SHOULD PLAYING WRONG BALL COST YOU TWO SHOTS OF A PENALTY?

By COLIN FARQUHARSON
Colin@scottishgolfview.com
Two Scots, competing at vastly different levels, fell foul of the same golf rule on Sunday - playing the wrong ball - and it cost them a lot.
Stephen Gallacher was in fourth place when he mistakenly played the ball of one of his amateur partners at the 16th hole in the final round of the Alfred Dunhill Links Championship over the Old Course. 
The two-stroke penalty meant he ran up a quadruple bogey 8 at the hole and slipped back to a joint fifth place finish with seven other players.
In financial terms, the two-stroke penalty cost him about 40,000 Euros.

 On the same day, at the lat hole on the McDonald Ellon course in Aberdeenshire,
Kimberley Beveridge, pictured, 17-year-old Aboyne junior, played what she thought was her ball - it wasn't her partner Jess Meek's ball, so the mystery here is how it got to be there - and discovered to her horror when she got up to the green that it wasn't her ball at all.
The two-stroke penalty cost Kimberley victory and a voucher worth £60 in the North/North-east/Angus girls individual competition. She finished second, a shot behind Jess Meek.
Without the two-stroke penalty, Kimberley would have won by a shot.
It is not for me to question the Rules of Golf but a two-stroke penalty does seem a very severe punishment for what is after all a genuine mistake.
Why not just a one-stroke penalty?
Nobody would deliberately play a wrong ball, would they?. What would they gain by doing so?
I put the same question to rules expect Gillian Kirkwood. Here is what she had to say:
 .
"I've been looking up the history of the Rule (Kenneth Chapman, The Rules of the Green, Virgin Books 1997)

"Playing a wrong ball has had a loss of hole penalty in Match Play since as far back as 1812,  although in 1891 the St Andrews Rules changed it to a one-stroke penalty but rescinded  it in 1899.

"Every rule which has a penalty of loss of hole in Match Play, has a penalty of two strokes in Stroke Play."