The volunteers on the right side of TPC Sawgrass’ 13th hole? When what happened occurred, they said they saw it coming.
“I called it,” one said.
“I called it!”
Then there was the rules official. She’d never seen what befell Kevin Roy during Sunday’s final round of the Players Championship. Roy had asked her: “Have you ever seen this?” — and she said simply:
“Never.”
In the end, all of it cost Roy a stroke, and he bogeyed the hole on his way to finishing his round with a three-over 75 and a four-over total for the tournament. But what unfolded on 13 was curious, and video of it — which you can watch below — started to circulate on Sunday afternoon.
It started with Roy’s tee ball, which drifted right, bounced once — and disappeared into a smallish hole in a tree trunk. That excited the volunteers. Roy eventually learned his fate, then laughed when he told playing partner Eric Cole what had happened. “It’s in the hole,” Roy said. “It’s in.” Cole then hit his second shot, before walking over to have a look himself.
The official then arrived. The ruling? Roy took a one-stroke penalty for an unplayable lie, then fished into the trunk hole and retrieved his ball. The broadcast announcers were shocked at it all. “Come on,” one said. “That’s unbelievable.” another said.
From there, Roy hit onto the green, and he two-putted for bogey.
Notably, if the hole had been deemed an animal hole, he still wouldn’t have been given relief, and a recent story from GOLF’s rules guy addressed that. It read this way:
My golf buddies were playing a money game. One friend hits his second shot into a hole in the trunk of a large, living tree. His ball came to rest in a burrowing animal hole — likely mole or gopher — inside the trunk. He took a free drop correctly … but was it proper? Without the burrow, the ball was definitely not playable.
—Scott Bie, Sacramento, Calif.
Alas, your pal is going to want to crawl into a hole after reading this.
An animal hole that qualifies as an abnormal course condition — from which you get free relief — is defined as “any hole dug in the ground by an animal, except for holes dug by animals that are also defined as loose impediments (such as worms or insects).”
Those three little words, in the ground, did him in. He gets the general penalty (two strokes in stroke play or loss of hole in match play) under Rule 14.7 for playing from a wrong place since he wasn’t allowed to lift the ball in the first place and did not replace it as required by Rule 9.4b.
Had he called it unplayable to begin with, he could have escaped with just one penalty stroke. It’s all enough to make you want to smash your tree-iron. … Sorry, couldn’t resist. What? You expected a “gopher is a varmint” reference? Puh-lease.
