway and you know it has just reached the rough, while the provisional is much further in.
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 golf ball search time rule? Is it fair? Let me know with a tweet.
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