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Lottie Woad struggled to get a stance. 

Then, after a two-stroke penalty, she stumbled during Saturday’s third round of the U.S. Women’s Open. 

The sequence came from the greenside bunker on Riviera Country Club’s 9th hole, where Woad’s second shot had plugged into the steep upslope and about a yard from the lip. She was stuck. The primary issue was her footing.    

Standing normally, Woad would slide, and she tried to find stability. Peacock network cameras showed her trying to push into the sand with her back (right) foot, and at one point, her caddie, David Taylor, put his left foot behind her right foot. Woad continued to push. At one point, she slid down the bunker. An official was called. Woad and Taylor said they saw bunker liner and wondered whether that could lead to relief, but, following a seven-minute conference, they were denied. 

After she tried to position her right foot again, Woad hit. Her ball unplugged — but it jumped forward only about an inch before sliding back down the bunker. From there, she hit her second shot to 2 feet, and she one-putted for what she believed was a bogey five.  

It was more. There was a review, and a short while later, Woad’s score became a seven. At issue was Woad’s stance. At 12:20 p.m. local time in L.A., reporters were told that Woad had been assessed a two-stroke penalty, under Rule 8.1a of the Rules of Golf, “for improving her stance in the bunker,” though it was not noted what action triggered the infraction.  

Peacock network mics did pick up the official who talked with Woad telling her to be “careful about building a stance,” but no penalty was called. When contacted by GOLF.com, a USGA spokesperson said that an official monitors all broadcast feeds and “as this situation aired, prior to the referee coming to help, we actively started reviewing it.”

Three times on the Peacock broadcast, an analyst was concerned about Woad’s actions. 

“So [the official] just mentioned I was a little concerned that it looked like she was kind of building a stance,” the analyst said. “You saw her take her foot with the sand and try and make extra sand so she could stand on it. You’re not allowed to do that.” 

“This is what I’m concerned about,” the analyst said. “Caddie kind of came in and helped as well. Digging in the feet and really moving the sand around.” 

“She’s got to be very careful that she’s not also creating some type of stance,” the analyst said. “Just looking at the ball, she was fluffing up the sand. The caddie, David Taylor, came in and was doing the same.” 

From there, Woad played one-under golf, and she finished with a three-over 74.

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In the relative Stone Age of 2022, USGA rules expert Craig Winter was hanging out in the living room of his Washington State home with a friend of his wife’s. The acquaintance was playing around on his computer with a whiz-bang new app called ChatGPT that allowed users with no coding chops to interact with artificial intelligence through a simple conversational text box.

When Winter finally convinced his wife’s friend to let Winter ask the super-bot a question, the subject matter surely came as no surprise: the Rules of Golf, more specifically a query about cart-path relief. In went the question and out came an answer, with no less than the USGA’s senior director of rules of golf and amateur status judging its merit.

“I was candidly really surprised with how good the answer was,” Winter recalled in a call with reporters Tuesday.

After more experimenting with Chat, Winter’s wheels began turning. So did his colleagues’. Could the USGA, on the back of its expertise in the rules space, team with a tech-solutions company to create an AI-powered rules engine that was better than anything any other provider could build?

The organization weighed proposals from several potential collaborators before settling on a pitch from one of its own corporate partners — professional services firm Deloitte — that, Winter said, “showed us that there was potential that was quite a bit more than what we had on our own plate.”

This was in April 2023.

On Wednesday, the USGA announced the fruits of that partnership: the launch of the pilot phase for Rules AI, a tool that will reside in the GHIN app and, the USGA says, give golfers “an accurate, streamlined way” to find answers to their rules questions.

Simply punch in your prompt — how do yellow stakes differ from red; what’s the penalty for carrying 15 clubs; what to do if a squirrel swipes your ball, etc. — and the app will deliver how-to-proceed guidance in authoritative language culled from the Rules of Golf, the Decisions on the Rules of Golf and the trove of rules questions that the USGA answers daily by phone, email and via its rules app (more than 20,000 such queries pour in every year). In total, it’s a vast resource of rules knowledge on which Rules AI has trained itself.

For the moment, the app is available only in beta mode to a cluster of handpicked USGA member clubs, but the association has plans to expand that test group to about 80,000 or 90,000 members of New York metropolitan area clubs later this month. The app will be available to all GHIN members by the spring of next year.  

