Off the Tee, Into the Tree

So I'm sitting here playing some armchair golf by watching the Farmers Insurance Open on the PGA Tour in Torrey Pines, CA. Ryan Palmer (no relationship to Arnold Palmer although many people assume he is) hit a ball into a Eucalyptus tree and it lodged in the branches. As Golfer Newbies we are more likely than most to hit our balls off the fairways and into the trees, so I looked up the rules related to golf balls in trees. There are three options related to your ball being in a tree:

1. You can climb the tree and play it where it lays, which then does not cost you a stroke, but is an unlikely scenario, although there have been cases on the PGA tour when this has indeed occurred.


2. If you can positively identify your ball, you can play the ball two club lengths from the spot on the ground directly under the ball in the tree and take a one stroke penalty.


3. If you can't play the ball in the tree and can't positively identify it as yours within five minutes, you have to take a penalty stroke and go back to the place the last stroke was played.

In this case, Ryan could not positively identify his ball, in part because there were several balls in the tree. So, he had to go back to the previous stroke location, which in this case was the tee. This did not do anything for his game today.

An interesting side note: the commentators said that one of these trees was cut down last week following damage from all the storms they had in California and they found 500! balls lodged in it. Amazing.