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AUGUSTA, GA – If missing the fairway wasn’t reason enough for Bryson DeChambeau to put it back off the tee at Augusta National, he found another in the second round of the Masters on Friday.
After a birdie on the second par-5 hole pushed him 3 cents for the tournament, DeChambeau took an aggressive angle off the tee on the third par-4.
DeChambeau, who leads the tournament from driving distance, hit his tee shot so high and hard that he apparently plugged the rain-soaked rough.
At one point, at least 15 people were looking for the ball – with no luck.
In 2019, the USGA and the R&A reduced the search time limit for a stray bullet from five minutes to three. As time passed on Friday, DeChambeau argued his ball was lost due to chance water in the area.
“How about the occasional water?” he asked a rules manager.
“But it’s not casual water here,” the rules manager explained.
Then DeChambeau suggested that his ball could have landed in an area designated as ground under repair.
“So you’re saying if we knew for sure it’s in that area and the ground is under repair, there is nothing we can do,” DeChambeau said.
Settlement officials explained to DeChambeau that he wasn’t sure this was where his ball landed because he couldn’t find it.
DeChambeau hopped in a golf cart and headed back to the tee to hit another drive. He hit his second tee shot at about the same spot, then exploded his chip shot on the green, failed to move up and down and made a triple bogey 7.
He also bugged the fourth hole par 3, reducing his score to 1 for the tournament, which was worse than the intended cutline.
It was not the first time that DeChambeau has sought redress under questionable circumstances. At the WGC-FedEx St. Jude Invitational in Memphis, Tennessee, in July, he unsuccessfully argued that his ball was sitting near a hill of fire ants – or a burrowing animal hole.
At the Memorial two weeks earlier, DeChambeau found one of his stray bullets under a metal fence and unsuccessfully claimed it was still within limits. He asked for a second opinion, which was the same. He took a quintuple 10 bogey on the hole and missed the cut.
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