Hands up – and be honest. Who really enjoys a blind shot? Not many right? There is a good reason lots of you would have it way down the list of your favourite strokes.
Not only can’t you see where you’re supposed to be aiming towards, you can’t see where the ball has gone either.
That sometimes creates an issue, as this comment I received outlines:
“We have a problem in winter where the second shot is a blind shot over a slope down to a lower level of the fairways.
“This area is regularly very wet and soft. You can hit a straight shot down the fairways, but when you get to the area where you expect to find your ball, it can be lost in the soft ground.
“It can be the case that you cannot clearly meet the casual water requirement, but you and your fellow players know it should be in this area but plugged.
“I have had this conversation with our committee, but they say you can’t drop a ball and play from where we all think it should be. It is a lost ball!
“I believe if everyone playing with you agrees it is virtually certain it is in the area, then you should get a free drop. What is your view on this?”
I am going to end up dying on this hill, but here we go…
Is this ball in temporary water? And could it be ground under repair?
What is temporary water? It’s described in the definitions as “any temporary accumulation of water on the surface of the ground (such as puddles from rain or irrigation or an overflow of a body of water) that… can be seen before or after the player takes a stance (without pressing down excessively with their feet)”.
If you can’t meet the requirement for temporary water then you can’t take relief from it. It’s either temporary water, or it isn’t.
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And if the ball isn’t in that abnormal course condition, then you can’t take advantage of Rule 16.1e, which gives relief for a ball that hasn’t been found but is known or virtually certain to be within it.
If you wanted to try the embedded ball rule – in the belief that it is plugged – you’re also going to be disappointed.
To take relief for a ball which is embedded in the general area, it needs to be “in its own pitch mark made as a result of the player’s previous stroke”. If you can’t find the ball, you don’t know whether it’s in its pitch mark or not.
So what’s left? Come up with the ball within the three-minute search time or come out empty handed and take stroke-and-distance.
Could the area be declared as ground under repair if the conditions are “abnormal to the course or it is unreasonable to require a player to play from a specific area,” as the committee procedures found in the Official Guide to the Rules of Golf point out?
That wouldn’t necessarily have to be marked – committees do have the power to declare specific areas GUR without getting out the white paint. But is this situation abnormal?
It also inevitably leads to a wider question that can arise in these scenarios. As I said earlier, to take relief from a ball that hasn’t been found but is in an abnormal course condition, you must know or be virtually certain the ball is in that condition.
Virtually certain doesn’t mean you think it’s in there, or it’s probably in there. The definition says it’s when “all reasonable information in question shows that it is at least 95% likely that the event in question happened”.
I’m not too fond of ‘virtually certain’ as it’s written in the rules as I think it confuses some people. What one player considers to be virtual certain isn’t always what another does. And what on earth is 95% supposed to mean? How are you supposed to evaluate that in the heat of a competition round?
In this case, for example, could you know or be virtually certain the ball was within the abnormal course condition if you couldn’t see it land? What else could have happened? Unless you’re into a walking into a virtual swimming pool, it’s tough to know where the ball may have actually have ended up.
I try to keep it simple. The question I ask myself when faced with something like this is ‘could the ball be anywhere else?’ If it could, then it’s not virtually certain, is it?
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. Email me at s.carroll@nationalclubgolfer.com
What do you think of this temporary water rule? Let me know by leaving a comment below or get in touch on X.
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