Golf’s rule book has a way of surfacing at the strangest moments. This time, it was a throwback clip that did it. The DP World Tour posted archival footage this week, captioned “the worst plugged lie you’ll ever see.” It revisited Pablo Larrazábal’s ball buried deep inside a greenside bunker during a stop at the Made in Denmark tournament. And PGA Tour winner Michael Kim did not just watch the clip and move on.
“I find it so stupid that you need two penalty shots for taking an unplayable to get out of a bunker,”Kim wrote, quote-tweeting the DP World Tour post.
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The discussion surrounding the bunker shot itself dates back to Pablo Larrazábal’s third shot on the par-5 11th during the Made in Denmark tournament in 2019. His ball was plugged so deep in a greenside bunker and right along the edge that even the commentators openly questioned whether he should have just declared it unplayable.
Instead, Pablo Larrazábal played it as it lay, taking a stance with his one leg on the sand and one leg on the edge of the hill’s grass, and moved the ball only a few inches with a mighty swing. Then he needed a fifth shot to escape before missing his putt for a double bogey.
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Kim gave a clear explanation of why the USGA rule bothered him.
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“I find it stupid because a two-stroke penalty is mostly reserved for breaking rules, teeing off in front of the tee markers, or playing the roll ball. One stroke is mostly for hitting it in the wrong place, like penalty areas or OB. I take one penalty and then get out of the penalty area. But not for bunkers. I have to drop it in the same general area and put myself into a half-fried egg lie.”
That is a fair description of how Rule 19.3 works. A player whose ball is unplayable in a bunker gets three relief options for a single-stroke penalty. But two out of those three require the ball to stay in the bunker, meaning a bad lie can simply become another bad lie. The only way to guarantee a clean escape out of the sand, aside from replaying the previous shot, is the back-on-the-line relief option introduced in 2019. And that costs a two-stroke penalty total instead of one.
The USGA and R&A have defended the extra stroke as the price for extra relief being granted since it lets a player who otherwise would simply pick up and go rather than face disqualification.
That said, Kim isn’t the first player to call out the USGA on one of their rules. Pablo Larrazábal once urged the R&A to reconsider relief for balls landing in other players’ divots, calling it a matter of luck rather than skill.
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The post ‘I Find It So Stupid’: PGA Tour Star Takes Blunt Stand Against USGA’s Controversial Penalty Rule appeared first on EssentiallySports. Add EssentiallySports as a Preferred Source by clicking here.
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