If you know anything about the USGA, you probably know it treats rules governance with the diligence of a detonation physicist handling Plutonium-239. Every word is pored over, every adjustment and amendment agonized over. So, it may come as some surprise that the USGA has entrusted the game’s commandments to a technology that while stunningly powerful also is prone to dispensing flawed information, if not outright hallucinating.

That’s where the last two years come in.

“Our approach from the very start is we need to provide accurate answers,” said Anthony Santora, the USGA’s managing director, IT, who joined the Tuesday call with Winter. “There’s a lot of misinformation out there on the internet.” Santora added that any prospect of Rules AI providing bad intel was a “non-negotiable. So, for us, we’ve been really taking this guardrail phased approach to everything.”

News

Inside the new rules policing player behavior at PGA Championship

By: Sean Zak

At first, that meant training the engine on the 25 primary rules in the rules book, along with those rules’ many subsections. Then came a more nuanced education by way of 35,000 questions and answers from the USGA’s rules-query database. That was followed by feeding the bot real-time rules questions that golfers emailed to the USGA — with the USGA’s rules department reviewing how effectively the bot answered them. This has been an essential step in grooming the app’s intelligence. As the USGA’s rules whizzes have flagged Rules AI providing inaccurate or incomplete answers, they have been able to proactively train it to not make the same mistake again. This legwork also would make it challenging for a competitor to swoop in and create an equally reliable rules tool.      

“We’re able to continue to make this better and to be able to teach it because we’re hands on, looking at it, looking at questions coming in, and seeing answers that are coming out,” Santora said.

Week by week and month by month, the app got smarter and more sophisticated.

“I’ve spent a good amount of time dreaming about the possibility of this actually working,” Winter said, “but not really getting to that point until we were almost 16, 18 months in.”

Every potential question ladders up into one of 500 different rules topics — i.e., “out of bounds,” “cart-path relief,” etc. “When a question comes in, it’s going to ultimately land in the topic that is most similar to what this person is asking,” Winter said. “So all of that nuance is available for the system to be able to use this closed set of information that’s accurate to find the answer.”

That’s not to say Rules AI is perfect. No machine, no matter how thoroughly it has been trained, can be omniscient, especially when it comes to the Rules of Golf, where scenarios without precedent can seemingly appear out of thin air. When the app receives a question it feels unqualified to answer (and no doubt, as the app becomes more widely available, an army of fast-typing rules sharpies will revel in trying to stump the bot), it is wired to refer users to the USGA for further counsel.   

Complex questions can take Rules AI 10 seconds or more to answer but more commonly asked questions will have what the USGA calls “golden answers” that the app will deliver almost instantaneously.

Winter stressed that Rules AI should not be used to supersede tournament or club committees’ expertise or rulings; it’s more so a reference that allows players easier and faster access to rules guidance, which likely also will lower the volume of rules queries the USGA fields the old-fashioned way.

“We’re not trying to put a rules official in golfers’ pockets,” Winter said. “This is about scaling the expertise of our rules staff, our rules experts, to golf around the globe.”

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The post ‘Wow, what a break’: Rules benefit Jordan Spieth — and so do his left fingers  appeared first on Golf.

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Jordan Spieth swings right-handed, but he does some things lefty. A few years back, he said he throws and shoots from that side. 

Looks like he places that way, too. 

That was seen Friday, atop the greenside bunker on the par-5 5th hole at TPC Craig Ranch. Spieth’s ball looked to be plugged there during the second round of the CJ Cup Byron Nelson event, and theatrics began. He called for an official, whom he wanted to confirm that his ball was embedded, and if it was, would the drop be a club length. Yes, the ball was embedded, and yes, the drop was a club length. 

Spieth found a spot to take relief, then asked another question: If his ball rolled into the bunker below him after dropping it, would he have to drop his ball again? He was told he would, then did twice, and each time, caddie Michael Greller tossed him the ball back. After the second drop, he was allowed to place his ball. If Spieth could do that well, his ball would likely sit atop the thick rough, giving him an extremely favorable lie for his third shot. At that point, he had also made four-straight birdies. 

