Rules of the Game

In countries around the world, aiming a 1.68-inch-diameter ball at a four-and-a-quarter-inch-diameter hole is a sacred ritual that millions practice each Sabbath. As in other religions, golf embodies high ideals—play the ball as it lies, play the course as it's found, do what's fair—and exhorts adherents to enter not into temptation. Of interest to theologians, moral philosophers and students of human nature, perhaps even to those trying to cure their slice or improve their putting, is a peculiar moral imperative: Golf demands self-inflicted punishment for transgressions of its rules.

Such rules require, at the very least, Talmudic scrutiny. One's ball may come to rest in a bunker against a half-eaten pear (with no pear trees in the vicinity) or manage to stick in an orange that has obviously dropped from the tree above. Can the player obtain relief, move the ball without penalty? Or the player's drive may slice from the tee back into the clubhouse. Naturally, he'll wish to know whether he can open a window and play his second shot out of the locker room.

The conscientious golfer will equip himself with the 1988 edition of Decisions on the Rules of Golf, a 450-page paperback that fits neatly into any golf bag. For those who dare to tee off with something a bit more condensed, there's the 136-page pamphlet. Unwieldy? Hardly. These publications represent nothing less than a major effort to enumerate and explain the Rules (upper-case R). Before a major 1984 revision, golfers had to contend with a two-volume 900-page affair, about as accessible as the minutes of the Roman Curia. That becomes all the more poignant when you realize there are only 34 rules.

The Rules emanate from the font of wisdom and the ultimate authority of the game, the United States Golf Association, whose stately Georgian Golf House is located in Far Hills, New Jersey. There, the Rules of Golf Committee thrashes out decisions that weigh upon every golfer who's tempted by what Frank Hannigan, senior executive director of the U.S.G.A., terms "the national inclination to nudge the ball to a better lie."

Hannigan, an affable man who, with Tom Watson, wrote The New Rules of Golf and whose Labrador retriever shares his office, claims that the system for decision making is "surprisingly democratic," with a 12-member committee deciding on questions referred by amateurs and professionals. With five members from the U.S.G.A. board and seven consulting members, including representatives of the P.G.A., the P.G.A. Tour and the L.P.G.A. and "distinguished elders," the Committee's (with a capital C) decisions become precedent for the sport, akin to law in the nongolfing world. Major tournaments have been decided on arcane questions that percolate through the system, as Craig Stadler discovered at the 1987 Andy Williams Open. He knelt on a towel to hit a shot from under low-hanging branches and was disqualified for turning in an incorrect score as a result of unknowingly "building a stance." The rule had been decided upon just two weeks earlier to resolve a question raised in the 1982 N.C.A.A. championship tournament. Stadler's infraction would probably have gone unnoticed (he knew nothing of the rule), except that someone Hannigan describes as a "Rules of Golf nut" had spotted it on a video replay.

Just how high a stance does the thickness of a towel afford, anyway?

"That question irritated a lot of people, because the circumstances seemed so remote," Hannigan admits. Alas, somebody must make the Rules, so the Committee eventually "throws up its hands and puts things to a vote."

"On some of these goddamn decisions, no answer is going to make any sense," says Hannigan. "What's really important is that you have answers and that people accept the answers."

But back to the course. If golfers have trouble accepting dirty trousers, they can accept a penalty. If they spread a towel when no one is looking, they will, of course, inflict that penalty upon themselves. The Committee has also judged the half-eaten pear in the bunker to be forbidden fruit; it is a natural object and a player may not move it. The fact that there was a bite in the pear and no tree in the neighborhood did not sway the members into granting it the status of an obstruction and therefore providing relief to the golfer. The golfer whose ball became embedded in the orange was offered the option of "playing it as it lies" or declaring it unplayable and suffering a penalty stroke.

"Critics would accuse us of having a tortured set of rules," says Hannigan. "But don't forget the nature of the game and the nature of the playing field. You're talking 125 or 150 acres out there and balls bounce and rest in screwy little places. This is not like a tennis court."

Of course, golf does demand creative play, the ability to invent a shot. Top money winner Tom Watson offers an illustration: "You have to think out a problem when you don't have a swing for it. Your ball may be up against a fence and you can't swing right-handed. You may have to play it out left-handed with your putter."

On the other hand, the Rules forbid certain options that some may construe as creative. If the ball lies on a discarded newspaper, it is not permissible to burn the newspaper and create a better lie. The golfer whose drive landed back in the locker room may, however, open the window and attempt to hit it out onto the fairway. He should be wary of kneeling or standing on any towels, though.

