The big silver ball in Times Square drops just once a year.
But the little dimpled ball that golfers use? It gets dropped every season, at courses near and far.
The situations vary. Golfers take free drops and penalty drops, usually within one or two club-lengths of a reference point. What doesn’t change is the procedure itself.
Rule 14.3 requires the ball to be dropped the proper way: straight down from knee height. No tossing. No rolling. No spinning the ball in your fingers to try to influence how it lands. The ball is not allowed to hit your body on the way down.
Simple enough. It wasn’t always so.
For much of the game’s history, dropping the ball involved a bit of choreography. Prior to 1984, players were required to face the hole and drop the ball over their shoulder. Go back even further and you’ll find other variations, facing the hole and dropping over the head among them.
In 2019, the procedure changed again, this time to knee height. The goal was practical: speed up play and improve consistency. From a lower height, the ball was less likely to plug in sand, say, or bounce and roll outside the relief area.
But even from knee height, gravity can still have ideas of its own.
Sometimes a dropped ball rolls out of the penalty area. What then?
That question was answered in one of the USGA’s most-watched rules videos of the year. The solution is mercifully straightforward. If the ball rolls out of the penalty area after the first drop, you pick it up and drop again. If it rolls out a second time, you place it on the spot where it first hit the ground.
Drop, drop, place. That’s it.
As for the Times Square ball, we’re still not entirely sure how those mechanics work.
