Columnist Dean Juipe: Tiger helps uncover golf revelation

Dean Juipe's column appears Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. His boxing notebook appears Thursday. Reach him at [email protected] or 259-4084.

The game of golf has changed and a pastime that has humbled millions for hundreds of years has suddenly become much easier to play.

Scoring is destined to go down and maybe already has in the past few days.

Golfers can now expect fewer temper tantrums on the course and a happier happy hour in the clubhouse. Handicaps will be slashed and everyone from professionals to novices will be able to trim a few strokes from their game.

This joyous turn of events is not the result of improvements in equipment or even modifications in instruction. It has nothing to do with how much you can afford to spend on graphite shafts or oversized heads.

It's simply the gracious result of a rule-book revelation.

That's because, as of last Sunday, golfers seem to have been given something of a free rein to remove obstacles that may be impeding their path to the green. Thanks to the PGA Tour's Orlando Pope, an on-course supervisor who ruled Tiger Woods could solicit members of his gallery to move a 1,000-pound boulder that was blocking his route to the green, golfers everywhere will be reorganizing the many impediments they come across on or slightly off the course.

The ruling came on the 13th hole during the final round of the Phoenix Open and it surprised even Woods. After hitting his tee shot into a gravelly area laden with decorative rocks, he asked almost jokingly if he could push aside a boulder that was all but casting a shadow on his ball.

Amazingly, Pope said OK and Woods solicited a dozen members of his gallery to muscle the gigantic rock out of his way. Woods then birdied a hole that only moments earlier had bogey written all over it.

The ruling was correct as the boulder was not "solidly embedded" in the ground. But if a thousand-pound rock isn't embedded, almost nothing is and that destroys the implied intent of the rule if not the rule itself.

"You can't dig rocks out, but if you can pick it up and get it out of the way and it doesn't cause an undue delay and you're not in a hazard, then you can do it," said Stu Reid, a Las Vegan and a rules expert who has worked 37 national championships. "The rule allows Tiger to do what he did. If a rock can be removed, the player, in fact, can move it."

Holy cow! This may not be a change in the rules per se, yet it brings an increased awareness to an area almost every golfer thought was verboten. Very few, if any, golfers realized that even under championship conditions the player was allowed to do this type of housecleaning.

Reid says rules 23-1/2 and 23-1/3 specify that even large stones can be removed and that the player can receive assistance in promptly moving them.

He also predicts the rule will not be tweaked or altered, although he said it's already a hot topic on the Internet site he visits. What many of those people are saying is this: Now that we know we can adjust the landscape, we will.

Wait til this really sinks in. Delays or no delays, there's not a golfer out there who won't take advantage of this newly discovered and strangely permissive rule.

Maybe it's legal but it sure looks wrong.

And although they didn't see it at the time, those guys who came to Woods' aid the other day didn't realize the can of worms that was underneath that lovely boulder.

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