[RoverRick]

Most of you probably do not watch the Euros golf tournaments, with their dry humorless announcers, but last week there were two incidents of balls moving after the player grounded his club.

The first happened on the 18th last group of the day, it was some dude I have never seen before or heard of, but he in the last group on Sat, and the last group on Sunday so he was doing pretty well. He grounds his club, takes another look at the flag and looks down and his ball is not centered on the club face. So he asks his caddie and playing partners, and camera man and anyone else around if they saw it move. Nope. No one saw it move. So he signs the card at the end of the round and goes to the hotel.
Sunday morning he shows up, tees off, and the rules official comes and says that the ball may have moved and they are going to review it and make a decission. As he walks off of the 4th green they pull him aside and inform him that indeed his ball had moved. He had signed the score card that was wrong and he had been eliminatedd from the tournament.

Later in the round, another guy Siem from Germany, is in the last group, on hole 15 or so, getting ready to chip, grounds his club and the ball moves a fraction of an inch. He gets a 1 stroke penalty giving the leader a two stroke lead and loses the match.

My question first question is, Do we really need this penalty?

Second question is Do you count that during your regular play?

[wdgolf]

I understand the purpose of the penalty because it is very hard to differentiate between the ball accidentally moving and someone giving it a push forward 3 feet when he "didn't meant to hit it". McIlroy lost Abu Dhabi because of a penalty and took it like a man. These guys are pros and should be more careful (IIRC, McIlroy also got a point for moving the ball at the last Open Championship).

But like the rule that spectators can't call in a fowl, it shouldn't be reasonable to DQ someone a day later, especially after he brought up the rule infraction when it happened, just add a point and call it a day.

[RoverRick]

Yeah, I debated with myself about that, much like the anchoring debate, where do you draw the line, but it seems very harsh. However, if the ball hangs on the lip, it is another stroke. The ruling on the DQ was that he should have had the officials look at the tape to see if the ball had moved. Of course, he had asked everybody around and no one saw it move. Even on the video, you do not see it move, but you can see that it had moved about a 1/4 inch. I guess you just develop a routine where you never ground you club and this is a non issue.

Mcilroy's penalty was different because he wiped some sand out his way so he could putt the ball. The problem was he was not on the green so that was illegal. He intensionally did something and knew better. He just did not think. In these other cases, they moved the ball in preparing to hit it.

But Poulter last year dropped his marker on the ball, and got a penalty.

I think my issue with these things are they are so trivial yet so costly.

[GolfSpy Matt]

I think the stroke penalty is ok, but I really dislike the DQ. Especially in the case that you outlined above, the guy did everything within reason (it seems) to check if the ball had moved. If you want to retroactively give him the penalty stroke, ok maybe, but the DQ seems over the top.

[ninjacobra]

i really thk they shd review this rule,n guy getting dq was overkill.

i feel as its a game of integrity as long as u didnt hv the intention of hitting it u shdnt be penalized this harshly