Billiards On The Golf Course

Playing the par-5 7th hole at my home course yesterday a most curious thing happened to me. I'd hit a decent drive down the left side, just into the rough and short of the fairway bunker. It was sitting up nicely so I was able to get a 3-wood on it for my second and I made good enough contact with it to leave myself just under 100 yards for my third shot into the green. One of my playing partners (who had driven the ball some 30-yards further than me off the tee) was sitting in the middle of the fairway and prepared to challenge the green with another driver, this time off the deck. He hit it hard and low and somewhere around 100 yards from the green it landed, bounced once and then crashed into my ball, kicking it forward and to the right. My playing partners ball caromed directly sideways into the rough and behind a tree. Talk about rub of the green? It looked like we were playing billiards out there, for pete's sake. Not knowing how to proceed, I assumed that since it was impossible for me to accurately estimate where my ball actually lay before it was struck by my playing partners ball (I was roughly 200 yards away at the time of the collision) that I should just play it as lay after the contact. And for those of you who are interested, I proceeded to chip onto the green and make a routine two-putt par while my partner hit a miraculous low hook-chip to the back of the green and then dropped a bomb from about 30 feet that hit at least 5 different leaves on its way to the bottom of the cup for the most unlikely of birdies. Rub of the green, I guess.