The game’s most significant changes in more than 60 years have just kicked in.
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After a six-year consultation process, a handful of new rules took effect from January 1 in an effort to speed up play and modernise the rules.
The number of regulations has fallen from 34 to 24, including:
- There is no penalty if you accidentally move your ball on the green, or move your marker. A player may just replace it where it was previously, and play on. A player can also fix anything on the green, including spike marks.
- You can ground your club in a hazard (provided you don’t use it to improve your position for the stroke). You can also move loose impediments without penalty.
- If you take a drop, either with a penalty or without, it is done from the knee, rather than the shoulder.
- You can putt with the flagstick in and there is no penalty if the ball strikes it.
“I think the rules changes are fantastic,” Wodonga Golf Club professional Gavin Vearing said.
“The idea is to speed up play and a lot of it is commonsense as well.
“The one with being able to putt with the flagstick in, I had a situation on Saturday with a long putt, I had to wait for one of the guys to get up there and hold the flag, where it was probably around 60 foot (18.28 metres) so the chance of getting it in the hole was pretty slim.”
Golf Australia’s director rules and handicapping, Simon Magdulski, said it wasn’t expected every player would know the new rules immediately.
“Our aspiration is that we get at least one player in every group on every golf course by January who is across the new rules,” he told Golf Australia’s website.
“But we hope that if one player knows the new rules and another player goes to take an incorrect drop or something like that, then he or she would point that out. And the next time that player sees someone else trying to take an incorrect drop, then they would in turn point that out.”
Magdulski said some of the new rules were quite simple.
“But players do need to know that they have to drop from knee-height or they’ll be penalised and the same for dropping in the correct relief area,’ he said.
In addition to these changes, some clubs are expected to take up a local rule which states that a player who hits a ball out of bounds can drop between the position it appears to have come to rest and the edge of the fairway (but no nearer the hole) with a two-shot penalty.
Looking for lost balls – the bane of any golfer – is also among the new changes with players now having three minutes to find it, as opposed to the previous five.
“Say if you’re teeing off the first hole and you can’t find the shot, instead of running back to the tee, you can actually drop it out on the edge of the fairway where you think it was lost for a two-shot penalty,” Vearing said.
However, Wodonga won’t implement that during club championships.
In an interesting aside, the term hazards are no longer and will now be called penalty areas.
“I don’t think penalty area is the best word because if you’re in the penalty area, you might be able to play out if it, that’s not really a penalty,” Vearing mused.
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