The big silver ball in Times Square only drops once a year.
But the little pit ball the players use? It falls every season, on courses near and far.
Situations change. Golfers get free points and reduced sentenceusually within one or two lengths of a landmark. What does not change is the procedure itself.
Rule 14.3 requires the ball to be thrown the right way: straight down from knee height. No throwing. No rotation. Don’t spin the ball on your toes to try to influence how it lands. The ball is not allowed to hit your body on the way down.
Simple enough. It wasn’t always like that.
For most of the game’s history, throwing the ball involved little choreography. Prior to 1984, players were required to face the hole and shoulder the ball. Go back even further and you’ll find other variations, facing the hole and falling over your head between them.
In 2019, the procedure changed again, this time to knee height. The goal was practical: speed up gameplay and improve consistency. From a lower height, the ball was less likely to go into the sand, say, or bounce and roll out of the relief area.
But even from knee height, gravity can still have ideas of its own.
Sometimes a dropped ball goes outside the penalty area. What then?
This question was answered in one of USGA’s The most viewed rules videos of the year. The solution is mercifully straightforward. If the ball goes out of the penalty area after the first down, you pick it up and throw it again. If it rolls a second time, place it where it first hit the ground.
Release, release, set. That’s it.
As for the Times Square ball, we’re still not entirely sure how those mechanics work.
