----- Original Message ----- From: D William Ggle <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Thursday, August 08, 2002 3:34 PM
> To quote you, > "Have suspected the USGA is off base so much that I dropped my membership > years ago and totally ignore them!!" > I hope you do not plan to play in any USGA sanctioned events. The rules of > golf are the rules. Do you play selective rules, > ie. I do not like to play the ball as it lies, so I always move it, or the > oput of bounds rule is unfair so I play it like a lateral hazard. You might > not like the rules, but if you ignore them you are cheating. Golf is a game > that relies on the integrity of the players. You are correct, of course, in the most literal sense. That does not mean that people who play by other rules on the course have no integrity. IMHO, the USGA is an ostrich. Public course and non-elite golfers are not visible to them, so they don't exist. Now for a touch of reality... Where I live, there is golf and there is "league golf". Almost all competitive golfers around here, save the members of private clubs, play in various leagues on public or daily-fee courses. Every league I know has a rule to play OB -- and even lost balls -- as a lateral hazard. It is downright annoying to EVERYBODY on the course to enforce the rules of golf as written on these courses; that is the reason for those league-golf rules. There is no loss of integrity when everybody agrees that those are the rules. But wait! The USGA does not allow that as a local rule. Not many people know this (I didn't until I started reading from "The Decisions"), but there are lots of things you CANNOT make a local rule. This very reasonable (IMHO) modification for busy courses is not allowed as a local rule. Can you say "ostrich"? I knew you could. The USGA can define the rules, but they can't define integrity. That is inherent in the golfer. And if the USGA continues acting like an ostrich in cases like this, they will lose all credibility (and thus all authority) in the cases where we need them most. Frankly, I think the USGA is trying to do the right thing in the COR wars, and is simply fumbling the ball every time they get near it. The real villains in this piece are the OEMs that began by ignoring the "no spring face" provision that has been in the rules forever, and is trying to blame the USGA now that they got caught. But as long as the USGA doesn't do right by its constituents in the obvious ways (like rules that make sense on public courses, or at least sample local rules that do instead of forbidding local rules that do), they are laying themselves open to losing other wars (like COR) big time. Just my 2c. DaveT PS - I also sent a nastygram to the USGA several years ago when I refused to renew my membership. If they read those letters, then my position is already known to them.
