The opportunities for success now come few and far between for five-time PGA Tour winner Ben Crane.
The 49-year-old, whose last win came in 2014, has played in only one event this season, in Puerto Rico, where he missed the cut, and competed only 16 times over the previous two years. So making it to the weekend at the Corales Puntacana Championship, being played opposite the signature RBC Heritage, was a big deal.
Unfortunately for Crane, the opportunity ended prematurely on Saturday because of a penalty he called on himself in a bizarre playing of the wrong ball.
On the eighth hole at the Corales Golf Course, Crane hit his tee shot into a hazard, arrived at where he believed the ball went in and took a drop to hit his third shot. But he then he saw a second ball in the fairway and realised that his first shot must have caromed off the rocks and landed safety into play.
As Crane explained in a video he took of himself on X after the round, “Now I have two balls in the fairway, I assume that hit my ball on the right was the … second one I put in play. And I play that golf ball and putt out and realise there’s a big rock stuck on that ball.
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And you know you do a good job of identifying when I took my drop of what number I was playing. And I realised I had played the wrong golf ball through the hole.
Disqualified myself today here is why. pic.twitter.com/i26Gxv8d80
— Ben Crane (@bencranegolf) April 19, 2025
“And realise I have to disqualify myself because I’m pretty sure that’s the ball that I had abandoned, and I played it.”
Crane’s mistake was a breach of Rule 6.3c(1) in the Rules of Golf, which state, “If you do not correct the mistake before making a stroke to begin another hole or, for the final hole of the round, before returning your scorecard, you are disqualified.”
