This teen caddy stuck his WHOLE DANG ARM in an animal hole to save Dad from another weird golf rule

Meet 13-year-old Dylan Block, the star of the PGA Professional Championship in California. This is a crash course in the Burrowing Animal Rule, and how and when to use it.

If a wild weekend at the U.S. Open has you yearning for more, uh, strange golf rulebook scenarios, well, you’re in luck. And it’s only Monday.

This early-week strange golf rules situation takes us to the PGA Professional Championship in Seaside, California. No, no — this isn’t a PGA Tour event or one for touring pros of any sort. This is the national championship reserved for club professionals, the guys that run your local pro shop, give lessons, conduct junior clinics, and are really responsible for the grassroots growth of the game. It’s a pretty dang cool event, just given the wide range of players you’ll find here. Many are former college players, some are current college coaches, some are longtime PGA Tour pro Omar Uresti (another story for another time), some just regular ol’ shop pros who get to actually play golf a couple of times a month.

Anyway, the payoff is quite large — the top 20 finishers get exemptions into the big PGA Championship in August, and the winner takes home six PGA Tour exemptions for the following season.

With that context, here is, uh, a 13-year-old boy digging his Dad’s golf ball out of a giant animal hole under a tree at the PGA Professional Championship yesterday.

Okay, so what the heck’s going on here?

Great question. That’s Michael Block, the 2014 winner of this event and a fairly well-known club pro with a handful of recent PGA Tour starts who’s coming off an appearance at the U.S. Open at Shinnecock. He finished just one spot out of dead last and missed the cut, but it’s still a hell of an accomplishment for a club pro to make the dang event. He missed the cut on Friday, traveled cross country to California, and teed off on Sunday morning in this tournament. Thus might explain the opening round.

Block sent a tee shot off the grid into a grove of trees here, and had trouble locating his ball for some period of time — you’ve only got five minutes to find and play your shot once it’s your turn. Lucky enough for him, his caddie — his 13-year-old son Dylan — spotted what looked to be a ball deep underneath a tree in what looked to be an animal hole. Still, just seeing the ball isn’t quite enough. Under the USGA’s Rules of Golf, you need to actually be able to identify that it’s your ball, not just a ball. That means getting the thing out of the fox den of a hole, or pulling a periscope out of your bag or something.

Ever thankful for skinny, pliable limbs, Dylan was able to reach deep whatever creature’s home down there and retrieve dad’s ball. I, uh, wouldn’t do that but the evidently teens have no fear anymore.

Dad gets a free drop out of the trouble, and Dylan saves the day

Hold on, wait, I thought you don’t get relief from trees?

That’s right! But in this situation we’re not just dealing with a tree. Behold every competitive golfer’s favorite lifeline: The Burrowing Animal Rule. ENTER THE USGA RULEBOOK, SECTION 25-1 ON ABNORMAL GROUND CONDITIONS:

Interference by an abnormal ground condition occurs when a ball lies in or touches the condition or when the condition interferes with the player’s stance or the area of his intended swing. If the player’s ball lies on the putting green, interference also occurs if an abnormal ground condition on the putting green intervenes on his line of putt. Otherwise, intervention on the line of play is not, of itself, interference under this Rule.

....Except when the ball is in a water hazard or a lateral water hazard, a player may take relief from interference by an abnormal ground condition....

Okay, that’s great — abnormal ground conditions get us a free drop. But what counts as an abnormal ground condition?

An “abnormal ground condition” is any casual water, ground under repair or hole, cast or runway on the course made by a burrowing animal, a reptile or a bird.

Course officials decided that the hole under the tree wasn’t naturally occuring, but rather it had been created by an animal of some kind. Dylan Block stuck his arm down there anyway to save Dad a shot. Call it a late Father’s Day present, I guess.

In all seriousness, the rule exists to preserve both (1) player safety and (2) the environs of the animals. Keeping humans from hitting balls out of snakeholes and the like keeps all involved safe and happy.

As for our intrepid caddy here, well, uh... here’s hoping Dad gets Dylan, uh, I don’t know, whatever 13-year-olds are into these days. I think he’s earned it.