When did we get so pious about perfection? “If you’re on the fairway you should never have a poor lie”.
Can you hear that? It’s our sport’s ancestors spinning in their graves. “Preferred lies should be in play all the time”. That’s an assault on golf’s central principle: Play the course as you find it and play the ball as it lies.
When England Golf revealed they had brought back old rules for preferred lies – removing the ability of clubs to just use them whenever they wanted all year round – I knew it would provoke comment.
But I didn’t expect our inboxes to show some golfers declaring preferred lies should be in play 365 days a year. The tone?: ‘I’ve hit a fairway, I deserve a good lie’.
Is golf that binary? I think we’ve been spending too much time in simulators. The game isn’t the tidy, manicured, version we play in a studio – where the mat is level, pixelated fairways are spotless, and every bounce goes just where physics says it should.
Golf, much like life, can be unfair. It can punish good shots and forgive those we were convinced were destined for deep trouble.
Sometimes you hit a great drive and it ends up in a divot. That’s how it goes. If every shot realised its expected outcome, where would be the drama?
Preferred lies all year round? Come on, we’re better than that
You can’t expect perfection every time for doing something passable. That’s all hitting a fairway is. It’s not a particular piece of brilliance. It’s not necessarily even a good shot.
It’s a result lots of us can achieve with a decent degree of consistency. If that’s the case, should we always be entitled to a flawless result?
Preferred lies are meant for when temporary conditions might interfere with fair play. They’re for prolonged rains and spring thaws. For muddy patches and icy spells. Not simply to satisfy a good swing.
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They’re supposed to help protect the course, not to be a comfort blanket. They’re meant to be the exception, not the rule.
So when I read some golfers say they should be ubiquitous, I say, ‘come on, we’re better than that’.
I know it feels unjust when we hit a good one and arrive to see our ball sitting down in a bad lie. But isn’t golf a test of temperament as much as it is a trial of technique?
If we make every fairway lie perfect, we lose what makes the game so addictive (at least for me, anyway): the triumph of overcoming a challenge.
We’d make our incredible, amazing and, yes, sometimes depressing and disheartening sport something it was never meant to be.
Boring.
Golf doesn’t always have to be fair. It just needs to be honest. That sometimes means taking the rough – along with the odd bad lie on the fairway – with the smooth.
Now have your say
What do you think? Are we going overboard in our search for a good lie? Or should a decent shot never receive a dodgy outcome? Let us know in the comments on tell us on X.
