A Waltz with the Rules
Exploring the game we love through the Rules we love to hate
By: Shane René • Administrator of Media & Communications
In my role with the Idaho Golf Association, I’m tasked with telling stories. Who we are, what we do, why we matter, and how you, the golfer with a day job, have a home in our ecosystem. At championships, I’m the guy in the trees with a camera and a golf cart, inevitably summoned by players to answer the game’s most prickly questions.
“Do I get relief here?” they ask, pointing at their ball as they notice the camera around my neck and the nervousness behind my eyes. “Can you call someone who does know?”
As the resident propagandist for USGA Rules in my casual, Sunday foursome — and as a player with my fair share of tournament experience — I often know the answer to their query. But I save my fast and loose interpretation of the Rules for friends and weekend frenemies.
“Uh, yes, I think so,” I’ll stutter back, reaching for my radio to contact a more able mind for The Rules. “But let’s make sure before you move it.”
By policy, I do not hand out rulings at state championships. We deploy a cast of expert volunteers to assist players on the Rules when it matters most. So I always try to hang around to watch our officials engage with rulings, eager to absorb more of the nuances that govern our game.
But as fruitful as those lessons can be, I couldn’t resist the feeling that I was long overdue for a more formal waltz with the Rule book. And my experience with the Rules thus far — both live on the course and through ill-fated attempts to wrestle its pages — has made clear that I was going to need some stewards to guide me toward the light (if there is one).
The PNGA’s six-week course on the Rules of Golf seemed like an obvious place to start. Designed to prepare folks for the USGA’s 80-question Advanced Certification exam, experts from across the PNGA network walk you through every inch of every rule, from the principles they aim to support to the procedures that protect them. And it didn’t take long for me to start to wonder: is there is a rule book for any game more foreign to it’s most avid participants than the Rules of Golf?
In his largely unknown and delightfully wonky book “The Principles Behind The Rules of Golf,” Richard Tufts, in 1960, opens his introduction with this very observation.
“It is indeed unfortunate that in a game as fascinating as golf, an appreciation of the Rules under which the game is played should be the exception rather than the order,” he writes.
Sixty-five years later, if you followed a random foursome on a random Sunday at a random public golf course, observing some violation of the Rules is a certainty. Even the most honest golfers are prone to posting suspect scores. I’d even venture to guess that you’re more likely to find the average golfer annoyed by an adherence to the Rules than you are to find one objecting to their circumvention. How much can we blame the weekend warrior when The Rules seem so poised to spoil a good walk?
Russ Peterson, who remains the heart of the IGA’s local authority on the Rule’s of Golf (read more on Russ here), refers to this sensibility as “playing at golf.” The Rules, as he and many others see it, define the game. Once you withdraw the Rules of Golf from the game you’re playing, the game, in some sense, ceases to be “golf.”
I, for one, am completely wooed by the latter perspective. Playing “Rules Nazi,” is not my style, but the at-times-punishing nuances of The Rules establish much of what I find so intoxicating about the game. Lacing my ball down the fairway and anxiously chasing after it to discover “the course as I find it and my ball as it lies” — not as I expect to find it and deserve it to lie — is part of what makes golf the most reliable way to keep me off my phone for more than four-consecutive hours. Over coming that tension yields a colossal hit of dopamine.
But as strongly as I believe the Rules empower the game, it’s a hard book to sell to new golfers. The density of the Rules, I’ve come to find, is rivaled only by it’s lack of moisture. Each rule is drier and chewier than the one before; they are repetitive and irksome long before they add strokes to your score. And golfers seem to have plenty of fun without them. Asking people to digest the Rules before they play is like asking Game of Thrones fans to read the complete works of George R.R. Martin before logging into HBO.
Golf, especially today, is full of these tensions. The same equipment that makes the game easier for newbies has distorted the scale and challenge for elite players. Shirtless, music-blasting golfers are disruptive, but their money is good for golf courses. We all agree that golf is best played in beautiful places, but beautiful places are probably best without bunkers and bent grass. We like to say that golf is for everyone, but most of its cathedrals are private.
Negotiating these tensions is a key part of what I do as a “storyteller” for one of golf’s long-standing institutions. And seeking to enrich my understanding of the Rules feels like a step I should have taken some time ago. But I hope to use that education to create more resources for golfers in Idaho to understand the Rules and share that understanding with the people they play alongside.