Yeah, one of my favorite topics. Bunkers are a special place on the golf course with special rules and demands the player play a different set of shots. Which leads me to a story.
Two of my teammates went out to play in last week’s league matches. On the 4th hole one of them approaches the green ends up with a fried egg in the bunker. The bunker had recently been raked nicely and as any of you know who have ended up in one of the renovated bunkers, the sand is loose and fluffy. They’re both pretty familiar with the rules of golf, and they would both know how to play out of bunker under USGA rules.
REGL has their own set of rules for bunker play that are definitely not in the spirit of what we’ll talk about in this blog entry. And of course, those rules were adopted two years ago, and a lot of the REGL local rules change from time to time, so my guys weren’t exactly sure whether they still had the option to rake and place (they did). However, our player agrees with me that the rake and place is an absolute disgraceful policy (especially with the renovated bunkers) and went ahead and got out of the bunker from his fried egg lie, ending up in the grass area between the top lip of the bunker and the fringe of the green, and in an absolutely horrid lie. Double bogey and loss of hole. Respectability intact.
I continue to object to the mere presence of a local rule for bunker play that allows players to draw preferred lies in any bunker. Do I like playing from a fried egg? No, I do not, but difficult lies are a part of the game. Do I like playing out of the back of a shoe print? No, I hate that, and I have a special set of words that I reserve for (people) that play from a bunker and don’t clean up their mess. However, I take my lumps and make the best of it. Do I like playing off of a hard bunker with no sand under the ball? No, but I put the ball there on my previous shot. If you’d rather not play from a bunker at all, I can tell you that there are rules already in the rule book to take your ball out of a bunker for your next shot (you may not like adding 2 strokes to your score, but you don’t have to play out of bunkers if that’s not something you’re comfortable with). The reason given for the need for a local REGL rule for bunkers was that the course does not maintain them (I don’t believe this is currently true), and the sand is poor (I don’t think this is currently true either for a majority of the bunkers at Ruggles - #3 being a notable exception).
Sorry for the soliloquy on the REGL local rule for bunker play, I'll get back to what's in the Rules of Golf addressing bunkers - Rule 12.
The first part of the rule addresses whether you are or aren’t in a bunker. If any part of your ball touches any part of the bunker inside the edge of the bunker, you’re in the bunker. You then have to abide by the special rules that apply to making a shot from the bunker. Even if you’re ball comes to rest on top of a leaf (a loose impediment) inside the bunker, you’re in the bunker. If your ball comes to rest on an area of the bunker that was washed away and they’re no longer any sand there, you’re still in the bunker. However, there are circular bunkers with patches of grass growing within them. If your ball ends up on these grassy areas without touching sand, you’re not in the bunker and can play the ball as if it were in the general area of the course.
Segue here..
You’re Victor Hovland, in the final group of this year’s PGA Championship playing alongside Brooks Keopka. Down one, you tee off on the 16th hole and your ball finds a fairway bunker. 170 yards to the green, you try to play a middle iron out of the bunker. Ball flights now and embeds just above the edge of the bunker. According to the 2019 rules of golf, an embedded ball in the general area of the course can be granted free relief, but that also means that the ball must be played from the general area after taking that relief within 1 club length of the point where the ball was embedded. Victor took his drop in the tall grass above the bunker, but the stuff was nasty thick and the slope was brutal. Double bogey and Brooks cruised to the win.
Another option available to Victor (and one he probably should have considered) would have been to declare the embedded ball as unplayable (1 stroke penalty), and he could have played his next shot from the same spot in the bunker as the previous stroke (not the best choice since he just thinned one into the bank), he could have dropped within 2 club lengths of the embedded ball (that might have got him onto the fairway…), OR he could have drawn an imaginary line from hole through ball and gone back on that line as far as he wanted to drop his ball (maybe also in the fairway?). If he ends up playing from the fairway, put the ball on the green and makes a putt, he ends up with a bogey on the hole (drive, shot from the bunker, penalty, shot from the fairway, putt).
Oddly enough, there was a similar (but not the same!) situation on Saturday. Corey Conners was leading going into 16 and hit his approach from the bunker low and (instead of embedding above the bunker) embedded in the face of the bunker. There is no free relief for an embedded ball in a bunker, and Corey had to declare his ball unplayable in the bunker. Did he have the same three options for unplayable relief? No, not really. He could have replayed the shot, could have dropped within 2 club lengths of the point of embedding (still in the bunker), but he could not go back on the line and play the ball from outside the bunker UNLESS he paid another penalty stroke (2 will get you out of any bunker). I believe he played his 4th from the bunker and never recovered the lead.
Before I wrap up the first discussion on Rule 12, it occurs to me that there is another famous story regarding “being in a bunker” that was illustrated well in the 2010 PGA Championship. Dustin Johnson was in contention if I remember correctly. Played a shot on Sunday at his final hole and incurred a 2-stroke penalty. The crime? For that PGA, since there were so many areas of the course that were sandy and “bunkerlike”, that there was a local rule that said to assume that if your ball was on sand, you were in a bunker and could not ground your club. There were 1021 “bunkers” at Whistling Straits in 2015, and Dustin failed to recognize that the beaten-up area the spectators had trampled for 4 days of play was one of them. Martin Kaymer went on to win in 2010.