Austin Eckroat appeared to sink a 20-foot putt for birdie Sunday at The Players Championship in Florida — only to have it wiped off the board in a rarely enforced timing rule.
On the par-5 11th hole at TPC Sawgrass, Eckroat, 25, left the ball on the hole’s edge, where it sat for about 30 seconds — and then fell in, to the gallery’s roar.
As the ball sat on the cup’s edge, Eckroat casually made his way to the hole. He appeared to stare down the ball and the hole for about 13 seconds until it finally dropped in, triggering a chorus of cheers.
But because the ball took over 10 seconds to drop in the hole after Eckroat reached it, a stroke was added to his score, and Eckroat walked away from 11 with only a par.
Eckroat, who ranks No. 48 and won his first PGA Tour title, the Cognizant Classic, this month, smiled and waved to the crowd when the ball finally fell.
But under golf rules, when a player’s ball overhangs the lip of the hole, a player is allowed “a reasonable time” to reach the hole and 10 more seconds to wait to see whether the ball falls.
If the ball falls in that waiting time, the player has “holed out with the previous stroke.” If it doesn’t, the ball is treated as being at rest, and if it falls before it’s played, the player has “holed out with the previous stroke, but gets one penalty stroke added to the score of the hole.”
In Eckroat’s case, as it took over 10 seconds to fall in, the ball was considered “at rest,” and he was hit with the penalty stroke.
PGA rules were clearly not enforced in the hit 1980 comedy “Caddyshack,” when protagonist Danny Noonan left a key putt short.
But that’s when the groundskeeper, played by Bill Murray, set off a series of explosives aimed at killing a course gopher. The pesky rodent survived, and the putt fell about 54 seconds later — and the stroke counted.