The U.S.G.A.'s goal is to achieve universal acceptance of the Rules, and success depends on, well, universal acceptance. The U.S.G.A. is an amateur body and its enforcement of the Rules extends only to the 13 tournaments it sponsors each year. (The most famous of these, the U.S. Open, will be held this year at The Country Club in Brookline, Massachusetts, June 16 through 19.) However, the U.S.G.A.'s moral authority extends from the idyllic hilltop in New Jersey over courses in the United States, Mexico and the Philippines. The rest of the world's golfers defer to the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews, Scotland. Just how that demarcation was established is lost in history. Perhaps it had something to do with the advance of the British Empire. What is clear is that as golfers ventured forth from the original St. Andrews links, the Rules had to adapt to new terrain and new ecology. To wit:

Balls encountered anthills (the anthill may be removed without penalty; if it is home to fire ants, however, the player may take relief) or came to rest in bunkers alongside the remains of dead land crabs (the deadscrab, as a natural object, may not be shifted). During the 1987 Women's Mid-Amateur Championship, the Committee afforded relief to the player whose ball came to rest against a dead squirrel, which, though a natural object, was feared to carry disease.

Over the years, the U.S.G.A. and the Royal and Ancient have become quite chummy about the entire Rules process. Their joint negotiating committees meet regularly and at four-year intervals issue revised rules for the game. The Rules will become uniform throughout the world in 1990. Until then, the one remaining difference is small but basic: the size of the ball. Americans tee off with a 1.68-inch ball; Brits may hit the smaller 1.62. And in a generous departure from Anglo-Saxon tradition, motivated, no doubt, by their responsibility to the entire world, the bodies began issuing metric measurements in 1984.

Transatlantic harmony reigns on such matters as the troubling ice question. If a ball lands in a pile of ice cubes, as distinct from one that comes to rest in a clump of ice caused by the climate, what are the golfer's options? The former impediment is considered "manufactured" and therefore an "obstruction" that may be moved without penalty. Prior to the Rules' revisions in January of this year, ice cubes were considered either "loose impediments" or "casual water." Casual water wouldn't have required a penalty stroke; the player could simply have moved the ball a club length away. However, if the player had chosen the loose-impediment option and had inadvertently moved the ball while clearing away the ice, he would have been penalized a stroke.

Of course, actually getting a ruling poses other problems. If a foursome in a quandary queries the club pro or the local governing body, called the Committee, and the question cannot immediately be resolved by a reading of the Rules (which the local governing body has no power to waive), the U.S.G.A. stands ready, if not necessarily eager.

"You should be around this place on a spring Monday morning," bemoans Hannigan. U.S.G.A. staffers have long recognized the voice of "that pro from California" on the line. And there was the Japanese gentleman who repeatedly submitted exotic circumstances in overly polite letters composed in fractured English. When politely reminded that Asia, with the exception of the Philippines, lay within the sphere of the Royal and Ancient rules, he responded by showering the U.S.G.A. staff with gifts of small electronics.

Lest the Rules of Golf Committee be accused of being a crotchety body (one member, a leading attorney, once asked that a petitioner withdraw a question rather than subject the Committee to the pain of deliberating it), Hannigan insists it is capable of "bursts of humanity." It once ruled a rattlesnake an "outside agency" and didn't penalize a player for moving her ball outside fang range. The golfer's partner had insisted she play the ball where it lay and had graciously volunteered to ward off any attack. The eventual ruling clarified language that had dealt with only worms and insects and had made no mention of a possible life-threatening situation. A worm poking out of the ground may be removed without penalty, by the way. Environmentally concerned golfers whose drives land in birds' nests may also move the ball without penalty, a gesture perhaps to endangered avian species.

In addition to its environmental awareness, the U.S.G.A. was one of the earliest converts to arms control. A 1938 rule limits a player to 14 clubs; at the time, some pros were buiding arsenals of as many as 25 per bag. Nevertheless, golfers have encouraged weapons development—sorely testing the patience, if not the moral authority, of the U.S.G.A. The precise design standards for balls and clubs are determined at the U.S.G.A. laboratory at Far Hills, a place packed with instruments, a wind tunnel and a mechanical golfer dubbed Iron Byron (its swing is patterned after that of legendary pro Byron Nelson), which hits shots out onto an instrumented test rangs. A legal ball, for instance, may fly and roll no farther than 297 yards when hit by Iron Byron. Real live golfers, of course, are permitted to milk all the distance they can out of the ball. The building is a favorite of cameratoting Japanese golfers; the guest book is filled with Oriental calligraphy.

