Everybody loves a good rules takes. What should change, what shouldn’t, and how. PGA Tour players are full of them, as longtime PGA Tour member Pat Perez proved on the most recent episode of GOLF Top 100 Teacher Claude Harmon III’s GOLF.com Podcast Off Course.
What rule would he change? Turns out, there are two of them.
1. Move ball from divot in fairway
There may be no worse feeling in golf than striping a drive down the middle of the fairway, walking up to your ball, and seeing it sitting squarely in a divot. That’s golf, some people say, but Perez disagrees. That’s the first rule he would change.
“If there’s sand in it, it’s ground under repair. Technically, it’s ground in repair,” Perez says. “I’ve done my job. I’ve hit the fairway, why do I get penalized to be in a divot?”
2. Putter has to be the shortest club in your bag
Perez didn’t like belly putting, and doesn’t like arm-locking. He says it’s against the spirit of the game, which is why Perez says if he was King of Golf, he’d decree that your putter has to be the shortest in your bag
“I’ve never liked anchoring, and to me the arm lock is the most anchoring of them all,” he says. “I don’t care about how far it goes, I don’t care about the driver head. People want to see it go far…but you still have to make putts. The hardest thing is still making that 6-, 7-footer with a slide on it.”
Listen to the full episode on Spotify right here: