Duffers' Rules Far Too Lax

I joined the Duffers' Dream Tour earlier this year and for the most part, it has been very enjoyable. The scheduling of rounds and the variety of courses suits me perfectly. In addition, organization of the league is good and the fees are reasonable. The size of the field on the weekday tour is modest, but this is okay since everyone can tee off within an hour of each other. The only thing I don't particularly like about the league are the peculiar rules it seems to employ.

The latest round at Hidden Lake really highlighted this issue. Prior to this round, I was only aware of a couple major deviations from the rules on the Duffers' Dream Tour. For balls that go out of bounds, players are allowed to take a one stroke penalty and drop a ball within two club lengths of the point where the original ball went out of bounds. Under the Rules of Golf, players would normally have to take a one stroke penalty and play a ball from the same location where the original ball was struck. The Duffers' Dream Tour also caps individual hole scores at twice the value of par. Both of these rule deviations are designed to speed up play, which is a worthy goal. They were communicated to me at the beginning of the season, so I don't really have a problem with them.

At Hidden Lake however, I became aware of a new twist. Playing the sixteenth hole on the New Course, a short par-4, one of my playing partners hit his tee shot well right of the fairway into some long fescue and trees. He then declared that he was hitting a provisional ball, which travelled well left of the fairway into more long fescue. We searched for his original ball for some time, with no luck. At that point, he declared that he would drop a ball at "point of entry" and take a one stroke penalty. He claimed that the Duffers' Dream Tour treated fescue as a lateral hazard, thereby permitting him to do this. After dropping a ball, he hit his third shot just off the green. After a chip and a putt, he marked a five on his scorecard.

This is such an abomination of the Rules of Golf, that I thought there was no way it would stand up. We brought it up to the league organizer at the end of the round and, to my absolute amazement, he let it stand. What??? According to the Rules of Golf, the player should have been hitting his fifth shot from the tee, because neither of his first two tee shots could be found. Instead, he scored five for the whole hole. That is a gift of at least three strokes, maybe more if he continued to struggle off the tee. To make matters worse, the same player used the same loophole to save strokes on another hole too. I'm sorry, but when you deviate this far from the rules, you are no longer playing golf, just a poor facsimile of it.

Even if you treat fescue as a lateral hazard (it's so ridiculous I feel silly saying it) then the player should have dropped where his second ball entered the fescue, because he declared that ball a provisional. The only way you can ignore a provisional ball is if you find the original. In this case, the player did not find the original, so he would have been laying four after his drop.

All of this was particularly annoying for two reasons. First of all, I had played five and a half rounds on the Duffers' Dream Tour without being told of this deviation from the rules. Had I known, I could have saved a few strokes myself along the way. Worse yet, at a previous round, I was denied relief from a cart path on a very harsh call. My tee shot landed in long fescue just right of the cart path. In addressing the ball, my feet were on the cart path, so I was allowed to drop the ball at the closest point of relief, no closer to the hole, with no penalty. In my estimation, the closest point of relief was the fairly tame rough on the opposite side of the cart path, but my partners insisted that the closest point of relief was backwards on the same side of the path where the fescue lay. It was extremely close and we probably needed a tape measure to settle it, but just to avoid the hassle, I played the ball where it lay. The point is, they were extremely picky in that situation. How then, do you explain the extremely lax attitude toward the situation at Hidden Lake?

In another bizarre decision, players at Hidden Lake were allowed to lift, clean, and place their balls through the green. Lift, clean, and place is allowed sometimes when a course is particularly soggy after heavy rainfall. We did have rain the day before, but the course was sufficiently dry that this was not necessary at all. In fact, it wasn't even necessary the day it actually rained. I know because I played the very same course on that day as part of the Deepwoods Tour. The kicker is that the Duffers' Dream Tour allowed players to lift, clean, and place anywhere on the course - even the rough! I have never seen this anywhere. It allows players who bury a ball in the rough to clean it off and prop it up nicely on the grass. Way too lax, is all I can say.

Bizarre rules aside, I had a pretty good round. My driving was still no good, as I was pulling everything off the tee left of target. However, my irons were decent, as was my putting.

Score: 93
Par: 71
Putts: 38
Fairways: 2
Greens: 7