Shivas's cheater line

[JESII]

Ted,
What exactly is the point of disallowing the use of your own equipment (which is being used on that shot) to improve your chances of a successful shot?

Why is it substantially different than telling someone they are not allowed to intentionall line up their feet square to the target?

Sully, you keep calling it equipment, but it's not equipment anymore once you pick up your marker.  It's the sacrosanct ball in play.  

And that's the rub right there. Once the ball is no longer "equipment" (ie: you have lifted your marker and the ball is "cheater-line" ready) I don't have my hands on it anyway so I am clearly not "placing a mark to indicate a line for putting"...the mark is already there, just as if you just stumbled onto the green and it was aligned perfectly.

Sure, you're idea to disallow lifting the ball at all may well slove the great portion of that issue. Are you now going in that direction? To disallow lifting the ball for any reason?

[John_Cullum]

And that's the rub right there. Once the ball is no longer "equipment" (ie: you have lifted your marker and the ball is "cheater-line" ready) I don't have my hands on it anyway so I am clearly not "placing a mark to indicate a line for putting"...the mark is already there, just as if you just stumbled onto the green and it was aligned perfectly.

That is a very interesting technical point

[JESII]

Why thank you very much...



Anyone have a clue as to the reasoning behind allowing players to mark their ball on the green and lift it in 1952?

[TEPaul]

"TE
for what it's worth, I think that's a very good point. It hints at the many potential "unintended consequences" that the rulemakers have to try to factor in and consider in making/changing the rules. To me it also implicitely gets to the heart of this discussion/debate."

Peter:

I agree with you, indeed it does get to the heart of this debate.

For instance, I believe I'm safe in saying that the stymie itself was never something that somebody just dreamed up as an interesting thing to do in golf or to insert into the Rules at some point over golf's history.

The stymie was merely the age old result of the fact that one of the great principles of golf was you put your ball in play on the tee and you didn't touch it until you removed it from the hole.

So for years the stymie was just something of an unintended byproduct of one of the two great principles in golf.

The fact that it became considered something of an unattractive "defensive" mechanism between players and their golf balls was what finally killed it, I think. Golf, in my opinion, never actually contemplated that there should be some defense mechanism between players in the context of their golf balls. So the stymie and the removal of it is probably a pretty good example of how the weakening of one of the great principles in golf's Rules was a good thing in the end.  

Futhermore, the way the Rules dealt with a match play player's ability to lift his ball on the putting green from the 1950s until the 1990s is an interesting evolution in and of itself which took those decades to get to the point of how the Rules deal with lifting on the putting green now.

For instance, the last vestige of the stymie did not come out of the Rules of Golf until the last decade or so when the player no longer had any control over his opponent's ball if it was closer to the hole. Today a player in match play can mark and lift his ball on his own at any time.

[John_Cullum]

Shivas

How's this for a middle ground (I really hate the middle ground, Ilike extremes):

Handle it just like they do with lift clean and place. You get one shot at replacing the ball on the green. Once it's down and you have let go of it, it's in play and you can't lift it again.

There would be nothing worse for some anal retentive cheater to have misaligned his ball by just a fraction. So the cheather would have to give up the practice and learn to play without aligning it.

[TEPaul]

"Anyone have a clue as to the reasoning behind allowing players to mark their ball on the green and lift it in 1952?"  
 
Sully:

Yes, I just went through all that this morning. It was the result of the abolition of the Stymie in 1951.

You should also all realize that under the Rules of Golf a golf ball is technically replaced when it has been put back on the green in the same spot from which it was lifted. Technically the removal of a ball marker does not constitute the act of replacement.

It seems to me there may be a ton of golfers including a number of Tour players who aren't aware of this technicality. They seem to think that the act of removal of one's ball marker completes the act of replacement.  

[JohnV]

Bryan,
You can do anything you want so long as it doesn't violate Rule 6-7.  There is no need to specify that in any rule.

