The Jared Rules: A Casual Golfer’s Guide to Bending the Rules

Golf has rules.

A lot of rules.

Rules about where you can drop. Rules about where you can’t drop. Rules about what happens when your ball disappears into a patch of grass where four people watched it land. Rules that, in certain situations, would have you walk all the way back to where you just hit from and try again.

The rules matter. They make competition possible. They let us keep handicaps, play matches and know that your buddy's 84 and your 84 at least vaguely mean the same thing.

But sometimes you're not competing.

Sometimes you're a new golfer trying to get around 18 holes without holding everybody up. Sometimes you play five times a year. Sometimes you're out with friends, there's music playing in the cart, and nobody particularly cares whether your 103 would survive an audit from the USGA.

That's where the Jared Rules come in.

The Jared Rules are named after a friend of mine.

We’re going to call him Jared, because that’s the name his parents gave him.

The basic philosophy is simple:

Golf is supposed to be fun. If strict adherence to a rule is making a casual round substantially less fun, you're allowed to cheat a little.

Not really cheat.

You can't kick your ball 40 yards down the fairway. You can't take an eight and write down five. You definitely can't make a three after putting two balls in the lake.

Think of the Jared Rules as a little flexibility for golfers who still want to keep score, still want to get better, but don't need every Saturday round to feel like U.S. Open qualifying.

Golf is hard enough already.

First, know what kind of golf you're playing

This is the rule that makes all the other Jared Rules work.

If you're playing in a tournament, posting a score for your handicap, playing someone straight up for money, or otherwise competing under the Rules of Golf, then play by the Rules of Golf.

The Jared Rules are for rounds where everyone understands that we're playing casual golf.

You can still keep score. You can still want to break 100, 90 or 80. You can still talk plenty of trash when somebody makes triple.

But everybody should know the deal.

The Jared Rules aren't about secretly cheating your friends.

They're about collectively agreeing that sometimes golf can lighten up a little.

1. Improve a terrible lie

This is probably the foundational Jared Rule.

Your drive misses the fairway by four feet and settles all the way to the bottom of thick rough. Your ball finds an old divot. You're on a patch of dirt on a course where every other square foot is covered in grass. Or it settles into a tire track left by a maintenance cart.

Move it.

We're not talking about moving the ball 20 yards or going from behind a tree into the middle of the fairway. Give yourself a few inches. Fluff it up. Put it somewhere you can actually hit a golf shot.

There's even some fine golf-cinema precedent here.

In Caddyshack, Danny Noonan watches Judge Smails use the timeless "foot wedge" and help himself to a better lie. Danny, desperately trying to get on the Judge's good side, responds: "Why don't you improve your lie?"

Judge Smails was cheating.

Under the Jared Rules, he was just a man ahead of his time.

The distinction is that Smails was trying to get away with it.

We'll get back to that.

2. If everyone saw your ball land, it isn't lost

This one is important.

You hit a drive a few yards into the rough. Three people watch it bounce. You have a tree, bunker, sprinkler head or some other obvious landmark where everyone agrees the ball finished.

Then you get over there and can't find it.

The rough is deep. There are leaves everywhere. Maybe the course just isn't maintained all that well.

Under the Jared Rules, drop another ball around the spot where everyone agrees the original should be and keep playing.

No penalty.

Professional golfers can play longer courses, firmer and faster greens and some brutally thick tournament rough. But they also regularly have marshals, volunteers and ball spotters watching shots and helping locate golf balls. USGA championship marshals are specifically tasked with spotting stray balls.

Weekend golfers get Bob.

Bob was looking at his phone.

So if everyone knows roughly where your ball is and it has simply vanished into thick grass, I'm comfortable saying you shouldn't immediately add strokes because nobody can find it.

This isn't unlimited.

If you hit it over a fence, 50 yards into the woods, clearly out of bounds, or everyone heard the very recognizable plunk of your new Pro V1 entering a pond, that's different.

You lost that one.

Take your medicine.

But a ball disappearing in plain sight shouldn't automatically wreck a hole.

Interestingly, even the official rules recognize the pace-of-play problem created by lost balls. The USGA provides an optional Local Rule, when adopted by the course or committee, that lets golfers take relief in a defined area for a lost ball or a ball out of bounds rather than going all the way back to replay the previous shot. The official version still comes with a two-stroke penalty, so Jared would consider it unnecessarily harsh, but we're moving in the same general direction.

