At the 2025 RBC Heritage, Justin Thomas was hit with a one-stroke penalty for accidentally moving his ball while trying to remove a loose impediment in a waste area on the second hole. It was a costly reminder that while you can remove loose impediments anywhere on the course including bunkers (that wasn’t always the case), you better be careful when doing it or you risk the same fate as Thomas.
Rule 15 covers what happens when your ball moves as a result of moving a loose impediment. The proper procedure is to replace the ball in its original location and take a penalty stroke under Rule 9.4b. Most golfers know this.
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But if you keep reading Rule 15, you’ll find out things aren’t so strict when it comes to accidentally causing your ball to move while removing an obstruction. There is a long list of man-made things that qualify as obstructions, including penalty-area stakes, sprinkler heads, golf carts, benches, ball washers—even golf equipment (belonging to anyone). Boundary objects, like OB stakes, are NOT obstructions. And it’s important to know the difference between an obstruction and a moveable obstruction.
To keep it simple, if it’s easy to move (like a rake), you should move it. If it’s not easy to move (like a cement bench), you take relief so your next shot is not intefered with.
Getting back to the question of what happens if your ball moves as a result of removing a rake or anything else that inteferes with your ball, stance or intended swing, the answer is, replace the ball and play on with no penalty. The replace-the-ball part is super important because if you didn’t do that, you would be penalized for playing from the wrong place (Rule 14.7). Even worse, it’s a two-stroke penalty or loss of hole in match play. Ouch.
In the case of the rake, you obviously can slide it out of the way. But you might wonder if your ball came to rest on a movable obstruction. For example, if your ball stopped on someone’s sandwich wrapper from the halfway house. When that happens, you can lift your ball, remove the wrapper and then replace your ball. But here’s the catch, and this also is important to remember: You have to drop your ball in this situation. Don’t place it.
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The drop area starts with the point directly under where the ball came to rest on the sandwich wrapper. You can drop in an area that is not nearer the hole and no farther away than a clublength from that point directly under the wrapper. You also have to drop in the same area of the course as the reference point. Meaning, if the wrapper was in a bunker, your drop would also have to be in that bunker.
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Incidentally, if this scenario were to happen on a putting green, you would place the ball and not drop it. Yep, sometimes the rules remain confusing.
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