If a group is on the clock, the time a player spends re-marking his ball is counting towards his time he has to play a shot so he better get on with it.

I'm sorry John, but that's lowest-common-denominator thinking that is the reason the game is so slow in the first place.  Nobody gets penalized unless they're on the clock, and you can't get put on the clock unless you're borderline comatose out there.  

Dave,

I agree that there needs to be more enforcement of pace of play.  The USGA has done a good job of doing that at their amateur championships.  The new policies were great last year at getting players to speed up and the ones that didn't get penalized.  Hopefully similar changes will happen on the pro level someday.

Unfortunately the way the game is played today it will always be slow on the pro tour.  Unless the PGA Tour shrinks the size of the fields so that there is some room to move on Thursday and Friday there really isn't much point in enforcing pace of play too tightly.  All they really care about is making the turn with the morning wave so that the afternoon tee times go as scheduled.

On the weekends they could do more to speed things along, but usually they've got it all figured out to just fit in the TV window so they don't have the incentive to do so.  If the event is to finish at 6 on the East Coast, they would either have to start them much later or risk finishing at 5:20 and leaving CBS with 40 minutes of dead air.

Reality sucks.

[TEPaul]

John Cullum:

Interesting you say that about giving players one shot at lifting, cleaning and replacing. I don't think that's ever been contemplated as a requirement.

I had a pretty long running proposal in with the USGA asking them to consider putting clearer language into the Rules about when players could continuously putt and when they couldn't.

Most of the correspondence on that proposal was with PJ Boatright. He said although it was a technical violation of the Rules it was condoned by the Rules because it speeded up play.

But he did tell me something that I found very curious. He said that once a player marked and lifted his ball he had given up the option of putting out. I'm not sure why he said that at that point since for a number of years he as well as everyone else had been watching players lift and clean there ball, replace it and putt out of turn anyway.

[TEPaul]

JohnV:

Personally, I don't think the USGA has all that much responsibility to try to enforce pace of play through their Rules of Golf in anything other than their tournaments.

Shivas seems to want to create a R&A/USGA Rules of Golf mechanism so that players can penalize each other perhaps even in recreational golf.  

If one thinks about it that is not only completely impractical, it's a hugely ridiculous thing to propose trying to do through the actual R&A/USGA Rules of Golf.

That kind of thing on a recreational level falls into the area of etiquette in golf on which the R&A/USGA merely make a few recommendations.

One thing the USGA is not and is not supposed to be is some National Association of Pace of Play traffic cops for recreational golfers either through the USGA/R&A Rules of Golf or otherwise.  

[Phil McDade]

Does anyone remember how Betsy King used to line up her putts?

She would stand behind the ball and line the putter up exactly where she wanted to hit it and then move around to the side and putt.

Given that there was a line on her putter, didn't she do the same thing as lining up a mark on the ball?

So, if you want to ban lines on the ball being used, I think you also have to ban all markings on top of the club.

The Rules-makers apparently feel at this time that attempting to regulate a Rule written like that is not practical.

It is either that or they don't think it is so important that a "discussion" of it should become the most replied to topic in GCA history.

John:

Somewhere deep in this thread's past, the Betsy King example was brought up. Not to speak for Shivas, but he has in the past utilized the rules' specific exemption for markings on clubs as defense for having them on a putter. His argument with the cheater line is that there is no exemption, or no specific language, that talks about allowing a line on a ball. He relies on the "anywhere" language in rule 8 to argue that would include a cheater line on the ball.

I'm guessing he wouldn't oppose the Betsy King alignment procedure (absent specific language banning the practice, ala croquet-style putting), as long as she didn't have a line on her ball indicating the line of the putt.

[TEPaul]

"John:
        Somewhere deep in this thread's past, the Betsy King example was brought up. Not to speak for Shivas, but he has in the past utilized the rules' specific exemption for markings on clubs as defense for having them on a putter. His argument with the cheater line is that there is no exemption, or no specific language, that talks about allowing a line on a ball. He relies on the "anywhere" language in rule 8 to argue that would include a cheater line on the ball.
        I'm guessing he wouldn't oppose the Betsy King alignment procedure (absent specific language banning the practice, ala croquet-style putting), as long as she didn't have a line on her ball indicating the line of the putt."

