Tag: Seonghyeon Kim

Rules of golf: Slow play, a missed re-start, bad advice and even fire ants highlight 2021

Some rules violations hit harder than others, while others just make you scratch your head.

Just when you think you’ve seen it all on the golf course, something else comes along to baffle fans, players, and rules officials alike.

The rules of golf can come up and bite you (pun intended: see fire ants below), if you’re not paying attention. Other times, weird things just happen. Further still, sometimes golfers simply don’t know a particular rule.

New rules of golf were rolled out on Jan. 1, 2019, but most of what trips golfers up continues to be of the tried-and-true variety.

As we get set to close out the year that was 2021, here’s a rundown of some of the memorable moments that involved rules violations.

Golfweek’s Steve DiMeglio, Beth Ann Nichols, Adam Schupak and Adam Woodard contributed to this article.

Watch: Evil 360-lip-out eventually drops but did it count?

Korea’s Seonghyeon Kim was assessed a one-stroke penalty for waiting too long for a putt to drop.

Korea’s Seonghyeon Kim endured one of those heart-crushing misses: a 3-foot, 4-inch putt that did a full 360-degree trip around the cup and hung on the lip at the 72nd hole of the CJ Cup in Las Vegas on Sunday.

Kim did what any golfer would have done. He stared at the hole in disbelief and I tried to will the ball to drop for a finishing birdie. A golfer is granted a “reasonable amount of time to reach the hole plus 10 seconds,” according to The Rules of Golf.

Kim’s putt eventually dropped just before he tapped it in for what seemingly would have been a birdie to finish at 17-under 271. There was only one problem: it took a total of 26 seconds from the time when his ball stopped above the cup to the moment it dropped into it.

Kim was assessed a one-stroke penalty (in violation of Rule 13.3a); that brings us to the second rule violation. Since Kim already had signed his card, combined with his failure to include an unknown penalty, Kim was only assessed a one-stroke penalty, turning his birdie into a par, instead of disqualification (Exception to Rule 3.3).

The penalty cost him $17,000 in prize money and some non-member FedEx Cup points.

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