8 Accidental Ways Your Golf Clubs Become Illegal!

Deputy Editor Joel Tadman runs through the 8 innocuous ways the clubs in your bag could become illegal!

► Chapters
Introduction 0:00-0:41
Having too many clubs 0:41
Club damaged 2:59
Making adjustments mid round 4:46
Non-conforming attachment 5:47
Repair or replace a club damaged in anger 7:35
Adding substance to the clubface 8:54
Old grooves 10:29
Putting grip on wedge 12:37

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► Video shot on location at Burghley Park Golf Club in Stamford, Lincs. Visit https://www.burghleyparkgolfclub.co.uk/ for more information.

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Now, the rules of golf can be incredibly difficult to get your head around, but don’t worry. I’ve done all the hard work for you. I’ve trolled through hundreds of pages of the rule book to bring you the eight ways you could be making your golf clubs illegal. Now, it’s really easy to do. A lot of you, I’m sure, will have fallen foul of some of these. And look out for number three, cuz I’m pretty confident everyone has done that one at some point. We’re here at the beautiful Bley Park Golf Club in Stanford, Lincolnshire. Let’s get into it. [Music] [Music] Now, the first way your golf clubs could become illegal starts even before you’ve teed off. And this is one that so many golfers fall foul of. It’s just having too many clubs in your bag. As we know, under the rules of golf, you’re only allowed a maximum of 14 clubs. And often golfers, we like to chop and change clubs in certain areas of the bag. Me, for example, I like to chop between my hybrid and my two iron depending on the conditions that I’m playing in. But I’m not allowed to have both. If I had both, that would be 15 clubs and I’ll be in for some serious penalties. Now, the rules say that if you accidentally get to the first te before your round and you realize you’ve got an extra club in your bag, you need to take the appropriate steps to take that club out of play. You need to declare it to your playing partners. Ideally, you would leave that club behind so it’s not in your bag. If that’s not possible, you need to sort of make an indication that it’s not in play. Maybe turn it round in your bag with the grip pointing up. If you’ve got a buggy, maybe leave it on the floor with a buggy so it’s not actually in your bag. So, you’ve taken the appropriate step to let everyone know that this club is out of play and obviously you’re not allowed to then use it during the round, but you’re not going to incur any penalty shots if you go through this process. Now, problems start to occur if you tee off and then realize you’ve got an extra club in your bag. That’s when you’re going to start incurring some penalty shots. So, say for example, you tee off on the first hole, you’re walking down, you look in your bag, realize, “Ah, I’ve got an extra club in my bag. What is the penalty?” So, you then need to take the same steps. So, realize, choose the club that you don’t want to use. Turn it over, put it in your bag, declare it to your playing partners, let them know that that club is out of play. But because you’ve already teed off, you incur a two shot penalty. Now, a penalty occurs here. Two shots per hole in stroke play with a maximum of four shots. So, if you tee off from the second hole and then realize you’ve got an extra club in your bag, that’s a four shot penalty. If you rewind back to Ian Woo at the Open Championship at Royal Liith and St. Ans, got to the second TE, realized he had an extra driver in his bag. He hadn’t teed off on the second, so he only got a two-shot penalty, but it did cost him the open. So, make sure you check your bag before you round. Make sure there’s only 14 clubs in there, and you won’t incur any of those pesky penalty shots. [Music] Oh dear, that wasn’t very good. I’ve just noticed when I hit that, there’s a little bit of a rattling noise on this club. And obviously, all modern drivers these days have some sort of adjustability. Now, these adjustable features are designed that they shouldn’t reasonably be able to come loose during the course of a round or in reasonable play. And actually, they should technically be rendered unusable if the screw is not in place. So, it’s incredibly unlikely that the adjustability features on your drivers would come loose during the course of a round. However, if uh any part of the club does become loose during a round, it could be that the club becomes nonconforming. So you need to make sure that you uh take appropriate steps to restore the club to its original position. Actually any sort of part of a driver that comes loose is technically class as damaged. The the definition of damage on a driver is pretty broad and it basically means the club condition has changed from what it was previously. So you can actually take appropriate steps to say I’ve got the Titus GT3 driver here. You can see say this track has become loose. You make sure you get your wrench tool. Hopefully, you keep it with you um in your bag in case you need it. Give that