My friend and subscriber to HomeOnTheCourse, Bill Miller, and I are playing in our club's major member/member tournament this weekend. After losing our first nine hole match on Friday, we won the next two and started thinking good thoughts. Then yesterday we had bogeyitis in our first nine-hole match of the day and then lost the last hole of the second match to give our opponents a tie. We will be pretty much playing out the string in today's final two matches.
Yesterday was not a total loss. It never is when you learn something, and I learned two things related to rules during our first match against Bob and Jeff. On hole 15, the sixth of our match, since we played the back nine, Jeff took a practice swing from under a tree. His club nicked a branch, a single small leaf fell to the ground as a result, and he called a stroke penalty on himself. Later on the 17th hole, Bob hit Jeff's ball to the green, thinking it was his; Jeff did not stop him because he thought his ball was farther down the fairway, not realizing that was my partner Bill's provisional ball (Bill thought he had hit his second out of bounds but found he had not).
When I returned home last night, I did a little research. In the first case, Jeff actually called an unnecessary penalty on himself. Yes, Rule 13-2 indicates that you may not improve your lie by consciously removing leaves, branches or other indigenous growing things. But the rules of golf are subject to "decisions" that are made on the tough grey areas, and Ruling 13-2/22 points out cases in which accidentally knocking down leaves would not improve a player's lie and, therefore, no penalty would ensue. Jeff clearly had not intended to improve his lie, nor had he done so even unintentionally (What is one small leaf in a forest of them?). Jeff's honesty to a fault did not affect the outcome of our match; I just hope he didn't have any side action on his score.
In the other case in which Bob hit Jeff's ball, Bill and I were convinced the hole was ours by default (although winning the hole would not have affected the outcome, just the margin of the loss). For hitting the wrong ball, Bob was definitely out of the hole but, according to Rule 15-2, Jeff could replace his ball at the spot from which Bob hit it and proceed without penalty. The sins of one partner are not visited upon the other, although given the way I've played this weekend, Bill might argue with that.