Do you play golf just for pleasure, trying to shoot your lowest
score and beat your regular playing buddies? Or do you enjoy the
excitement and buzz of competing against a wider field in tournament
play, either at your country club (or local course) or even at high
profile events?
The question is, should you or your caddie use a
laser range finder to help you determine the distance to the green, or
any other object on the course, for example water hazards or bunkers?
Some people might consider this to be cheating, however is this just
another albeit high tech way of calculating distances. Golfers or their
caddies have been measuring course distances hole by hole forever. The
golf course even supplies a detailed map of each hole on the course,
showing driving distances, distance to any hazards, distance to the pin
etc. Even on the course itself there are permanent distance markers
(colored markers on the fairway) and a lot of courses have a 150 yard to
the center of the green marker (sometimes a stake at the edge of the
fairway or even a particular bush is strategically planted on every
hole).
While using a
range finder when playing a Sunday morning
round with your buddies may help you, I'm sure it won't be long before
they're borrowing it to measure their long drives or distance to the
pin. Obviously if you only ever play at your country club and don't
visit other courses then you will have a lot of local knowledge of your
course and probably a
range finder device is not for you. But what if
you enter competitions at your club or play in competitively at a
selection of courses, can you use a
range finder to help you?
Well
according to the USPGA Rules of Golf you can, I searched for the
question "Do
laser range finders conform?" and the answer was:
"Yes,
provided that the local Committee (i.e., committee in charge of a
particular competition, golf course, Rules of Golf Committee, etc.) has
established a Local Rule allowing players to use devices that measure
distance only. Use of devices that gauge or measure other conditions
that might affect a player's play (e.g., wind, gradient, temperature,
etc.) is not permitted, regardless of whether any such additional
functions are actually used."
So we have discovered that it's
legal to use
golf range finders, just make sure that if you intend to
use one during tournament play pick a basic model that doesn't have all
the features that the USPGA regard as illegal, and only measures
distance, you have been warned! The
laser range finders with all the
cleaver stuff like slope technology (this adjusts the distance to take
account of any change in gradient), will obviously help you learn to
gauge distances for yourself, and is OK for unofficial just for pleasure
rounds of golf. However the big thing here is that you have to know how
far you can hit a golf ball with each club in the bag, it's useless
information knowing the distance is 225 yards, but you don't which club
to select to hit the ball that distance.
I recommend that if you
decide to invest in one of these devices that you first use it on the
driving range to determine your average distances with each club, before
trying it for real on the course.
Finally it's up to the
individual golfer to decide if they wish to embrace the new technology
or stick to traditional methods of determining the distances on the
course.