Rules of Golf
Five-time PGA Tour winner Ben Crane DQs himself for bizarre rules sequence in hitting the wrong ball
Emilee Chinn
The opportunities for success now come few and far between for five-time PGA Tour winner Ben Crane. The 49-year-old, whose last win came in 2014, has played in only one event this season, in Puerto Rico, where he missed the cut, and competed only 16 times over the previous two years. So making it to the weekend at the Corales Puntacana Championship, being played opposite the signature RBC Heritage, was a big deal.
Unfortunately for Crane, the opportunity ended prematurely on Saturday because of a penalty he called on himself in a bizarre playing of the wrong ball.
On the eighth hole at the Corales Golf Course, Crane hit his tee shot into a hazard, arrived at where he believed the ball went in and took a drop to hit his third shot. But then he saw a second ball in the fairway and realized that his first shot must have caromed off the rocks and landed safety into play.
As Crane explained in a video he took of himself on X after the round, “Now I have two balls in the fairway, I assume that my ball hit on the right was the ... second one I put in play. And I play that golf ball and putt out and realize there's a big rock stuck on that ball. And you know you do a good job of identifying when I took my drop of what number I was playing. And I realized I had played the wrong golf ball through the hole.
"And realize I have to disqualify myself because I'm pretty sure that's the ball that I had abandoned, and I played it."
Crane’s mistake was a breach of Rule 6.3c(1) in the Rules of Golf, which states, “If you do not correct the mistake before making a stroke to begin another hole or, for the final hole of the round, before returning your scorecard, you are disqualified.” Having mistakenly played his original ball (which had a scuff mark from hitting off rocks), and not fixing the error before teeing off the next hole, the result, a DQ, was clear.