Rules Guy: Can you take advice from a caddie who’s also your playing partner?

The Rules of Golf are tricky! Thankfully, we’ve got the guru. Our Rules Guy knows the book front to back. Got a question? He’s got all the answers.

I’m a caddie at a resort and sometimes get asked to play with a client. When playing, how many penalty strokes must I take each time I give advice to a client who asks for it? Does the client get a penalty too? —Steve “Cadillac” Heslin, Las Vegas

This all sounds very sketch, even for Vegas, where “clients” often ask for untoward things. Now, just as a Cadillac can pull double duty as one’s personal ride and as an Uber, but not at the same time, so too golf. You’re either a caddie or a player.

Ergo, your fellow golfer gets two strokes each time for asking for advice, per Rule 10.2a… and you get two strokes for giving advice under the same rule. Call it a new spin on the old caddie maxim: “Show up, keep up and shut up.”

For more caddie-related advice from our guru, read on …

Rules

I’m a caddie. On a recent loop, my guys were atrocious putters — they never hit the line I gave them. On the last hole, one of them had a six-footer that needed to start on the left edge. I pulled the pin and held it up in the air so that its shadow made a line from his ball to the left edge of the hole. He sank the putt while I was holding the shadow on that line. Assuming this isn’t legal, what if I take the shadow away just before the golfer putts the ball? —Maddox Miller-Jones, via email

Maddox, you are right to be afraid of your own shadow, as having the player putt while the shadow’s still in place would be a breach of Rule 10.2b(2), which pertains to advice and other help. It gets your man the general penalty of two strokes in stroke play and loss of hole in match play.

That said, using the shadow to point out the line before the stroke is made is okay — actually, it’s more than okay, it’s downright ingenious. Give yourself a big tip.

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