Out Of Bounds!?

I was watching Celebrity Golf from the 1940?s on the Golf Channel the other night, on a 400yd Par 4 hole Sam Snead hit his tee shot out-of-bounds, found the fairway with his reload, played a 7 iron to the green, two-putted, and was then credited with a bogey 5. Under today?s rules that would certainly have been a double bogey 6, so I checked on the web and discovered that the stroke and distance penalty for out of bounds was only introduced worldwide in 1951.

I bring this up because I consider the out-of-bounds penalty to be very strange indeed, it does nothing but try to stifle long hitters like ourselves, and was probably dreamt up by a bunch of sub-200yd straight drivers who were desperate to find a way to curb the big hitters of their time!

Harvey Penick made the point most eloquently in his Little Red Book:

?The most embarrassing thing you can do in golf is swing your driver on the tee and completely miss the ball.
For this humiliation, the penalty is one stroke.
However, if you smash a drive a long way but the ball lands an inch out of bounds, the penalty is stroke and distance, in effect, a two-shot punishment for what was nearly a good drive.?

I?m sure that if we could get the rule back to the way it was golf would become a more exciting game overnight, with the risk/reward equation once again favouring golfers who are prepared to go for it off the tee.

Phil ?The Power? Naylor