Take a deep breath. Chill. Try to keep that blood from boiling. The sky has not fallen in. Your ball is just in a divot.
Remember ‘play the ball as it lies’? It’s a central principle of the game, says the Rules. One of golf’s great commandments.
But maybe we’ve been coddled, by rules that have burgeoned from 13 simple statements to a book that spans more than 500 pages, and which have found all manner of ways to let us lift our ball when things get tricky.
I know it’s frustrating. You’ve hit the middle of the fairway, you stroll up and then you see it – your ball at the bottom of a divot. It’s a perfect drive, but rotten luck.
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I understand why you’re cross. The turf is damaged. It isn’t how we think the course is supposed to play. You’re stuck trying to hack it out. Or worse, adding a stroke to your score by declaring it unplayable.
This is not an accident. It’s by design.
Rule 16 tries to draw a line between what’s abnormal and what’s simply normal wear and tear. Abnormal course conditions are animal holes, immovable obstructions, and temporary water.
They’re also ground under repair, and it’s this bit where club golfers grasp tightly. The grass is ripped. There’s a big gap where turf once lay. It’s going to heal. Surely it’s the absolute embodiment of ground that is “under repair”?
So why aren’t golf balls in divots ground under repair?
But divots are not abnormal. They’re anything but. They’re not a huge hole housing a badger sett. They’re not a flooded patch of fairway caused by a night of torrential rain.
They’re a by-product of playing the game. Every time your club hits the ground, a little bit of turf flies. Multiply that by loads of golfers every day and it’s not a surprise there might be some fairways with a fair few of them.
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Can you imagine little circles of white paint around every divot found on a golf course? Your greenkeepers would never get anything else done.
But can’t committees just declare any part of the course to be ground under repair – whether they mark it or not? You’ve read the rules, I see.
Then we’ve got preferred lies, which some clubs bring in all winter and basically allow golfers to smooth over any imperfection – including extricating a ball from a divot. So why can we do it six months of the year but not the rest?
It’s because preferred lies are meant to be temporary. They’re supposed to help protect the course from tough conditions, not give you a better chance of making par.
That’s before we even get on to the tricky part. What is a divot? Golfers love to say, ‘everyone knows what a divot is’, but do they?
A fresh gouge is obvious enough, but what about a small indentation with a touch of topsoil missing? What about something that’s half healed? What about a sanded over divot that’s lost a bit of the mix? Is a small scuff in the grass a divot? Should there be a defined measurement and how do you work that out during a round?
I see enough of this with animal holes, and golfers bereft when they learn a scraping doesn’t apply. Give relief for divots and a discussion about whether someone was able to take relief would soon descend into disagreement when a player doesn’t get the result they were looking for.
When divots are part of normal play, that uncertainty disappears. That doesn’t feel fair when your ball is at the bottom of a crater. It feels unjust to be suffering in someone else’s mess.
But that’s the game’s great paradox. There’s a reason we call it the rub of the green. So just take a wedge, swing steeply, and knock it back into the play.
As frustrating as divots are, they’re not abnormal. They’re just part of the game.
Now have your say on divots
What do you think? Does this argument find favour with you, or should you always get relief from a ball in a divot? Let us know in the comments or get in touch on X.
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