Daniel Berger and a rules official Thursday on the 7th green at El Cardonal in Diamante.
The Golf Channel
Daniel Berger? He looked dazed.
But Harris English?
He was apparently prepared. A potential line was laid out to a tee for him, so to speak, and, on national TV, he walked away.
“Did you hear what Harris’ initial reaction was?” analyst Johnson Wagner said on the Golf Channel broadcast.
If you were watching Thursday’s first round of the PGA Tour World Championship of Technologyyou can have. To put things in perspective, the group i Berger, English AND Tom Hoge had just hit approaches on the par-4 7th El Cardonal in Diamante when Berger, as he reached to score his ball, noticed that the wind pushed him forward. What about now? Would he be penalized? Where would he play next?
Berger called English and the microphones picked up this exchange:
“Harry, I went to score my ball…”
English paused for a second and then closed in on three words.
“Four free kicks.”
Good job everyone. On the air, Wagner laughed, as did colleagues Terry Gannon and Billy Ray Brown. No, Berger would not be anchored with four shots. But what is the call here?
After English’s lineout, Berger called an official, telling him that as he went to score, “the wind blew and carried him this way,” before asking where he should play next: old country or new. The official told him the latter and from there, Berger scored two goals, doing so without a penalty.
There are several parts of the rule in play here (Rule 13.1d (2)). If Berger had already marked his ball, picked it up, put it down again, and then the wind moved it, he would have had to put it back where it had originally been (and could do so without penalty ). But since he had not scored it yet, he was allowed to play it from the new country.
There’s a little more. On the broadcast, it was initially thought that Berger had accidentally moved his ball as he went to score, and if that was the case, the decision would have been slightly different, although also without a penalty. Rule 13.1d (1) states “there is no penalty if the player, opponent or other player in stroke play accidentally moves the player’s ball or ball marker onto the putting green” and that the player must “replace the ball on its original spot (which if not known must be estimated) or place a ball marker to mark that original point.
“So since he hadn’t already marked his ball,” Wagner said on the broadcast, “he’s going to play it where the wind blows it. If he had marked it and gone to replace it and blown it, he would had shifted back.”
