Circumstantial evidence- Case closed!

This is a tale from this year’s NALG championship.  A true tale!

Life if full of interesting happenings.  In golf many unusual or hard-to-believe stories are occurring every day.  This is one from this year’s NALG championship in Fort Worth, Texas.

The 18th hole at the Golf Club at Champions Circle is an interesting par-5.  If you want to hit it into the fairway you need to carry over 200 yards and even then it is unlikely that you will reach the green unless you are a long hitter.  Many of our players this year chose a different route including the author.

We aimed down the 14th fairway as it was much safer.  The real challenge then occurred on the second shot as you needed to hit a high shot of about 150 yards over some trees in order to get a clear shot at the green.

One of my playing partners who shall remain nameless, hit his tee shot down the right side of hole #14.  My cart partner and I proceeded out to our 18th fairway.  When we got out there we looked back and saw this player trying to hit a wood in an attempt to reach the green.

You have to understand that there are some pretty tall trees on that line that he would have to carry.  He must have had something like 220 yards in so it was a risky shot.  We see him swing but don’t see any ball.  There is a creek and some medium length grass amongst the trees short of the green.  All four of us began a search but his ball could not be found.  All I found were a couple of Taylor Made Tour Responses.  His ball was a Pro V1X Left Dash with a recognizable marking.  He drops for a creek penalty and completed the hole.

Now the interesting part starts.

Since I was one of the early players that day I planned to take some videos of players that the NALG could use.  So I decided to go out to hole #17 to capture some shots into that shorter par-3.  As soon as I get there David Burczyk from Florida sees me and said the guy I was playing with hit his ball.  David had hit his ball down the left side of hole #14 when my group was playing hole #18.  He knew his ball was in the fairway.

When he got to the location where he expected his ball to be it was nowhere to be found.  He remembered the player in my group hitting from the same general area but didn’t think anything about it.  When he couldn’t find his ball he was even starting to question himself about whether he really saw his ball stop in the fairway.  He did happen to find a Pro V1X Left Dash with a recognizable marking on it that he found in some tall grass near a small creek on that hole.  He wasn’t sure it would have been playable.  He handed the ball to me.  I immediately knew it was the same type of ball and marking that my playing partner was playing.

The next morning on the practice green I walked up to this player and showed him the ball and asked it if was his.  He said it looked like it and then I told him what happened.  He was baffled and couldn’t explain it.

Later that afternoon in the clubhouse I was talking with Burczyk and he said he was hitting a Taylor Made Tour Response with a blue mark.  I was thinking he was referring to one of those balls with the wide color ring around it so it didn’t “ring a bell”.  He said it wasn’t one of those balls.  It was just an all-white version but had a blue highlight over the text on the equator of the ball.

I told him to wait a minute as I wanted to retrieve something from my car.  I proceeded to show him the two Tour Response balls I had found in the creek area the day before.  Sure enough, when we looked at one it had a blue highlight over the Tour Response text.  He identified it as HIS ball.

Now to be clear, the player who played the wrong ball had no idea that he did so.  And since the only balls we found were not the one he thought he was playing it never occurred to us at the time that he could have played a wrong ball.  But after over 24 hours, the evidence had become clear.

After discussing with the tournament organizers, no action was taken.  If the Rules of Golf would have been applied, the player would have been disqualified after the fact since the evidence was clear after being discovered – and the tournament had not yet concluded.  Luckily this did not have any effect on the results.

This just goes to show that you never know what will happen on a golf course!  Even in golf the facts sometimes come to light - even the next day!