Oh, man. It’s bad enough that you didn’t realise you just dropped closer to the hole after taking relief from a sprinkler head, but then you double-downed by fixing a raised divot on your line of play from the fringe.
As you chip the ball onto the green, someone with a decent understanding of the rules might recognise that you just committed two penalties. But how do you proceed?
Let’s get into this. When you dropped closer to the hole, you violated Rule 14.7 (playing from the wrong place) and should be assessed the general penalty. That means in matchplay, you’d lose the hole. In strokeplay, it’s two shots added to your scorecard.
OK, so if you’re playing a match, you’re done. It doesn’t matter what you did next – you’ve already lost the hole. In strokeplay, however, you’re still playing, so let’s continue to examine this situation as if you weren’t in a match.
When you walked up to a raised piece of grass caused by someone ahead of you chunking the turf and repaired it, you were in violation of Rule 8.1a (taking an action that improves conditions affecting the stroke). If you’ve got a divot hole on your line of play in the general area of the course, leave it be. Same with loose impediments. If moving one improves your line of play, it’s a penalty.
The penalty for violating Rule 8.1 is either loss of hole – again, it wouldn’t matter in matchplay since you’ve already lost the hole – or two strokes. You might think that means you get hit with a two-shot penalty for playing from the wrong place and another two for hitting a chip shot after tapping down the raised turf. Four extra strokes? Is that right?
Luckily for you, no. Rule 1.3c covers this and goes on to clarify what happens in general when a player breaches a rule and then breaches another rule before the next stroke, like you did when you hit a chip shot after dropping in the wrong place and then tapping down on the bruised grass.
The Rules of Golf explains that because there was no intervening event between dropping in the wrong place and then tapping down the divot, the player gets only one general penalty of two strokes. To be clear, for the purpose of applying this rule, an “intervening event” means either the completion of a stroke or being aware or becoming aware of a breach of a rule (this includes when a player knows they breached a rule, when the player is told of a breach, or when the player is uncertain whether or not they have breached a rule). If either intervening event happened between the two acts that are penalties, then both penalties apply.
Incidentally, if you hadn’t committed the second penalty and only accidentally played from the wrong place, the procedure for finishing the hole is to continue with the ball that you hit from the incorrect spot. Then add a two-stroke penalty to your score. It could be a “serious breach” if playing from the wrong place gave you a significant advantage. In which case you’d have to correct the error by going back and playing from the correct position before starting the next hole or you could be disqualified. But in most cases, playing from the wrong place is loss of hole or a two-shot penalty in strokeplay.
