The Rangefinder Was a Local Rule

In a practice round before the 1961 U.S. Amateur at Pebble Beach, Deane Beman told Jack Nicklaus to walk off the golf course. Beman had been doing it since 1954, when he was still a junior. He paced the distance from trees and bunkers to the greens and wrote the numbers on his scorecard, and Nicklaus thought it was funny. "He would laugh when I pulled out my card," Beman told Golf Digest in 2016.

Nicklaus tried it anyway. "I walked off the golf course at Pebble Beach, and I had this little scorecard and I wrote all of these yardages down," he said later. He played 12 rounds that week, was under par in every one of them, and won. When he joined the tour in 1962, by his own account, he was the only player on it charting yardages.

Nicklaus does not say Beman invented the idea. He credits Gene Andrews, a California amateur, with being first. None of the three used a machine to measure anything, and as of 1968 the Rules of Golf would not have let them. That year the rule makers banned artificial devices that helped a player, and measuring distance with one stayed against the rules until 2006.

The book

By 1970 some caddies were selling books of yardages, though not very good ones. In 1976 George Lucas sold his first yardage book at the Danny Thomas Memphis Classic for $5. About half the field bought one, and Sports Illustrated wrote that almost overnight it became the Book.

Lucas measured with a surveyor's cable. He called big mounds Dolly Partons and small ones chocolate drops, and a sideways tree on Pebble Beach's 15th hole was Poltergeist. His roommate, the caddie Jerry Pruitt, gave him the nickname Gorgeous George, and Lucas respelled it Gorjus. "I liked j better than g," he said, "and I shortened it to fit on vanity plates."

Lucas and one other man, Mark Long, made most of the PGA Tour's yardage books for nearly 40 years. All of it was legal, and the rule makers later said so: "while the use of yardage books was allowed, the use of distance-measuring devices was prohibited."

The 150-yard yew

A tour pro had a caddie and a book. A golfer at the local course was more and more likely to have a golf cart instead.

In January 1976 Stanley Zontek, an agronomist for the USGA, the body that sets golf's rules in the United States, wrote about the 150-yard marker in the association's Green Section Record. "For whatever reason," he wrote, 150 yards from the center of the green had "become the arbitrary standard." The USGA, he noted, "at one time was opposed" to yardage markers on the course. They had spread anyway because caddies were "no longer available for advice and yardages," which was "becoming the case more and more with increasing use of powered golf cars."

So courses planted the number. Zontek listed what was in the ground: Japanese yew, Colorado spruce, flowering dogwood and a Crimson King maple. Somerset Hills in New Jersey printed a card keyed to its own landmarks, including "Big Cherry Tree on Left 125" and "First Old Apple Tree on Right 164."

Twenty-one years later another Green Section agronomist, Patrick Gross, took stock of what had piled up since. He counted red, white and blue flags, whiffle balls on the flagstick, colored disks in the fairway, painted lines on the cart paths, pop-up markers, painted stakes and numbered sprinkler heads. The "cute little 150-yard trees" had grown into "big 150-yard trees that need extra pruning." Then he asked: "How many times have you played a course and stood on the big white disk indicating 150 yards to the green and noticed the sprinkler next to it that reads 154 yards?"

The speed gun

Bushnell was a sports optics company, known for binoculars and riflescopes and owned at the time by Bausch & Lomb. Laser Technology, of Englewood, Colorado, had been selling a laser speed gun to police departments since 1991.

In 1994 Bushnell asked Laser Technology to design a laser rangefinder that could sell for $500 or less, and agreed to pay for the research. Professional rangefinders then were the size of a shoebox, ran on an external battery, weighed about four pounds and cost thousands of dollars, according to a federal court's findings in a later patent case. The new one went on sale in October 1995 as the LyteSpeed 400. A year later it was renamed the Yardage Pro, and Bushnell calls it the first consumer laser rangefinder.

By 1997 it cost about $350, and Newsweek reported that it was already used by nine of the 15 top money winners on the previous year's PGA Tour. They could use it only in practice rounds, because in competition it was against the rules. George Lucas had one too: in 1996 he started carrying a Yardage Pro to back up the $5,500 Topcon surveying laser he had measured with since 1990.

Peter Dawson ran the R&A, the USGA's counterpart for most of the rest of the world. A 2004 Golfdom column quoted him saying the last thing he wanted to see at St. Andrews was a golfer coming up the 18th fairway and stopping "to pull a bloody telescope out of his pocket to measure the distance. What's next? A windmill to measure wind currents?"

Bushnell has led the market ever since. In 2008 it reported that 93% of the devices used on the PGA, LPGA and Champions tours were its own. At the 2021 Players Championship, 151 of 154 players named Bushnell as their preferred device. Both counts come from the Darrell Survey, which tallies equipment at tour events, and both were published by Bushnell and its distributor.

The local rule

A local rule is one a course adopts for its own ground, on top of the Rules of Golf. A course cannot just make up any rule: the USGA and the R&A publish model wordings, and a course's committee picks the ones it wants.

