The big silver ball in Times Square falls only once a year.
But the small dimpled ball that golfers use? It is dropped every season, on courses near and far.
The situations vary. Golfers take free drops and penalty drops, usually within one or two club lengths of a reference point. What doesn’t change is the procedure itself.
Rule 14.3 requires the ball to be dropped correctly: straight down from knee height. No throwing. No roles. You don’t have to spin the ball in your fingers to try to influence how it lands. The ball should not touch your body on the way down.
Simple enough. That wasn’t always the case.
For much of the game’s history, dropping the ball involved a bit of choreography. Before 1984, players had to face the hole and drop the ball over their shoulder. Go back even further and you’ll find other variations where you look at the gap and fall over the head between them.
In 2019, the procedure changed again, this time to knee height. The goal was practical: to speed up the game and improve consistency. From a lower height, the ball was less likely to end up in the sand, or bounce and roll outside the relief area.
But even from knee height, gravity can still have ideas of its own.
Sometimes a dropped ball rolls out of the penalty area. What then?
That question was answered in one of the USGA’s most-watched rules videos of the year. Fortunately, the solution is simple. If the ball rolls out of the penalty area after the first drop, pick it up and drop it again. When it rolls out a second time, place it where it first hit the ground.
Drop, drop, place. That’s it.
As for the Times Square ball, we’re still not entirely sure how those mechanisms work.
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