Phil:

The point here, as I've tried to make again and again, is that if the USGA wants to pursue some way of making this putting practice a violation of THEIR Rules of Golf you can count on the fact that they will figure out a way to do it for their reasons and for the arguments that they will give for doing it. While Shivas can prattle on and on with all the reasons he would do it the fact is Shivas will not be in the USGA Rules Committee's decision making process on this issue. The only thing Shivas or Pat or anyone else can do to facilitate a Rules change is to make a proposal to the USGA Rules Committee that they should consider it and give reasons why if they feel like it. But if The USGA Rules Committee does it at all it may not be for Shivas's reasons or with his language and his recommendations.

[Phil McDade]

Tom:

Agreed.

But Shivas and Mucci seem less concerned with the process of changing the rule, and more focused on the proper interpretation of the rule.

Granted, under Shivas' interpretation of the rule, enforcement of the cheater line rule may be problematic, as many have pointed out. And John VB would prefer enforcement of the slow play provision, rather than a new rule to enforce. I can actually see the enforcement of a "cheater line" rule as more problematic at "refereed" matches (re. the Texas Longhorn example), with pretty easy self-enforcement at the club/local daily fee/muni level (not that different than jangling coins in the pocket...). I say this because the more I watch golf, the more I'm convinced those playing at the highest levels, for lots of pay, will stretch the rules to the Nth degree (Tiger moving a two-ton "pebble" in Phoenix, JJ Henry's Ryder Cup drop, Pressel's lateral/where did it cross the hazard ruling a few weeks ago) to gain an advantage.

I think the advocacy of the cheater line rule is an attempt to get at the insidious practice of Joe Hacks taking up the tactics of the pros from watching them on TV and in person. Shivas is right; the game of golf here in the U.S. takes way too long to play, and a cheater line rule would be one small step toward speeding up play.

[Peter Pallotta]

Phil
I'm late to the party on this, and coming basically empty-handed, but a couple of things struck me from your post:

1) This discussion may in fact be more about the interpretation of the rules than a change in the rules, especially to some; but it seems to me that, in the golf world, and for competitive amateurs and pros alike, it's effectively the same thing...with all the time and processes that a formal rule change implies/requires.

2) I am making an assumption that the rule makers, even if they received some formal submission regarding a change, would treat the issue slowly and methodically, in part because they are aware of the possibility of "unintended consequences" that I mentioned earlier. As you say, the game of golf takes too long to play, in part because of all this 'aligning' that's going by Joe Hacks. But look what’s happened, even just in the context of this thread, when we think about changing that: i.e. a number of new ideas and new 'rules' and new issues have sprung up almost immediately, all of them in reaction to (and as consequences of) the idea of ending the alignment practice. I can only imagine what other unintended consequences a more formal and lengthy process might discover...or what those consequences would mean out in the world, on the course.  

By the way, I rarely 'align' the ball myself, not because I think I'd be cheating but mostly because I forget to, and also because I find that it doesn't help me very much at all -- only a good solid stroke along with a decent read does the trick, and on the rare times that I get both, the putt goes in or at least has a chance, whether I've aligned the ball or not.  

My personal feeling is that, as a non-competing amateur, I should try my very best to honestly play (and count my score) in keeping with the rules of the game as defined by the USGA/R&A, and I believe that if I do this I am honouring the spirit of the game. If and when the USGA/R&A change the rules, I'm sure I'll hear about it, and will then play according to the NEW rules, and will continue to honour the spirit of the game.  I can understand, though, how tournament players might feel differently.

Peter

[JohnV]

Does anyone remember how Betsy King used to line up her putts?

She would stand behind the ball and line the putter up exactly where she wanted to hit it and then move around to the side and putt.