"We scientifically address the issue of performance characteristics," says Dr. Ronald E. Philipp, who manages the research-and-test center. "And we go about it in a rigorous manner." Dr. Philipp uses both hands to set a huge binder on a conference table. The several hundred pages contain the data gathered in the U.S.G.A.'s third groove study, completed just this past January. For those who have been consumed by the Iran/Contra affair or the Presidential primaries or who maybe don't play the game, the groove question has been golf's major controversy of recent times. U- or box-shaped grooves on club faces have become more popular ever since the V-shaped-groove requirement was eliminated in 1984. U.S.G.A. specifications require that the minimum distance between grooves be at least three times the width of the grooves themselves. If the grooves were closer together on the club face, players presumably would be able to put more spin on the ball and vastly lower their scores.

Karsten Solheim's Ping Eye 2 clubs do not meet the U.S.G.A.'s specifications. But more of the maverick designer's clubs have been sold than any other manufacturer's in recent years: Solheim's corporation sells 500,000 sets in 66 countries each year.

Hannigan offers the U.S.G.A.'s position: "Manufacturers are invited to submit samples to us when there's any doubt as to their meeting standards. In this case, the clubs were produced and sold before we even knew about them."

Hannigan admits that the U.S.G.A. was a bit slow off the tee with its ruling. While club-face standards were set in 1984, an exact engineering method for implementing them was not specified until 1987. The Ping clubs still do not meet the U.S.G.A.'s requirements.

To resolve the groove question, the U.S.G.A. conducted studies. According to test-center manager Philipp, "We did 30,000 hits with balls fired by an air gun against 60 club-face plates of various groove arrangements. These were correlated with Iron Byron hits at three club lofts."

The lab even grew its own grass to mount on the club faces to emulate fairway and rough conditions. The result, says Philipp: "On 'grassy hits' there was a direct correlation between the amount of space between grooves and spin rate."

Not that the average golfer would notice. According to Hannigan, variations in performance are hardly measurable in everyday golf. But there is a different perception among another class of golfers.

"Tour players are paranoiac," Hannigan insists. "They see things that are not really there. There are some amazing intellects on the pro tour who really feel (concluded on page 134)Rules of the Game(continued from page 110) that God put them on earth to win and if they don't, then something is wrong."

Hannigan notes that pros will often blame their equipment for high scores—or insist that the competition has discovered a magic club. Nevertheless, the U.S.G.A. will prohibit Ping clubs in its own 13 events at the end of 1989. Other golfers who feel magic in their Pings will be able to enjoy them until 1996, when the clubs will be prohibited from all play. After that date, a golfer may presumably take them out on a course, but the U.S.G.A. imperative becomes a moral imperative, and to paraphrase a Watergate tape, "It could be done, but it would be wrong."

And how about dimples? An organization that is capable of differentiating worms from burrowing animals (and pronouncing that one's own saliva is "foreign material" when applied to a club face) has not, oddly, ever debated how many little depressions there should be on the surface of a golf ball. Although dimple arrangements dramatically affect flight, as long as balls meet U.S.G.A. standards for weight, symmetry, initial velocity and distance, those balls will be approved for play.

Several years ago, a pair of entrepreneurs challenged the status quo by developing a ball with different aerodynamic characteristics. It was self-correcting.

The U.S.G.A. promptly prohibited the ball from play by all the power not really vested in it. The developers immediately brought suit against the U.S.G.A. for conspiring against them with golf-ball manufacturers.

After a protracted court battle, the U.S.G.A. settled with the complainants. But the Rules had survived.

The Rules are not puritanical. If the U.S.G.A. finds high-tech balls abhorrent, it tolerates betting with little trouble. Rules on amateur status include a section on wagering, which does specify a few conditions. Players may bet only on themselves or on teammates, put up all moneys themselves and never forget that "the primary purpose is the playing of the game for enjoyment."

Courtesy is paramount, but beware: A golfer who advises an opponent about which club will carry that bunker or water hazard may be surprised that it's strictly against the Rules. And if a golfer graciously lends an opponent a club to replace one damaged in the course of normal play, unfortunately, he cannot have it back for the duration of the round.

Make no mistake about it—those are not esoteric quibbles whose implications stop at the fairway. The golfer who's sorely tempted to nudge the ball to a better lie should never forget how the Rules bear on the rest of his life. As Tom Watson says, "If you kick a ball out of a bad lie, you may cheat at other things, too. Could be the IRS. Or your wife."

Q. If your ball lands on a newspaper, can you burn it to improve your lie?

Q. Can you move a dead land crab? A live rattlesnake?