Bring back the Stymie

Seven decades ago, a change in the rules deprived golf of one of its most interesting and challenging situations, the stymie. Find out what we’ve been missing and why the stymie should be restored to its rightful place in the game.

Nowadays, if another player’s ball lies between your ball and the hole on the green, you know what happens next: they will mark and lift their ball to avoid interfering with your line of putt.

But this was not always the case.

Since the 18th century, if another player’s ball lied between your ball and the hole, and the two balls were more than six inches apart, you were required to play your ball with no lifting of the obstructing ball. This was called a stymie.

If you found yourself in this situation, you were said to have been”stymied”. Your only options were to putt around the blocking ball, which some players tried to do by fading or drawing their putts, or to chip over it, which was usually done with a lofted club, although some players amazingly did it with their putter.

If you hit the obstructing ball, you had to play your next shot where your ball came to rest, while your opponent had the choice of playing their shot from the new position or replacing their ball in its previous position. If you strucked the blocking ball in the hole, your opponent was considered to have holed out on the previous shot.

Although, as now, the main objective was always get the ball into the hole, believe it or not, in some situations some players deliberately stymied their opponents to make things difficult for them.

While most of us have never witnessed or played a game with stymies, it doesn’t take much imagination to realize that they clearly added a lot of excitement and challenge to the game.

Here you can see Byron Nelson overcoming a stymie in the final round of the 1940 PGA Championship.

On this clip, you can see a young Ben Hogan being stymied by Mike Turnesa in the PGA Championship of 1948. Hogan attempts to chip in, but fails.

And here a modern day stymie, this time executed with a putter.

Interestingly, the word stymie has rarely been mentioned in the Rules of Golf over the years. Technically, the regulation of the stymie was born by default in 1744, when a rule was introduced that allowed an obstructing ball to be lifted provided it was in contact with another ball.

A year later, things were loosened up a bit with an amendment that allowed an obstructing ball to be lifted if both balls were within 6 inches of each other.

“If your Balls be found anywhere touching or within six inches of one another, you are to lift the first Ball until the other is played.”
Laws to be Observed by the Members of The Golfing Company in playing Golf — 22 April 1775

Originally, the stymie was allowed in all game formats, but in 1830 it was specified that it did not apply to stroke play or four balls, and it became only permissible in match play.

Finally, on a sad day for the game in 1952, the stymie disappeared when the R&A and USGA rules were unified.

There is not much information available about the reasons that led to the dissapearance of the stymie, but apparently it was a controversial decision that lasted for years.

There was a particular player that was totally against the dissapearance of the stymie. You may heard of him. His name, Bobby Jones.

In his book Golf is my game, published in 1960, 8 years after the stymie was abolished, Jones devotes an entire chapter to lamenting the demise of the stymie and advocating for its reintroduction into the game.

Acording to Jones, two reasons were argumented by the proponents of the stymie elimination.

The first one was based on the idea that each player must be permitted to play his own game free of any influence of his opponent.

Jones responds with unquestionable logic: “Why this should be an essential when the contest is man-to-man and head-to-head, I have never been able to see” (in Jones’ era, the stymies were only allowed in match play).

The second reason was that stymies were unfair because they introduced an unwanted element of luck into the game.

While Jones admits that in some cases the stymies were influenced by sheer luck, he argues that in reality they mostly favored the most skilled players because “More than anything else, it points to the value of always being closer to the hole on the shot to the green and after the first putt”.

Jones claims that some of the most exciting experiences he has ever had in the game were during stymie situations, and openly denounces its dissapearance as a real mistake that decreased the interest and excitement of the game.

“I have never experienced so many chill and thrills in so short a time…
…Without the possibility of the stymie, the situation on that thirty-fourth green would have been completely routine.”
-Bobby Jones, referring to a stymie situation he witnessed on the 1936 Amateur Championship

Despite all this, unfortunately, he was never listened to.

The game of golf is appealing because it provides a challenging environment that provides players with endless opportunities to achieve small victories.

Bringing back the stymies, even if only in some game formats, would not only exponentially increase that appeal, but would also be a fantastic way to honor the memory of one of the greatest golfers of all time.

Will the governing bodies of golf listen this time?

About the author:
Germán Lechuga is an avid, though admittedly not-so-great golfer who truly believes that the game of golf is one of the best things that can happen to anyone. After reluctantly ruling out having the talent necessary to develop a career on the PGA Tour, he decided instead to give something back to the game in the form of writing.

References:
Historical Rules of Golf: http://www.ruleshistory.com/
Jones, Robert Tyre Jr., and Keeler, O. B. (1960). Golf is my game. Doubleday.

Image credits:
Tournament photo: Public Domain image, courtesy of the Library of Congress
https://loc.getarchive.net/media/golf-11