“Wow, what a break,” an analyst said on the PGA Tour Live broadcast. “Because now he gets to place it.”     

Spieth lowered himself into the grass. With his left fingers — which were gloved by his white golf glove — he placed his ball. It looked like it was sitting on a tee. 

“That’s terrific,” the analyst said on the broadcast.  

From there, Spieth dropped a wedge to 4 feet, and he made his birdie four. Before finishing, he added two more birdies, giving him a back-nine 29 and a round of nine-under 62. Afterward, he said he was encouraged by his putting. Thursday night, Spieth said he made an adjustment and things clicked. 

“It was putting today,” he said. “I’ve been driving the ball the best of my life, and I drove it horribly today, like really badly. But … putting was the best.

“I felt fluid with it. I felt like I — in what I’ve been trying to do, I’ve been trying to put it all together. I know what needs to happen, but putting it all together into a fluid stroke and then being able to be outwardly focused has been the goal.

“I felt like last night I did a really good job out here of that being the goal, find that, and then carry it into this morning and then trust it on the course.

“Frankly, I mean, I told Michael — I’ve been telling Michael for a while. I just feel like one lips in instead of lips out, and I feel like the lid comes off. I lipped out a few yesterday. I had one on No. 10 go across the lip today, but then the one on No. 1 could have been short and fell in. It was like, oh, wow, there is a hole there.

“Sometimes I’ve certainly shown that I can get streaky with it and was able to kind of get on the right side of that today.”

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NEWTOWN SQUARE, Pa. — A new set of rules are set to provide some structure to the best golfers in the world. Not the kind of rules that govern penalty drops and relief, but rather rules of decorum. How pros behave. 

As was teased out Wednesday by Kerry Haigh, the PGA of America’s chief competitions officer, a new “code of conduct” is in place at this week’s PGA Championship that is the result of recent collaboration between the four major championships and the main tours. The policy, as Haigh put it, ensures that “everyone is behaving appropriately, professionally, and as we would want our children and people watching to see the major championship.” 

Fourteen examples of “unacceptable behavior” are posted in the Aronimink locker room, outlining breaches of the code, including obvious no-no’s like damaging property and less obvious ones like failing to be honest and even wearing a hat backward. Here’s the full list: 

This comes a month after Sergio Garcia received the first such warning on Masters Sunday, after damaging turf on an Augusta National tee box and breaking his driver shaft over the leg of a bench. Garcia apologized, but he wasn’t the only golfer gone wild that week. 

Robert MacIntyre was similarly reprimanded at the Masters after he was caught raising his middle finger at the 15th green after missing a shot short into the water hazard. MacIntyre didn’t seem too bothered, considering he missed the cut and then posted to Instagram an AI-generated photo of himself as a bird-flipping Masters gnome.

Last summer, at the U.S. Open, Rory McIlroy smashed a tee box marker, which would draw a quick warning today. A few days later, at the same event, Wyndham Clark damaged a locker in Oakmont’s locker room, an episode to which he had to answer in the following months. That all took place after Clark threw his driver at last year’s PGA Championship, hitting a sign and snapping the shaft. 

Of course, there is no meaning to a code of conduct without consequences. This week’s locker-room posting added plenty of relevant context to how the code will be upheld by the PGA of America. Each major (and tour) is expected to maintain similar codes in general, but may implement and communicate them slightly differently. Aspects like frequency of breach, player intent and severity will determine how a governing body — in this case the PGA of America — will rule. 

Upon first breach, a warning will be issued, though if the “severity of misconduct” is excessive, it could immediately bypass a warning. Upon second breach of the code, the infracting player would receive a two-shot penalty, and a third breach would result in a player being disqualified. Players are similarly held responsible for the actions of their caddies. The information of such a breach is not likely to be spelled out with great clarity, however. At least not this week.

PGA of America officials confirmed that, in the event of a warning, no official alert would be made. Obviously, in the event of a second breach, those added two strokes would need to be explained. Garcia’s warning at Augusta National was issued by Geoff Yang, the Masters’ chairman of competitions committee, and later confirmed by the club.

The PGA Tour has been developing a conduct policy and its collaboration with the various majors led to implementations at the Masters and PGA of America events. The Tour itself has not yet ratified a policy as it still needs to go through the Tour’s governance process for approval. Same goes for the DP World Tour. How that all looks in reality remains to be seen, but the PGA of America first used this code at its Senior PGA Championship last month.

