No penalty for moving ball: USGA,R&A

November 20, 2013. Golfers will not face penalty if their ball moves from a rest position without their knowledge under new rules next year by the sport’s governing bodies.

The United States Golf Association and the Royal & Ancient Golf Club said that when “enhanced technological evidence” shows a ball has changed location, it “will not be deemed to have moved if that movement was not reasonably discernible to the naked eye at the time.”

A golfer who unwittingly moves his ball during competition may not be penalize if that movement could not reasonably have been detected without the use of “enhanced technology.”

The USGA and the R&A, which have been busy grappling with the growing impact of video evidence in the reporting of potential rules violations, in a joint statement, released as part of their biennial review of the Decisions on the Rules of Golf has decided to follow the dictum, “Seen no evil? Then you’ve done no evil, either”.

The announcement comes in the wake of season marked by several headline-making incidents in which rules infractions came to light by way of video evidence.

Of those incidents, none was more closely scrutinized than one involving Tiger Woods at the BMW Championship in September, where the world’s top-ranked player was slapped with a two-shot penalty after cameras showed that his ball had moved as he prepared to play his third shot on the first hole of his second round. Woods insisted that his ball had merely oscillated.

But if oscillate-gate is what many fans will think of when they read Tuesday’s joint statement, it’s far from the only incident that golf’s ruling bodies had in mind.

They had to address the questions about the influence of video evidence on the game that has been simmering for some time.

Eighty seven changes have been made to the 2013-14 edition of the “Decisions on the Rules of Golf” manual but this  one in particular will be of interest to world number one Tiger Woods.