In revising the rules regarding dropping for 2019, the USGA and R&A may have forgotten to include an important detail.

Rule 14.2b says:

b. Ball Must Be Dropped in Right Way
The player must drop a ball in the right way, which means all three of these things:

(1) Player Must Drop Ball. The ball must be dropped only by the player. Neither the player’s caddie nor anyone else may do so.
(2) Ball Must Be Dropped Straight Down from Knee Height Without Touching Player or Equipment. The player must let go of the ball from a location at knee height so that the ball:

• Falls straight down, without the player throwing, spinning or rolling it or using any other motion that might affect where the ball will come to rest, and
• Does not touch any part of the player’s body or equipment before it hits the ground.

“Knee height” means the height of the player’s knee when in a standing position.

In the Definitions section, we find this:

Drop
To hold the ball and let go of it so that it falls through the air, with the intent for the ball to be in play.

If the player lets go of a ball without intending it to be in play, the ball has not been droppedand is not in play (see Rule 14.4).

Each relief Rule identifies a specific relief area where the ball must be dropped and come to rest.

In taking relief, the player must let go of the ball from a location at knee height so that the ball:

• Falls straight down, without the player throwing, spinning or rolling it or using any other motion that might affect where the ball will come to rest, and
• Does not touch any part of the player’s body or equipment before it hits the ground (see Rule 14.3b).

Rule 14.2 includes a picture showing two golfers dropping from both one correct and one incorrect position each. The picture shows each of the two golfers dropping both times from their hands, once at knee height and once not at knee height.

But all four times, they’re dropping from their hands. The Rule (nor the Definition) doesn’t say anything about dropping the ball from your hand. It only says that the ball has to be dropped from knee height. Other rules say that the ball can’t be spun, it can’t hit another part of your body or equipment before first striking the relief area, and so on, but nowhere is “from a hand” specified.

We didn’t expect the reaction to this tweet to be as negative (though mild) as it was:

We posted a follow-up tweet or six, including:

Friend of Rules Geeks, Lou Stagner, was at a USGA/PGA Rules conference at the home of the USGA in New Jersey, and clarified this interpretation with the USGA before sending out this tweet:

Lou told me that he and the USGA representatives were even joking around about all the legal ways in which you could “drop” a ball from knee height, some of which are, as you can imagine, a little childish in humor (but still funny!). At any rate, Lou’s tweet was picked up by Ryan Ballengee, who wrote this article.

Now, this would be somewhat uninteresting and, honestly, pretty straightforward at this point, if one more thing had not happened. At the same rules seminar (I’ll be attending one in March), before the test on the final day, lecturers made a point of clarifying to the assembled “students” that dropping must (and they did use the word “must“) be from the hand.

I’m sorry, but no, it “must” not be, because as I originally stated in the first tweet in this post, neither the Rule, nor the Definitions, nor the one Interpretation regarding dropping say anything at all about the hand, let alone use the word “must.” If the USGA/R&A truly want people to drop from the hand, then they goofed. They could have worded the rule by saying something like “from a hand” at a few places, like “The player must let go of the ball from a hand and from a location at knee height so that the ball:…”.

But they did not.

So, if you’re a USGA or R&A official, and you see a player drop a ball by squeezing it between his or her knees and drop it from there… would you penalize the player?

I wouldn’t. And I don’t think you would either, because nowhere in the Rules of Golf does it say the player must or even should drop the ball from his or her hand.

Will the USGA/R&A rush out an Interpretation to cover this? Or will they rightly realize that 99.9999% of drops are going to be taken from the hand, and not over-react to close this small loophole, particularly since it really shouldn’t even matter whether a player drops a ball from between his knees or from his fingers or from his mouth or even with a mechanical grabber like in the tweet above?

We’ll have to wait and see…