Wyndham Clark Questions Complicated Golf Rule After Near Violation

A tricky golf rule nearly cost US Open champion Wyndham Clark last week at Bay Hill, sparking a heated debate about one of golf’s most confusing regulations.

The drama unfolded on the 3rd hole during the Arnold Palmer Invitational, when Clark’s drive landed, bounced up, and settled back into a small crater in the fairway.

Here’s where it gets interesting: If the ball had landed in someone else’s pitch mark, Clark would’ve had to play it as it lay. But since it was his own mark, he got to take a free drop.

“I was pretty surprised this was even an issue,” Clark said at this week’s Players Championship. “I hit it in the middle of the fairway, hit it on the green, and two-putted. What’s the problem?”

The confusion sparked plenty of social media chatter, with golf fans debating whether Clark had followed the rules correctly.

Turns out he did everything by the book. Golf’s Rule 16.3.a says you can take free relief if your ball ends up in its own pitch mark – but not someone else’s.

But Clark thinks the rule needs work.

“How are we supposed to know?” he asked. “We were 300 yards away. We didn’t see the ball bounce from that distance, and when we got up there, it was plugged.”

The world No. 8 raised a fair point about the practical challenges players face.

“If no one tells us and I get penalized for something I didn’t know happened, that seems pretty unfair,” he said. “Why are we making this so complicated?”

Clark, who finished second at last year’s Players Championship, is back at TPC Sawgrass this week looking for his first win of 2024. His best finish so far this year was T15 at The Sentry.

The incident highlights a bigger issue in golf: some rules that made sense in the pre-TV era might need updating for today’s high-tech world of instant replays and social media scrutiny.

“I wasn’t trying to cheat by any means,” Clark emphasized. “We just walked up, saw a plugged ball, and took the embedded ball rule.”