Ok Tae-hoon spent 2025 being untouchable on the KPGA Tour: three wins, the top of the prize money list, and Player of the Year. But this Friday at the Woori Financial Championship, something unusual happened. He ran out of golf balls before he could complete his second round and was sent home.

At the Seowon Valley Country Club’s Valley-Seowon course in Paju, Gyeonggi Province, Ok sent his tee shot on the par-5 seventh hole off a cliff to the right of the fairway. Fearing the ball was lost, he played a provisional. That one went off the cliff, too. Then another, and another. He sent five provisional balls off the same cliff in succession, losing six balls on a single hole. With no balls left to play, Ok told the tournament committee he could not continue, and they ruled him disqualified.

The KPGA Tour’s one-ball rule made borrowing a replacement ball nearly impossible. Under Model Local Rule G-4, players must use the same brand, model, and color throughout the round. Switching to a different model would have triggered a separate disqualification. The rule that could have saved him was the same rule that shut every door.

The seventh hole was not even where things first went wrong. Earlier, the 27-year-old carded a quintuple bogey nine on the par-4 fifth. Ok Tae-hoon’s tee shot found the right rough; his second went into deep rough on the left. He declared an unplayable lie, and his fourth shot did not move the ball a yard. His fifth found a bunker, his sixth came out into the rough, and only his seventh reached the green. Two putts. A nine.

Ok Tae-hoon came into 2026 as the KPGA Tour’s most dominant player, having multiple top-10 finishes in 2025. The DQ at the Woori Financial Championship is a sharp contrast to where he stood just months ago.

Surprisingly, the one-ball rule has caught other professionals before. In 2019, Eddie Pepperell was disqualified from the Turkish Airlines Open after losing all his balls in water and being unable to source an identical model. That same year, Russell Henley received an eight-stroke penalty at the Mayakoba Golf Classic after using two different types of Titleist Pro V1x balls in the same round and missed the cut.

Ok Tae-hoon started his second round composedly, swapping a bogey for a birdie before the turn and adding another at the fourth. But the fifth unraveled everything, and by the seventh, his ball supply was already gone. One bad tee shot, five failed provisionals, and a strict local rule ended the round of the man who, months earlier, was the best golfer on Korea’s domestic tour.

Ok’s nightmare exposes golf’s unforgiving ball rules, but change is already coming.

While Ok Paid the Price, the PGA Tour Is Quietly Rewriting Its Ball Rules

The PGA Tour, with USGA and R&A approval, introduced six rule changes from the 2026 season opener, targeting fairness around ball-related situations. The most significant change cuts the penalty for unknowingly moving your ball from two strokes to one, prompted directly by Shane Lowry’s controversial ruling at the 2025 Open Championship.

Free relief from any unrepaired pitch mark on closely mown areas is now extended beyond a player’s own mark. Previously, players lost strokes because of damage someone else left behind. That specific unfairness is now addressed, and officials no longer have to debate whose pitch mark caused the problem.

Preferred lies relief has also been trimmed from club length to scorecard length, bringing the PGA Tour in line with global standards. These are not dramatic overhauls but deliberate corrections to situations where the rules were producing outcomes that felt disproportionate to the actual mistake made.

Ok Tae-hoon’s disqualification is on the other end of that spectrum. He lost six balls on one hole and had nothing else to play with. He had no way out because of the KPGA’s one-ball rule. The PGA Tour is getting better at making fair decisions. This time, the KPGA was not.