The two-stroke penalty handed to Shin Da-in for replacing a ball has been one of the hottest issues in golf in recent weeks.
Shin was penalized two strokes at the OK Savings Bank Readman Open on the Korea Ladies Professional Golf (KLPGA) Tour last week for replacing her ball in a wrong place after lifting it on the first green during the final round at Pocheon Adonis Country Club in Pocheon, Gyeonggi Province.
The starting point of the dispute is whether Shin put the ball back on its original spot. On that question, Shin and the KLPGA tournament committee remain sharply at odds.
To untangle the argument, the concept at its center — the original spot — needs to be examined first. The original spot is the place where the ball originally lay. In golf, the rules often require a player to lift a ball and then put it back on that spot, a procedure known as replacing.
But humans are not machines. Is it possible to put a ball back on exactly the same spot after lifting it? If the ball is placed one centimeter away from where it was, should that count as a correct replacement? And what about a spot half a centimeter or one millimeter off?
That raises a more fundamental question: is there any margin of error for the original spot at all? The Rules of Golf provide none.
Just as no golf ball, however precisely engineered with modern technology, is a perfect sphere — the pull of gravity sees to that — replacing a ball on the exact spot where it first lay is, scientifically speaking, impossible from the outset.
That is why the rules include a provision accepting a player's reasonable judgment (Rule 1.3b(2)). When a player determines a spot, point, line, edge, area or other location under the rules, and has made all reasonably available efforts under the circumstances, the player's reasonable judgment is accepted and that spot is treated as the correct original spot. Even if video evidence or other information later shows the determination to have been wrong, the player incurs no penalty for that judgment after the stroke has been made.
What would happen without this provision? Suppose a player takes relief from a penalty area and plays on. Another competitor could readily object that the reference point was set incorrectly. Examined closely enough through video or other evidence, any reference point, however carefully established, will contain some margin of error when viewed scientifically.
The same applies when a ball is lifted on the green and replaced, as in Shin's case. Players, spectators and television viewers would flood officials with reports that someone had replaced a ball in the wrong place. Play itself could no longer proceed normally.
That single sentence — that a player's reasonable judgment is accepted when locations are determined under the rules — may look minor, but it is this important.
So how is it decided whether a player made a reasonable effort? The tournament committee considers the whole sequence of the player's actions, before and after, along with intent and other factors.
A committee's ruling on the rules deserves respect. But a ruling must not apply the rules in a way that misreads them or interprets them arbitrarily.
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