3. Move the ball away from roots, rocks and awful lies

Your ball ends up next to an exposed tree root.

Can you hit it?

Probably.

Should you?

No.

Move the ball enough to make a normal swing.

Same goes for rocks, hardpan, weird drainage areas and other spots where hitting the ball exactly as it lies doesn't add much to the experience.

If your ball is sitting on rocks, tucked behind a big rock or pressed against a root, a terrible lie can turn into a damaged club. A casual round is not worth damaging your clubs.

Your 7-iron did nothing to deserve this.

Again, don't use this as an excuse to give yourself a great angle around the tree. If the tree is still in your way, the tree is still in your way.

We're improving the lie, not improving your entire situation.

4. Take the breakfast ball

This is practically common law at this point.

You arrive at the course with six minutes to spare. There was no warm-up. You spent 25 minutes sitting in your car. Now you're standing on the first tee and apparently expected to make a coordinated athletic motion.

First ball goes sideways.

Hit another.

That's your breakfast ball.

The breakfast ball isn't even really a full Jared Rule. It's more like an established diplomatic norm among recreational golfers.

One is fine.

If you're putting your fifth ball on the tee and telling everybody, "This one counts," we've moved into a different area of jurisprudence.

5. Take a mulligan once in a while

The mulligan has been doing Jared Rules work for generations.

Nobody knows for certain where the term came from. One of the best-known stories credits Canadian hotelier David Mulligan, who reportedly hit a bad opening drive in the 1920s, re-teed another ball and called it a "correction shot." Another story credits a New Jersey club employee named Buddy Mulligan in the 1930s.

The USGA itself acknowledges that there are multiple origin stories and no definitive answer. Which feels appropriate for something whose entire purpose is pretending the first thing didn't happen.

The Jared Rules support the occasional mulligan.

Maybe one per nine. Maybe one per round. That's between you, your friends and your consciences.

The point isn't to erase every bad swing. Bad swings are part of golf.

But sometimes you've been waiting all afternoon for a par 3 over water, finally get there and cold-top a 7-iron 25 yards.

Hit another.

If nothing else, it gives you the opportunity to demonstrate that you can hit the exact same terrible shot twice.

6. Give yourself a chance in a terrible bunker

A good bunker is part of golf.

A bunker containing three millimeters of sand over concrete is something else.

If your ball is in a giant footprint, sitting in standing water, buried in an unraked crater or sitting in a bunker that hasn't seen fresh sand since the Obama administration, fix the lie.

Rake a little area and place the ball.

Then there’s the fried egg: a ball partly buried in the sand, with a little crater around it. The ball is the yolk. The bunker is breakfast.

A fried-egg lie can happen in a perfectly good bunker, too. It isn’t automatically a free pass under the actual rules. But in a casual Jared Rules round, especially when you’re still learning, tell your group, lift it out of the crater and give yourself a playable lie in the sand.

And if you're a newer golfer who has now taken three swings and you're still in the bunker, it's also okay to pick the thing up, drop it on the grass and move on.

You got the bunker experience.

It was authentic.

7. Don't walk back to the tee because you lost a ball

This overlaps with Rule 2, but it's worth making explicit.

In casual golf, we're not walking 230 yards back toward the foursome behind us because we couldn't find a ball.

Drop one near where it went missing and continue.

If you clearly hit a bad shot into an area where losing the ball was the obvious outcome, take a penalty stroke.

If everyone saw it land and it mysteriously disappeared, use Rule 2 and don't.

Either way, keep moving.

Golf already has a pace-of-play problem. Nobody needs to make it worse in the name of procedural purity.

8. Gimmes are allowed, but hearing the ball go in is better

The Jared Rules allow gimmes.

If somebody has a 14-inch putt and the group wants to give it to them, fine.

But Jared Rules golf actually prefers that you putt the ball into the hole.

There's something great about that sound.

The little rattle-rattle when the ball hits the bottom of the cup is one of golf's better rewards, and in an ideal world we all get to hear it 18 times every round.

So give the occasional gimme when it helps pace of play. Don't make your friend grind over an 18-inch putt for an 11.

But when you can, finish the hole.