Given that there was a line on her putter, didn't she do the same thing as lining up a mark on the ball?

So, if you want to ban lines on the ball being used, I think you also have to ban all markings on top of the club.

The Rules-makers apparently feel at this time that attempting to regulate a Rule written like that is not practical.

It is either that or they don't think it is so important that a "discussion" of it should become the most replied to topic in GCA history.

John:

Somewhere deep in this thread's past, the Betsy King example was brought up. Not to speak for Shivas, but he has in the past utilized the rules' specific exemption for markings on clubs as defense for having them on a putter. His argument with the cheater line is that there is no exemption, or no specific language, that talks about allowing a line on a ball. He relies on the "anywhere" language in rule 8 to argue that would include a cheater line on the ball.

I'm guessing he wouldn't oppose the Betsy King alignment procedure (absent specific language banning the practice, ala croquet-style putting), as long as she didn't have a line on her ball indicating the line of the putt.

Sorry, I gave up on this thread long ago and then made the mistake of coming back in.

I'll go away quietly now.

[TEPaul]

Phil:

Your last post was a good one even if I don't think personally I agree with all of it.

I think slow play is a problem in the US and with some Americans and probably more than anywhere else---although I sure have seen some Japanese who don't seem to even understand what it means.

And I'm sure aware of it in one way---officiating. Pace of play is about 80+ percent of what we do out there when we're officiating. It never stops, and we're all on radios with each other and we never take a rest from pacing a field because if you do and it gets ahead of you for any reason at all, even just golf related things like OB and no provisional, or lost balls etc there is almost no way to get it back on the pace of the original timing grids we all use. It's sort of like trying to get the little waves from a pebble thrown into a pond to reverse their course.

Recreational golf I haven't seen much problem with really slow play but that's obviously because I'm in the wrong place to see it at its worst.

So having said all that I sure am aware of the problem and the mechanisms to control it in some situations. if some golf courses are forced to just let golfers play a course on their own problems of slow play are inevitable, I guess. It's like the old Marine Corps adage that you (a course) can only go as fast as the slowest man.

I know it drives some crazy to hear me say this but some of the fanatics about the problems of slow play piss me off as much as truly slow players. To me they act like golf has to be some kind of Goddamned race around a golf course. In my opinion, it should never be that. It should be a good time and relaxing, if possible.

Therefore, I don't really see the R&A/USGA Rules of Golf as being the mechanism to promote less slow play in recreational golf in America. They can do that in their own tournaments and they really are now, but they aren't a National Association of Pace of Play Police, that's for sure.

I think slow play in American golf is a total lack of education on the grass roots level, and consequently a real lack of awareness of the etiquette of golf, a lot of which is to not play incredibly slowly. That etiquette to not play slowly is recommended in the R&A/USGA Rules of Golf book.

Golf committees in private golf clubs and managers of public facilities should make that etiquette recommended in the Rules of Golf available at any time necessary to all players. It's their own responsibility to control the pace of play of slow players at their course. That is not the job of the USGA and the Rules of Golf.

It really involves two simple things--

1. Explain to all the golfers of a golf club via the Golf Committe or at public facilities via management to do some of the things necessary for your turn when it's not your turn and it doesn't disturb the player whose turn it is. Most of us call that being "golf ready".

2. Explain to all golfers of clubs via the Golf Committee or via management at public facilities that once it's your turn do what you need to do and hit your shot in a general time frame of not more than about 40 seconds.

For Tour players I'd suggest the Tour institute their own Local Rules and procedures that their players have basically 40 seconds a shot and since they are on video tape if they get 5-10 bad times on the greens or anywhere else during a round they will be finded X. And the next time they'll be fined 2X, then 3X etc and if that doesn't bother them they'll be assessed shots concurrently or otherwise.

The USGA can solve this slow play problem created by this putting practice that's the subject of this thread in their own tournaments through the use of Rule 6-7.