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The post Because of 111-second tee shot, contending pro is hit with rules penalty  appeared first on Golf.

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Gregorio de Leo, standing on the National Golf Club’s 11th tee, was one shot out of the lead. During the final round of the DP World Tour’s Turkish Airlines Open, he was flying. 

Then he slowed down. 

And so did his momentum. 

According to a DP World Tour release, the 26-year-old Italian pro took 111 seconds to hit his tee shot on the 11th, and he was penalized a stroke under the circuit’s pace of play policy. Ben Parsons of Today’s Golfer — who had been at the event and whose work you can read here — reported that de Leo’s group had been monitored since the ninth tee, and the time on the 11th tee was 61 seconds more than de Leo was allotted. 

On the 11th, a 168-yard par-3, de Leo was a shot out of the lead, according to Parsons’ story, then he hit his tee shot short of the green, hit to 2 feet and made his putt. From there, Parsons wrote, an official told de Leo that he he was being penalized, and de Leo’s par turned into a bogey. In a statement to Parsons, the DP World Tour said that de Leo “exceeded his allowed time for the stroke (50 seconds) by more than an additional 30 seconds — whilst being monitored,” and that led to the one-shot penalty. 

Over his remaining holes, de Leo played one-over golf, and he finished four back of champion Mikael Lindberg, who won his first DP World Tour event. “This is a dream come true,” Lindberg told the tour’s website. “I’ve been dreaming about this for so many years.

“My feelings on this last hole, I almost felt dizzy and I almost felt I wanted to throw up.”

According to the DP World Tour’s release, two other players were noted on the “bad times register,” but neither was penalized. During the first round, Adrian Otaegui took 58 seconds to hit as the first player to hit his approach shot on the eighth hole, which was 8 seconds longer than he was allotted. During the second round, Stefano Mazzoli took 76 seconds to hit as the first player to hit his approach shot on the ninth hole, which was 26 seconds longer than he was allotted. 

Slow play has been a talking point in pro golf. Two weeks ago, Jin Hee Im was penalized a stroke during the third round of the LPGA’s JM Eagle L.A. Championship, and Im lost in a three-player playoff the next day.   

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Cameron Young, in the end, lost no ground. 

He may have also picked up a few followers. 

What unfolded before that was theater during Sunday’s final round of the PGA Tour’s Cadillac Championship. On his second shot on the second hole at Trump National Doral, Young placed his iron behind his ball, took his iron just over halfway back, then paused, then looked at his ball. He said it moved slightly forward. 

Young called for an official. In question was what moved the ball. Could it have been Young? Could it have been something else? Young was also leading by five. The official arrived, and Golf Channel mics picked up Young telling him that he didn’t know “for sure” whether he had caused the ball to move, before saying that he touched the grass and the ball rolled. The official told him he would be assessed a one-shot penalty. Young also asked for a video review, and the infraction wasn’t changed.  

In play in this scenario was rule 9.2b (2) of the Rules of Golf, which reads this way:

“The player, the opponent or an outside influence is treated as having caused the ball to move only if it is known or virtually certain to be the cause. If it is not known or virtually certain that at least one of these was the cause, the ball is treated as having been moved by natural forces. In applying this standard, all reasonably available information must be considered, which means all information the player knows or can get with reasonable effort and without unreasonably delaying play.”

And what does “known or virtually certain” mean? The Rules of Golf say this: “Known or virtually certain means more than just possible or probable. It means that either there is conclusive evidence that the event in question happened to the player’s ball, such as when the player or other witnesses saw it happen; or although there is a very small degree of doubt, all reasonably available information shows that it is at least 95 percent likely that the event in question happened.”

On the Golf Channel broadcast, announcer Steve Sands and analysts Smylie Kaufman and Curt Byrum said this:

Said Kaufman: “Most players in that situation will protect the field. And being able to sleep at night.” 

Said Sands: “But he said: ‘I wasn’t sure.’” 

Said Byrum: “By placing the club behind the ball, he wasn’t sure that’s what made the ball move or not. But … if you’re going to err on the side of caution, you’d have to call the penalty on yourself.” 

