Phones and golf courses form a tricky partnership. It can be pretty annoying when a playing partner slopes off to take a call during a round, or is head down in their social media feeds half the day.
But many of you will use them to enter scores, or to get yardages from a handy GPS app. Are there other ways they may be able to assist you, though?
What if you’ve smacked a shot into a bush and you’re having trouble trying to find out whether the ball you can just about see in the foliage is yours? Could you use your phone’s camera to identify the ball?
Some phone cameras have extremely powerful zoom features. Can you use them if it’s going to help you determine whether the ball is yours or not?
Can you use a phone to identify a golf ball?
The tricky thing about identifying your golf ball is you’re not allowed to assume. So if you find a ball in a tree, or a bush, you can’t just say, ‘that’s mine’.
Rule 7.2 sets out ways of identifying a player’s ball at rest. These are if you, or anyone else, sees the ball come to rest “in circumstances where it is known to be the player’s ball”.
It can also be done by seeing an identifying mark on the ball, or by finding a ball with the same brand, model, number and condition in an area “where the player’s ball is expected to be.”
But if your ball is high in the branches, or wedged firmly in a bit of gorse, you might not be able to get it back. How can you give yourself a chance at making sure it’s your ball?
A clarification to Rule 7.2 says that even though you are unable to retrieve the ball, you can ID it “such as by: Using binoculars or a distance-measuring device to see a mark that definitely identifies it as the player’s ball”.
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It’s the “such as” that you’ve got to focus on here, because it’s not limiting how you can do it to just binoculars or a rangefinder. If you extrapolate this, you’ll realise you can use your phone’s camera, and you can even use the zoom function, if it allows you to see your identifying mark on the ball.
Perhaps it’s just another reason to keep your camera with you on the course, and to make sure you properly mark your golf ball before playing. You never know when it might come in handy.
The main image has been created using Artificial Intelligence
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 this rule about identifying a golf ball? Let me know by leaving a comment below, email me at s.carroll@nationalclubgolfer.com or get in touch on X.