Other entities need to educate their players on their own. They can do that by showing all of them the R&A/USGA's Rules of Golf Rule 6-7 and its procedures or the guidelines under Pace of Play in the Etiquette section in the front of the Rules of Golf book.

[RSLivingston_III]

BUMP

This thread is obviously not getting enough attention...

[Pete Lavallee]

Shivas

How's this for a middle ground (I really hate the middle ground, Ilike extremes):

Handle it just like they do with lift clean and place. You get one shot at replacing the ball on the green. Once it's down and you have let go of it, it's in play and you can't lift it again.

There would be nothing worse for some anal retentive cheater to have misaligned his ball by just a fraction. So the cheather would have to give up the practice and learn to play without aligning it.

Shivas,

Does this solutiuon go far enough for you? It would seem to work very well for pace of play.

[Patrick_Mucci]

Does anyone remember how Betsy King used to line up her putts?

She would stand behind the ball and line the putter up exactly where she wanted to hit it and then move around to the side and putt.

Given that there was a line on her putter, didn't she do the same thing as lining up a mark on the ball?[size=4x]
NO

You're supposed to line up your club with your ball[/color][/size]

So, if you want to ban lines on the ball being used, I think you also have to ban all markings on top of the club.[/b]

NO, you don't.

When you swing your driver, at the top of your swing, do you know where the line on your driver is ?  Where it's pointing ?

I want you and others to think about that this weekend when you play golf.

Think about where that marking, if there is one, is, and where it's pointing at the top of your swing.

After the weekend is over, tell me how that worked for you.[/b]

[TEPaul]

Patrick:

After reading the tortured logic of your last post it just occured to me what I think we could expect when we make this proposal to the USGA about this cheater line thing being a violation of the Rules.

My predictation is the best we can expect is that they may rewrite Decision 20-3a/2 to read;

"Q. When a player is replacing his ball, is it permissible for him to position the ball so that the trademark, a manufacturer's line or the player's identification mark or identification line is aiming along the line of putt to indicate the line of play?

A. Yes"




And, NOW, I'm going out to mow a field or two.

[Patrick_Mucci]

TEPaul,

It's interesting to note that I just saw an advertisement for Titleist balls that said the following:

"New alignment arrow stamp on the ProV1 & ProV1x"

I think we'll put forth a reasoned request.

[TEPaul]

"I think we'll put forth a reasoned request."

Pat:

I'm sure we will. But let me ask you something since I've never been completely sure how your position on this issue difffers from Shivas's position.

If the best our proposal does is get the R&A/USGA to put clearer language into perhaps Rule 8-2b or a Decision that this putting practice IS NOT a violation of the Rules how would you feel about that?  

[Tony_Muldoon]

A bit late in the day but here’s another thought.


Like George, for easy identification I put a thick line through each of the makers’ logos.  For a short time I attempted to use one of these lines as an alignment aid in putting.  However I soon gave up the practice as I found you couldn’t just place the ball down; it took a couple of goes lifting, replacing to find the perfect flat lie and then twisting the ball, to get it right.  This is what wastes the time and I couldn’t be bothered and soon gave it up.

But what you are also doing is searching for the best possible lie for your ball – and this seems to me to be a violation of the sprit of the rules.  I’m not a rules expert, and they seem very vague on this (I’ve only looked at rule 20), but if we want a rule that knocks out the cheater line why not rule that “a ball on the green has to be replaced in a single action”.    Anyone fiddling or touching the ball for a second time would earn themselves a penalty.

Those addicted to the cheater line would soon drop it as it’s harder to putt when you are worried the line is just off the ideal.  Players would choose to place the substantially white space on top, all accusations of cheating could be easily   resolved and the pace of the game would be improved.

[TEPaul]

Tony:

If you really think about it you should see that a Rule calling for a single action replacement would also be very hard to regulate in practice.

What, for instance, would constitute a "single action"? Would it be disallowing a player from replacing his ball, aligning it and then going back and doing it again or would it disallow him fiddling with the ball and the line in a single time consuming action?

