Every weekend golfer has been there: you hear the loud thwack of ball on bark, you all stare at the branches, and the ball just… never comes down. Turns out PGA Tour players get the exact same treatment from trees. They just get a rules official and a TV camera to go with it.
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The ball went up. It did not come down.
Friday, second round of the Baycurrent Classic at Yokohama Country Club in Japan. Sahith Theegala stood on the par-4 11th, the hardest hole on the course, and pulled his tee shot left into the trees.
“We all heard it hit the tree really loud, but nobody ever saw the ball come down,” Theegala explained in a video the PGA Tour posted afterward. “I guess it popped up in the air and just embedded itself in some leaves and branches.”
Theegala and his playing partners, Jordan Smith and Tomohiro Ishizaka, walked up and stared into the canopy. Somewhere up there was a golf ball, and somewhere in the rule book there’s a problem with that.
You have to prove it’s yours
A ball stuck in a tree is perfectly playable under the rules. You can take an unplayable drop and keep moving, but only if you can identify the ball as yours. Otherwise it’s a lost ball, and that means going back to the tee.
So Theegala called a rules official over and did what any of us would do with a rangefinder: he pointed it into a tree. He marks a big chunk of his golf ball for exactly this reason, and he still couldn’t make out a single marking through the leaves.
Plan B: Throw things at the tree
This is where tour golf turned into your Saturday foursome. Theegala’s caddie, Carl Smith, started chucking an umbrella up into the branches to knock the ball loose. Jordan Smith’s caddie, Josh, joined in. Two professional caddies, at a PGA Tour event, flinging umbrellas into a tree.
Did it work? Sort of. After enough attempts, they knocked down enough of the tree for Theegala to finally identify his ball. But Carl’s umbrella got stuck up there too.
Final tree inventory: one golf ball, one umbrella. Golf takes balls. Apparently it takes umbrellas too.
The ruling, and the damage
Once the ball was ID’d, Theegala took an unplayable under Rule 19.2c. For a ball stuck in a tree, the reference point is the spot on the ground directly below it. One-stroke penalty, drop, then an iron to the left side of the green and two putts for bogey. Considering the alternative was a trip back to the tee, that’s a win.
Theegala and trees have history this year, too. Back at the PGA Championship in May, an approach shot of his clipped a tree near a fairway bunker and was never found. That one was a lost ball, a stroke-and-distance penalty, and a triple bogey. Next to that, a bogey and an umbrella in a tree in Japan counts as progress.
The lesson for the rest of us? Mark your ball, and mark it big. When the Sahith Theegala tree incident is the most relatable thing a tour pro has done all season, it’s a reminder that the trees don’t care what tour you play on.
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