Here’s one of those golf rules that you likely never heard of even if you consider yourself a student of the rules. It’s Rule 33-2d. It states that the committee running a tournament can decide, if it determines that a course is no longer playable or that conditions have made it impossible to play the game, suspend play. But the committe also has the power to render any play that has already happened during said round completely null. In other words, the committee can, under rule 33-2d, wipe out an entire round of golf, even if some competitors have finished play for the day.
That’s what happened today at the RICOH Women’s British Open at Hoylake, England. Conditions started bad, with strong winds and rain, and simple grew worse. And even with more than 30 golfers finishing their rounds, the committee (in this case, the R and A) decided that things were so bad they were just going to wipe out all play and start again with a fresh second round tomorrow.
This has happened twice before on the LPGA, the LPGA tells us, the last time in 2003. Generally you just suspend play and pick up where the round was left off. Not this time.
Why the change? Well, it’s possible that the committee understood that the round today would not have re-started, and that the continuation of the second round would come Saturday. Saturday’s condition might have been much better, giving those golfers still on the course a remarkable advantage over those who had to suffer through today’s horrible winds. So better to wipe out the entire round and level the playing field a bit rather than worry about how far the competition was.
So it is now possible that whoever wins the Women’s British this year will have played five full rounds of golf, but only four will have counted. The moral of the story is, don’t play major championships in England in September, but with the Olympics this summer the LPGA and the R and A had little choice in the matter.