a tighten and make sure you hear those clicks. That’s going to give you that peace of mind that that is properly tightened in place. It’s not going to come out again. Um and that’s restored to its original position and you can carry on using that club. So, take away from this, maybe on the first te, make sure you listen for any rattles. If you do notice it, give the club a tighten and that means you can carry on using this club during the round. [Music] Now, let’s say during the course of a round, you’re not really happy with how your drivers performing. Maybe the ball flight’s going a bit too high and the wind’s getting up and you want to knock it down. The temptation might be to get your driver out between holes, get your wrench out and make an adjustment that would alter the playing characteristics of the club. maybe knock some loft off to bring the ball flight down and hopefully make it perform a little bit better. Unfortunately, that is not allowed in the rules of golf. You’re not allowed to make any adjustments to the club during a round. You can do it before a round before you tee off, that’s absolutely fine, but not during a round. If you do it during a round, you will be disqualified. Now, if you do make an adjustment to the club, but then restore it back to what it was before without hitting a shot with it, that’s absolutely fine. But if you hit a shot with it, having changed the settings of that particular club, that adjustable feature, you’re going to be disqualified. Ah, now I’ve just noticed, as you can see, I have got one of the reflective stickers I was using to test uh this club on a phototric launch monitor. Now, we know these stickers are used by those types of launch monitors to capture what the club is doing uh through impact. So, a lot of golfers put a sticker on the face here to monitor club head speed if they’re trying to increase their club head speed. There’s a few other reasons why you might put a sticker like this on the face as well, but I was doing some testing earlier. It’s on there. And the rules of golf say that something like this is a nonconforming external attachment. So, um, if you do discover that you’ve got a sticker on your face like this, you’re not allowed to hit shots with that in place. So, you must take steps to take it off. And if you’ve hit any shots with this sticker on a face, you’re going to get disqualified. Unfortunately, we saw that happen with Rory Sabatini a few years ago after the round, realized that he had some stickers on his 3-wood. He knew that he hit shots with that club during the round and therefore he was disqualified. But if you do discover you’ve got a sticker like this on the club face of one of your clubs, but you haven’t hit a shot with it, you’re okay. All you need to do is take the sticker off. There you go. Get rid of that. And now that club is conforming and you’re allowed to use it for the upcoming shot, which I’ve got here, which is good cuz I’ve got a 7, which is the perfect club for this shot. Just a quick break to say if you are enjoying the video, please do click the like button. It really helps us out. And do subscribe to the channel if you haven’t already so you don’t miss any of our other videos. And comment down below. Have you fallen f of any of these rules? Have you got any questions about the rules of golf when it comes to equipment and changes you can make? I will get our expert to reach out to you and answer any of your questions. Now, another way your golf club could become illegal is if you damage it in anger and then attempt to repair or replace it. The rules of golf are very clear. If you damage your club in anger, so maybe you slam it into your knee, slam it into the ground, you’re not allowed to repair or replace that club, and if you do, you’re going to be penalized. You are allowed to continue using it. It’s still conforming in that regard, but you can’t repair or replace it. If you damage a club, whether you’re taking on a shot like this where, who knows, when I hit it, the club might wrap against a tree and snap in half. I am allowed to repair or replace it under the rules of golf. pretty unlikely you’re going to be able to do that in a club match if unlikely to have a spare seven iron available to you. But the rules of golf do allow you to do that. So, as long as you’re not breaking a club in anger, you are allowed to replace it if you need to. The rules are in your favor, but I’m a bit worried about this one. I’m a bit hesitant that we’re going to break this club here. Nearly hit the camera. Luckily, the club has become completely unscathed there. we’ve got away with it. Um, but there you go. If you do damage a club in anger and try and repair or replace it, your club will become illegal. So, make sure you don’t do that during a round of golf. Now, another way you can make your golf club illegal is by drawing lines on the club face with a substance that affects how the ball performs, how it flies, how it spins, how it performs through the air. Now, we’ve seen this before. I don’t know if you remember Hideki Matsiama