Said Kaufman: “I think you have to. Any time you put your club behind the golf ball and the ball moves and you touch the ground, you have to assume that’s what it was.”

Of course, Young could have also said nothing about the ball movement, a thought that wasn’t lost on on-course analyst Roger Maltbie. 

“Makes you proud to be a golfer,” he said on Golf Channel. “He’s the only guy that knew it. I think that’s very impressive.”

As was what followed. 

Young hit his third stroke to 13 feet. 

Then made the par putt.   

And his lead stayed at five. 

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The post Adam Scott does ‘a silly thing.’ He’s then hit with a rules penalty appeared first on Golf.

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Adam Scott says it was “such a silly thing to do.”

He said he’d never done it before in his career. 

He was also wondering what-if. 

Scott had finished his Cadillac Championship third round on Saturday, but a moment on Thursday lingered. Then, from the left rough on Doral’s 582-yard, par-5 8th hole, Scott hit his second shot — then backtracked after he learned that he hit the wrong ball, which is a no-no. From there, Scott took a two-stroke penalty, played his original ball and finished the hole with a double-bogey seven.    

Interestingly, the damage could have been significantly worse. Wrong balls are addressed in rule 6.3c in the Rules of Golf, which reads this way:

“In stroke play, the player must correct the mistake by continuing play with the original ball by playing it as it lies or taking relief under the Rules: The stroke made with the wrong ball and any more strokes before the mistake is corrected (including strokes made and any penalty strokes solely from playing that ball) do not count. If the player does not correct the mistake before making a stroke to begin another hole or, for the final hole of the round, before returning his or her scorecard, the player is disqualified.”

After the 8th on Thursday, Scott went on to shoot a four-over 76, then fired a 71 during Friday’s second round. On Saturday, he shot a bogey-free 66, and afterward, a reporter asked Scott how he was able to rebound from the wrong-ball sequence two days earlier. 

“Yeah, I mean, it’s such a silly thing to do,” he said. “I think it’s the first time I’ve ever done it in my career. That’s probably one of those things everyone ends up doing once. But an odd set of circumstances leading up to me not checking it, which I think I’ve done thousands of times. 

“To take two lumps there was, is tough, especially as you sit here now in the weekend and thinking if you’re two better you would be doing so well in the tournament.”

He then looked at things optimistically. 

“But golf can be cruel at times, and I’ve experienced plenty of other tough things on the course, and you just have to get on with it and do the best you can,” Scott said. 

“Luckily, it was like on the 8th hole and I had the rest of the day to try and salvage something out of it.”  

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The post Did slow-play rules penalty end up costing LPGA pro a victory? appeared first on Golf.

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Jin Hee Im hustled, jogging off the green on Saturday on El Caballero Country Club’s eighth hole following a birdie. “Off she goes to the ninth with a hop, skip and a jump,” announcer Grant Boone said on Golf Channel’s broadcast.   

The question is, though: What would have happened had Im played faster throughout the third round of the LPGA’s JM Eagle L.A. Championship?

Would she have won?

No one will ever know, of course — but the leaderboard would suggest so. On the 13th hole of Saturday’s third round, Im was hit with a one-stroke penalty for slow play, and a day later, Im, Hannah Green and Sei Young Kim needed a playoff to determine a winner after all three finished tied after regulation. For any of the three players, one stroke would have made the difference — including the one Im was assessed for slow play.  

After Sunday’s final round, Im talked with reporters, but was not asked about the penalty. GOLF.com attempted to reach LPGA communication officials for information on the penalty, but a message has not been returned. 

Those viewing the L.A. Championship on Golf Channel learned about the penalty as Im played the 17th hole during the third round. During the fourth round, the infraction was noted several times on the broadcast, including during the playoff, which Green won. Said Boone: “And you go back to yesterday, Jin Hee Im was penalized one stroke for slow play. And you got the butterfly effect in play here — you never know what would have happened had she been one stroke lower entering the day. That stroke certainly does loom large here.” Analyst Morgan Pressel then added: “It’s been impressive the way that she’s been able to bounce back after finding out yesterday about that penalty.”

