Can I Get a Ruling: Golf Rules Revealed Through Others' Mistakes - Hardcover

by Dave Marrandette (Author)

Can I Get a Ruling? offers entertaining and thought-provoking golf moments on the pro tour that will stir your sense of justice and challenge your own knowledge of the rules. You'll share the players' frustrations - and other times feel perplexed by their actions and the consequences. You'll see again that the mightiest titans that even strode the green are still like us - sometimes impatient, sometimes forgetful, sometimes exasperated at his or her own stupidity, sometimes just plain mad. And, like us, sometimes right on the money.

Front Jacket

Dave Marrandette's Can I Get a Ruling? Shares a conclusion about the rules of golf that the producers of TV's "Cops" and "Law & Order" hold about the laws of the land: They are more interestingly observed when broken. Considered abstractly, golf rules range from self-evident to law clerk-level complex. But when they are revealed through actual mishaps on the fairway, they become fascinating.

Most of the vignettes Marrandette has selected are from the past 50 years--the era of televised golf. But while you may recognize some of the names and even some of the moments, you'll see them in a new way through the prism of golf rules. They are all great golf moments and entertaining stories, but reading and considering them here may also improve your own mental golf game.

A sample ruling:
Chip Beck was tied for the lead during the third round of the 1992 Greater Greensboro Open when he pull-hooked his tee shot on the 14th. When he found his ball it had come to rest next to an out-of-bounds stake. Without thinking, Beck pulled the stake and began to prepare for his next shot. As he stood there with stake in hand, it dawned on him that maybe he should not have removed it. He replaced the stake and finished out the hole with a bogey. But the deed had been done. Even the act of pulling out the stake is an infraction. In the end he had to add two penalty strokes, giving him a triple-bogey. Eventually he finished in a tie for third, but without the penalty he would have finished in second place alone. The cost: $81,563.

Back Jacket

Can I Get a Ruling? offers entertaining and thought-provoking golf moments on the pro tour that will stir your sense of justice and challenge your own knowledge of the rules. You'll share the players' frustrations - and other times feel perplexed by their actions and the consequences. You'll see again that the mightiest titans that even strode the green are still like us - sometimes impatient, sometimes forgetful, sometimes exasperated at his or her own stupidity, sometimes just plain mad. And, like us, sometimes right on the money.