In September 2005 the two bodies announced that from January 1, 2006, a course could allow distance-measuring devices by local rule. The device could measure distance and nothing else: not wind, and not slope, meaning how far a green sits above or below the golfer. A course that did not adopt the local rule kept the old ban.

In 2009 they explained the reasoning. A device that gave "the same information that can be obtained through use of a yardage book or on-course markings" did not "diminish the skill level required to play the game." The same statement drew the line on slope hard. A device that could measure it broke the rules "even if all of the above features can be switched off or disengaged, and in fact are switched off or disengaged." Owning the wrong model was a breach whether or not you pressed the button.

That statement also said neither body planned to use the local rule at its own championships, and that they had "no intention" of letting devices go further. The USGA allowed them at its amateur championships in 2014. From 2016 a device with slope built in became legal, as long as the slope function stayed off during the round. That year the R&A wrote that leaving the decision to each club "was, and remains, appropriate."

The default flips

On January 1, 2019, the rewritten Rules of Golf turned the arrangement around. A golfer may now measure distance with a device anywhere, unless the course adopts a local rule banning it.

The USGA listed its reasons. Distance, it said, "is public information a player may get from anyone; and on most courses, this information is found on sprinkler heads, markers, posts, etc." The devices were already in wide use, and clubs had been confused about needing a local rule to allow them. Pace of play was not on the list.

As of October 20, 2026, when this piece was published, measuring slope is still banned, and the rule book now spells it out. A player may hold up a club as a plumb line to judge the slope of a green. A player may not use a bubble level, a weight on a string, or "a bottled drink to act as a level."

In 2021 Brett White was four shots back in the final round of the All Pro Tour's Colbert Charity Classic, with $23,000 to the winner, when his rangefinder "clicked on slope mode." He used it twice before a playing partner noticed, photographed the device and called an official. White was disqualified. "While it was a complete accident, intent in this situation does not matter and I was DQ'd," he said afterward.

Faster? Probably not

The usual case for the rangefinder is that it speeds up play. Nobody who changed the rules has shown that it makes golf faster, and the argument from the tours is that it probably slowed the pace of play.

The USGA tested the devices at two of its championships in 2013. Its researchers found "no evidence that DMDs had a negative impact on pace of play," which says they did no harm, not that they helped, and the data was never published. The Korn Ferry Tour, the PGA Tour's development circuit, tried them in 2017 and found nothing "concrete" to show play got faster.

Pace first appeared as a stated reason in 2021, from the PGA of America, the association of club professionals that runs the PGA Championship. When it allowed devices at its three majors that year, it said they "may help improve the flow of play." Webb Simpson was against them going into that week and changed his mind: "we have seen how there's a lot of situations where it helps." The PGA of America's own championships chief, Kerry Haigh, was less sure about pace. He hoped balls hit wide would save time, "but for the general balls in the fairway, they probably won't."

In 2025 the PGA Tour let players use them for four weeks. Afterward its rules chief, Gary Young, said, "We definitely saw that it was an extra step in the process rather than reducing the steps." He described a Korn Ferry player who lasered a shot a second time and went over his time. Rickie Fowler said that for the last few weeks he had stepped off his number and his caddie had shot it with the laser, "so our process didn't change."

The money

By 2009 Bushnell had sold 2M laser rangefinders for $395M, according to a sworn statement in a patent case. That total counts hunting and golf together, and the company does not detail a split. Bushnell had also paid Laser Technology, the speed-gun company, more than $14.6M in royalties.

In 2013 ATK, an aerospace and ammunition company, bought Bushnell for $985M. Two spin-offs later, Bushnell Golf sat inside a company called Revelyst. In the fiscal year that ended in March 2024, Revelyst's golf business, rangefinders plus launch monitors, kept 44% of its sales as gross profit and made $39M in operating income. The company's other two businesses lost money.

Bushnell has called itself "the #1 rangefinder in golf" for years. On the same day in 2025 it applied to register the phrase as a trademark twice, once on its own and once with the company's name in front. The bare phrase was abandoned in May 2026 after Bushnell did not respond to the examiner. "BUSHNELL THE #1 RANGEFINDER IN GOLF" registered on September 1, 2026, with the words "THE #1 RANGEFINDER IN GOLF" disclaimed. A disclaimer means the company claims no exclusive right to those words apart from its name.

What a course can still ban

A course that wants the old game back can still have it. Model Local Rule G-5 lets a committee ban distance-measuring devices on its course, and its wording covers only electronic ones. The yardage book stays legal, and so do the sprinkler head, the painted disk and the 150-yard yew. So does walking off the course before the round and writing the numbers on a scorecard, the way Beman did in 1954 and Nicklaus did at Pebble Beach.

We think the rule makers got there fairly. For almost 40 years they held that working out the distance was the golfer's job. When a laser made that job cheap, they handed the choice to each course and then to the golfer, and left the old way legal.