Notably, the LPGA announced a new “pace of play policy” in February of 2025. Under the new guidelines, if a player exceeds a time allotment by 1-5 seconds, she will receive a fine. Should a player take 6-15 seconds over the allotment, she will be hit with a one-stroke penalty. Finally, if a player takes 16 or more seconds than they are allowed, a two-stroke penalty will be charged. (The LPGA’s complete policy can be found here.)

It was unclear how many slow-play penalties have been called since last February. Before the LPGA’s season-ending event last year, Golfweek’s Beth Ann Nichols reported that three players received one-stroke penalties, and two players received two-stroke penalties. 

Im’s penalty was also discussed on Monday on Golf Channel (and you can watch the clip here). There, Boone said Im didn’t protest being penalized. 

“At the end of the day, once Sunday got there,” he said, “it was over and it was on to golf.”

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Imagine this scenario: You’re in a match with your buddies, and one of them hits an approach shot that finished just off the green. The ball is on the fringe and your opponent should be able to putt it. The only problem is, there’s a sprinkler head directly between his ball and the hole.

In my experience, most golfers assume that because the sprinkler head interferes their line of play, it means they are entitled to free relief. But according to the Rules of Golf, relief in this scenario is not legal.

A sprinkler head falls under an “Abnormal Course Condition” (Rules 16.1). And when it comes to this soft of obstruction, relief is only permissible if the ball touches the abnormal course condition or if the abnormal course condition physically interferes with the player’s area of intended stance or area of intended swing. In the case of a sprinkler head being in the line of your putt from off the green, none of these criteria would be met — and relief would not be legal.

However, if Local Rule F-5 is in place (which is often the case on the PGA Tour), free relief would be granted. According to the local rule, “if the aprons or fringes of putting greens are cut short enough that putting from off the green is likely to be a common choice of stroke, immovable obstructions that are close to the putting green may interfere with such strokes. In that case, the Committee can choose to give an extra relief option under Rule 16.1 when a player’s ball lies in the general area and an immovable obstruction close to the putting green is on the player’s line of play.”

So, next time you’re in a match with your buddies, be sure to specify if Local Rule F-5 is in play. If it isn’t, you won’t be able to take free relief when a sprinkler head interferes with your putt from off the green.

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The post Tour pro blows rules whistle on himself. Then ‘a bit of good karma’ came appeared first on Golf.

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Only one person, Matt Wallace says, saw him accidentally move his golf ball. 

Or so he thought. 

The golf gods, remember, see all. 

The divine sequence played out Friday during the Valspar Championship’s second round, where Wallace shoved his tee ball right and into the pine straw on the Copperhead Course’s par-5 11th hole. Delicacy was needed. Wallace said his caddie, Jamie Lane, warned him, too. But a wayward twig forced Wallace to hover his club at address, he said, and as he waggled it, his ball relocated.  

Uh-oh. 

Wallace called for an official. He also said he’d never made his ball before in such a way. 

“Didn’t know whether it was in the action of my swing or anything,” he said afterward, “but I definitely touched it, and then the ball moved from that.”

Still, Wallace said no one else saw the violation. At the time, he was also two-over for the tournament and fighting to make the cut. You know the options in front of him. An ethical dilemma played out, at least in a golf sense. 

But so be it, Wallace said. And he took his one-stroke penalty. 

“You’d hope that everyone’s like that,” Wallace said. 

“Yeah. You kind of — you’re not just doing it for yourself though, even though it’s such an individual sport. You’re doing it to protect the rest of the field. You’re doing it for your caddie, your team, your family. I would rather miss the cut doing something like that by one shot, and then giving it my all for the rest, than making it and knowing something’s happened. So I called it on myself.

“And then I made a few birdies.”

Yeah, so about that golf gods thing.

After the penalty, Wallace hit his third shot to the left of the green, chipped on and made a par. “Obviously very much needed at the time,” Wallace said. Then he birdied 14, a par-4, on a 22-foot putt. Then he birdied 15, a par-3, after hitting his tee shot to 6 feet. Then he birdied 17, also a par-3, after rolling in a 27-footer. 

And a par on 18, a par-4, gave him a round of three-under 68 and a two-round total of one-under, which was good enough for the weekend. 

“Yeah,” Wallace said, “maybe a bit of good karma coming my way.”

You never know who’s watching, after all. 

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