Pro golfers rarely lose a ball. They’re pros after all. Oh, and they have several thousand onlookers to help them locate an errant tee shot, not to mention all kinds of television cameras, a blimp, caddies, course marshals and volunteers trying to help them locate the ball.
I’ve got my friend Jack. Jack finds . . . maybe 1 in 10 lost balls.
The great thing about golf is that the average golfer and the pro golfer play the same exact rules and suffer the same penalties. If a pro golfer loses a ball, they have to go back to where they last hit and hit the ball again while adding an extra stroke to their score. Just like me.
Only difference is I have Jack and they have, quite literally, thousands of eyes looking for their ball. This just isn’t fair anyway you look at it. Having everyone in the world at a pro golf tournament helping a golfer find a ball is cheating.
Of course it’s not practical to think that thousands of people on a golf course should make a pro golfer look for a lost ball alone. It would look kind of silly to have everyone trying to act like they don’t know where the ball is. Inevitably, you’d have somebody yelling, “You’re getting hot, Tiger . . . no, no cold - cold, other way!”
Since it’s not practical to change the rule when there is a gallery, there should be a “no gallery” rule created. This is what pretty much every average golfer does anyway when they lose a ball and they don’t have an ESPN camera crew pointing them in the right direction. The normal golfer turns to his partner and asks, “What do you think?” the other golfer should always say, “I don’t know. Just drop one and let’s get out of here.”
That’s the “no gallery” rule. No gallery of thousands of people? Don’t waste time on a lost ball. Don’t waste time going all the way back to where you last hit the ball. Don’t slow down play for the other hackers out there. Just drop a new ball, take a penalty and get on with it.
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