Besides, we're all capable of missing a two-footer.

That's useful information.

9. You can pick up

Sometimes a hole has won.

You hit one into the trees. Then you hit another behind a different tree. Your fourth shot goes into a bunker. The bunker shot crosses the green. The chip comes back across the green.

At some point, you've seen enough.

Pick up.

Write down double par. Triple bogey. Whatever reasonable maximum your group uses.

Then forget about it and go play the next hole.

This is especially useful for newer golfers.

You don't learn much by making a 14 while three groups stack up behind you.

Golf gives you 18 fresh starts. Use the next one.

10. The Jared Junior Rule: let kids tee it up

This one isn't technically a Jared Rule.

We're making it the first Jared Junior Rule.

If you're playing with a kid who's having fun but hits their irons about 80 yards, a 500-yard par 5 can take a VERRRRRRYYYYY long time.

Let them tee the ball up in the fairway sometimes.

Move them forward.

And every once in a while, let the big dog eat when the big dog would normally be back in the bag.

The goal is to keep kids playing, moving and having fun. If they hit a good drive and want to hit driver again 150 yards later, I am comfortable saying the future of golf will survive.

One important caveat: Jared Rules absolutely apply to junior golfers, but kids should still learn the actual rules and proper golf etiquette.

Teach them where to stand. Teach them not to walk through someone's putting line. Teach them to yell fore. Teach them to rake bunkers, fix ball marks, keep pace and respect the course.

There's a difference between knowing the rules and deciding that a casual round doesn't require strict enforcement of every one of them.

Kids can learn both.

11. If you're going to move the ball, tell your playing partners

This may be the most openly "cheating" part of the Jared Rules.

Sometimes you're simply going to move the golf ball.

Not because you're entitled to relief under some obscure subsection of the rule book.

Because the lie stinks.

This is where we return to Judge Smails and his foot wedge.

Moving your ball to improve the lie without permission is a gigantic no-no in regular golf. Do it secretly in a match and you're just cheating.

The Jared Rules change one thing:

Say something.

"My ball is sitting in a hole. I'm moving it six inches."

"This root is right under my club. I'm moving it back."

"This rough is ridiculous. I'm fluffing it up."

Your playing partners will almost certainly say some version of, "Yeah, obviously."

Now everybody knows.

That little bit of transparency is what keeps Jared Rules golf from turning into four people quietly inventing their own scores.

The foot wedge is allowed.

Just announce the foot wedge.

12. Don't abuse the Jared Rules

The Jared Rules aren't designed to turn a 108 into an 84.

You still count bad shots.

You still hit out of bunkers.

You still hit balls into water and add strokes.

You still have to get the ball around the golf course.

And sometimes you get a terrible lie and should probably play it because that's golf.

The Jared Rules mostly remove the stuff that makes a casual round more frustrating without making it much more interesting.

A 108 might become a 103.

A six-hour-feeling round might become a four-hour round you actually enjoyed.

That's the goal.

Golf has always made a little room for this

Golfers sometimes talk about casual rule-bending as if it's a modern attack on the sanctity of the game.

It isn't.

We have mulligans.

We have breakfast balls.

We have gimmes.

We've been inventing unofficial ways to make recreational golf more enjoyable for a very long time.

Golf movies have been at it too.

Goldfinger contains one of cinema's great golf-cheating sequences. Goldfinger hits into the rough, can't find his ball, and Oddjob secretly drops another one in a better spot. Bond knows they're cheating because he's standing on Goldfinger's actual ball. He eventually beats Goldfinger through a bit of golf-ball trickery of his own.

Again, that's not quite the Jared Rules.

The difference is simple.

Goldfinger was trying to fool somebody.

Jared would have just said, "This lie sucks. I'm moving it."

And everybody would have kept playing.

So, is it cheating?

A little.

That's the fun of calling them the Jared Rules.

But there's a bigger point here, especially for newer golfers.

You don't have to experience the hardest possible version of golf from the moment you start playing.

You can learn the real rules while still giving yourself some room.

You can keep score without treating every number like it belongs in the official record.

You can improve your lie, take a breakfast ball, hit the occasional mulligan, pick up after a disaster and still care about getting better.

Then when the round matters, play it straight.

Until then, golf is supposed to be fun.

Move the ball six inches.

Those are the Jared Rules.