Furious Shane Lowry smashes up ground after plugged ball PGA rules controversy
Shane Lowry was on the wrong end of a horrible bit of bad luck as the conditions continued to get the headlines at the PGA Championship.
The Irishman found the 8th fairway but he also found another player’s pitchmark. From the outside it seemed unfeasible that he wouldn’t be able to get some relief but the rules state that it would only be the case if it was his own pitchmark. The problem was that it was another player’s pitchmark so Lowry was unable to reach the green from just 57 yards.
The Rules state: A player’s ball is embedded only if: It is in its own pitchmark made as a result of the player’s previous stroke, and part of the ball is below the level of the ground.
The ball was certainly below the level of the ground, the only problem was that it wasn’t his divot.
From there Lowry, who had smashed his tee shot 292 yards, could only advance it into a greenside bunker, from where he would drop a shot.
There was also a trademark outburst ‘f*** this place!’ before smashing the offending piece of turf to pieces.
— Golf Clips (@clips_golf) May 16, 2025
If this was a PGA Tour event then there’s little question that the players would be able to lift, clean and place the ball. Here we call it preferred lies, in the States they refer to it as playing the ball up.
But this is a Major and the authorities are loathed to put this ruling into place. Every player has been asked about it, needless to say they would like to be able to get rid of any mud, and the World No. 1 Scottie Scheffler gave as good an answer as anyone.
“When you think about the purest test of golf, I don’t personally think that hitting the ball in the middle of the fairway you should get punished for. On a course as good of conditioned as this one is, this is probably a situation in which it would be the least likely difference in playing it up because most of the lies you get out here are all really good. So I understand how a golf purist would be, oh, play it as it lies.
“But I don’t think they understand what it’s like literally working your entire life to learn how to hit a golf ball and control it and hit shots and control distance, and all of a sudden due to a rules decision that is completely taken away from us by chance. In golf, there’s enough luck throughout a 72-hole tournament that I don’t think the story should be whether or not the ball is played up or down. When I look at golf tournaments, I want the purest, fairest test of golf, and in my opinion maybe the ball today should have been played up.”
Scheffler was on the wrong end of a mud ball in his opening round, which led to a double-bogey at 16.
“I could have let that bother me when you got a mud ball and it cost me a couple shots. It cost me possibly two shots on one hole, and if I let that bother me, it could cost me five shots the rest of the round. But I was proud of how I stayed in there, didn’t let it get to me and was able to play some solid golf on a day in which I was a bit all over the place and still post a score.”
To his credit Lowry did play the next 10 holes in level par for a two-over aggregate but it was one too many and he missed the cut. How costly that bad rules break proved to be.
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