got disqualified at the memorial back in 2022 I think when one of his team applied a white substance on the face to help with his alignment. Now that substance was a white out material or a tipex we have over here which s protrudes slightly from the surface of the face and it was deemed that that would have an impact on how the ball would come off the face. Now, it’s worth pointing out that you are allowed to draw lines on the club base to help you with alignment, whatever it might be. But those lines have to be very thin and not protrude in any way from the surface of the club base. So, if you if you want to draw a line on your club face with a Sharpie, for example, to help you with alignment, just like that, you’re absolutely fine to do that. But if this the thing that you’re using to apply that line is going to protrude from the face and affect the how the ball comes off the face, then you’re going to get into a problem. And if you hit a shot with a club like that during a round, you will be disqualified. If you remember Ricky Fowler um a few years ago drew some white lines on his driver. Looked very interesting. But that was perfectly fine because the the lines were not sticking out from the face. So a line like that with a Sharpie could well help you with alignment perfectly fine within the rules of golf. But anything that sticks out a little bit is going to be deemed non-conforming and make that club illegal. Right, come closer. The next way your golf clubs could become illegal is down to these. The grooves on your wedges. Now, there are rules in terms of how the grooves need to be a certain depth, a certain width, and also have no sharp edges or raised lips. Now, this is not something you need to worry about. The manufacturers have very tight tolerances when it comes to manufacturing the grooves on their wedges and making sure they are conforming. And then actually you can get some manufacturers that make illegal grooves to give you that extra spin around the greens that you can’t use in competitions but will rip the cover off the golf ball if that’s something that’s important to you. But what’s interesting about the groove rule is that basically any wedges that predate 2010 are probably going to have illegal grooves in it. So, if your wedges are very old, there’s a chance they could be non-conforming. That said, there is a little bit of leeway when it comes to uh groove rule and unless you’re playing an expert competitions, you’re probably going to be fine. And there is a a web a website which I’ll put in the description where you can check your grooves on the database to see if the wedges that you’ll carry are non-conforming. But I’ll just read out what the USGA website says about it. face. It says the USG website states that the vast majority of golfers can continue to carry clubs manufactured prior to 2010 until at least 2024. Obviously, we’re beyond 2024 now, but clearly they’re not that bothered about whether you’re using non-conforming grooves in your wedges, especially at club level. I think you’re going to be fine. And as I said, if your wedges are before 2010, you probably want to think about upgrading anyway because you’re going to be reducing the amount of spin you’re getting around the greens. I’ve got a brand new wedge here, which hopefully has conforming grooves and will hopefully still give me a good amount of spin on these types of shot around the green. Not my best effort there, but there you go. That’s another way your golf clubs could become illegal. If your wedges predate 2010, there’s a chance they are, but there’s a generally a lot of leeway there and you’re probably going to be fine. Now, we’re often taught that a putting stroke would be a good thing to try and implement when you’re chipping in terms of taking the wrist out of the action and having a nice smooth controlled action to try and get better results when you’re chipping around the green. But that doesn’t mean that you can go to extreme lengths and put a putter grip on your wedge that you chip with. The rules of golf say that all grips, the cross-section of all grips must be circular on all clubs apart from your putter. You’ll notice on a lot of putter grips, they have often a slightly off center or off circular um cross-section and often a flat front edge here to help you with your putting, but you can’t take that a step too far and have a grip like this on your wedge to help you with your chip shots around the green. All your grips on your wedges must be completely circular, as you can see I’ve got here. So, don’t go putting putter grips on wedges. That’s going to deem your clubs illegal under the rules of golf. Thank you for watching. I hope you enjoyed the video. As said, do click the like button if you liked it. And if you’re after any more rules of golf advice, do check out the Golf Monthly website because there’s a whole host of articles there that are really going to help you out regardless of what situation you find yourself in on the golf course. That’s all for me here at Bley Park Golf Club. See you next time.