If any golfer requires a reminder of the need to always, always, ALWAYS follow one of the golden rules of the competitive game—read EVERY WORD of the local rules before teeing off—we offer the tale of Anthony Quayle at this past week’s Victorian PGA Championship. The details were originally reported by Martin Blake of PGA Tour Australia with more information from Ryan French at Monday Q Info. Read on with empathy and a little bit of respect at how things ultimately shook out.

Quayle, a 30-year-old playing in his native Australia in an event conducted by the PGA Tour of Australasia, was 15 holes into the opening round on the Open course at Moonah Links when he caught himself asking a question he should have broached on the first tee: Are we playing preferred lies throughout the whole course? That was the impression Quayle, who plays mostly on the Japan Tour and once finished T-15 at the 2022 Open Championship, had been under when given the rules sheet before teeing off. But after being asked something similar by his playing partner, American Tyler McCumber, Quayle was forced to double check. And when he did so, he found out that preferred lies were actually in place for only a portion of the third fairway.

Mortified with the fact that he been mistaken all this time, Quayle reached out to tour referee and Tournament Director Heath McLeod. “I didn’t feel comfortable hitting another shot without addressing it,” Quayle told Blake. “I felt like I’d done something really wrong. As soon as I realized, I felt sick in the stomach, I thought I’d done something terribly wrong.”

During the discussion with McLeod, Quayle walked back through his round and realized that two times he lifted his ball and placed it more than a few inches from where he picked up his ball, one time lifted and placed in roughly the same and one time he wasn’t entirely sure where he placed it. It was determined then that Quayle would get two-shot penalties for all the times the ball was not only lifted by then played from a wrong place (Rule 9.4) and a one-shot penalty for the time he put it back in the correct spot. All told, Quayle wound up having seven penalty strokes added to his score, posting a 73 instead of a 66. (McCumber also was penalized two shots for making the mistaken on that hole.)

Quayle was forthright after the round about the mistaken

“The fairways were decent,” he told PGA Tour Australia. “You could see how maybe we needed preferred lies because there were a lot of collection areas with divots. Our last three tournaments on tour have been preferred lie. The document I was handed is a little half-page document that is highlighted ‘preferred lie’ and highlighted scorecard length.

“It’s a massive rookie error on my part. I had just assumed on this tour we play preferred lie a lot. I just didn’t think too much more of it. I’m kicking myself now. Turns out on that document it only said it was preferred lie on the third hole in the blue painted area. I guess that sort of sat more in the fine print of the document.”

Said McLeod: “We’re proud of how Anthony’s handled it. As soon as he realized his mistake, he’s called me over, and went through it out at No. 15 green. He took responsibility for his actions straight away and we worked through the four separate occasions he had breached the rules and he accepted the penalty without any fuss.”

Suffice it to say, Quayle could have let the incident get in his head and disturb him for Round 2. But that didn’t happen. “After I had a bit of time to process what happened on Thursday night, I sort of grew the opinion that ‘let’s treat this as a bit of a challenge and see what we can do. Making the cut with a seven-stroke penalty is going to be impressive’,” he said.

And that’s just what Quayle did, shooting a second-round 67 to make the cut. He kept things going, with weekend rounds of 66 and 69 that allowed him to finish in third place with a 12-under 275 total, two shots back of winner Cory Crawford. (In second was McCumber, who finished one shot back.)

“After I made the cut,” Quayle said, “now it’s ‘finish as high as I possibly can because it’s going to be pretty impressive wherever I finish this week’. I sort of want the story to be as good as it can be going forward. It could be one that I remember for a long time.”

For better and worse.

This article was originally published on golfdigest.com