I don't think the Rules of Golf wants to or needs to get into writing Rules where far more players are going to be inclined to try to call penalties on one another. In a real sense that itself would be sort of counter to the true spirit of the game and the Rules.

But if golfers are taking too long doing anything about the game there certainly is a Rule in Golf to cover it. It's Rule 6-7 (Undue Delay; Slow Play). In practice and unofficiated Rule 6-7 generally falls more into the category of etiquette than actual penalty calling on the part of players against other players.

The only real problem with Rule 6-7 is generally speaking Rules officials apply that penalty to players. Other players generally don't or can't do that to other players. If they attempt to and the player in question challenges it the situation needs to be taken to the committee for resolution in a technical sense.

We who officiate though are mostly doing pacing (Rule 6-7) and if a player appears to be slow he is warned that he needs to play his shot when it is his turn within app 40 seconds (that's the time allowance we use in GAP and the Pa Golf Association). If he fails to heed the warning he is timed and if he gets a bad time or two he can be assessed one shot, then two shots and eventually a DQ within the Rules. The initial one shot penalty is still a "Local Rule", by the way.

That's probably a good "rule of thumb" for players who are playing unofficiated to be aware of.

In other words, when any situation comes down to a matter of slow play, within the Rules of Gollf Rule 6-7 is there to cover that problem somehow.

[TEPaul]

Tony:

If the Rulesmakers really want to cleanly ban this putting practice of aligning something on a golf ball for the purposes of indicating a line for putting and make it a violation of the Rules, they probably just need to make it a violation to have that "something" (whether it be a mark or a line (manufacturer's or player identification)) on a player's golf ball.

I don't see them doing that for a whole lot of reasons.

The fact is the Rules of Golf have never regulated what kind of identification mark a player puts on his golf ball and with a few exceptions they have also never regulated how a player replaces his golf ball just so long as he gets it back in the same spot from which he lifted it.

Those two exceptions are a player cannot roll his ball into replacement thereby testing the surface or the line and he cannot press his golf ball into the surface of the putting green.

[TEPaul]

The problem with you Shivas, is you need a far better education not only in Rule of Golf writing and interpreting but also in how golf Rules are applied and enforced in practice.

Your over-all tenet in this entire discussion is that you think the Rules of Golf should be written like a criminal or civil legal code to be more effective.

Thank God the Rules of Golf have never been written or applied like that and hopefully they never will be.

You show extreme umbrage whenever I mention that one of the primary adages amongst Rulesmakers concerning the Rules of Golf is the last thing they need is a bunch of over-arching lawyers writing them and interpreting them.

There's a very good reason for that and one thing you most certainly have done in this ultra long discussion is show us why that is so.  

Perhaps the best example of all of both why and how you really don't understand the essence of the Rules of Golf is that you were so truly surprised when I informed you on the telephone that the idea of and the word cheat, cheating and cheater have rarely if ever been mentioned within the Rules of Golf. There's a very good reason for that too!

I hope you don't try to deny, at this point, how surprised you were to hear that.

The fact that this thread has been entitled with your label of this putting practice---eg "Cheater Line" only reinforces that misunderstanding of the essence of the Rules of Golf on your part.  

In fact, that the Rules of Golf have historically not exactly even contemplated cheating is perhaps the most underlying principle of all of the Rules of Golf.

Matter of fact, in my opinion, the latter concept is often not fully appreciated by some of the very best Rules officials I'm aware of who tend to try to take on the character an attitude of a policeman when they officiate instead of doing what they should do within the essence of the Rules of Golf which is to attempt to help players not violate a Rule of Golf.

Here's a really good example of that difference. Not long ago one of the best Rules officials I know in a technical sense asked me to watch a player who he thought may be touching the putting green with his putter with this new practice some players use of going down the line of their putt and taking practice strokes.

Apparently his inclination was to watch this player to see if he actually did violate a Rule and then call him on it. I am inclined to simply tell the player immediately that he might potentially be doing that and to therefore be careful about it.