When can you pick up your golf ball?

• Marking: a ball-marker is put right behind or right beside the ball, or a club is held on the ground there. The marker must be removed before the stroke.
• Who may lift: the player, or someone the player authorises each time. The caddie may lift it on the green without being asked.
• Putting it back: the same ball, set down by hand on the spot, by the player or by whoever lifted it.
• If it will not stay: try again, then place it on the nearest spot where it will stay, not nearer the hole.
• If the lie has been altered: in sand, re-create it. Elsewhere, place the ball on the nearest similar lie within one club-length, not nearer the hole.
• When a ball is lifted to take relief it need not be marked.

Cleaning a lifted ball is allowed, except when it was lifted:

• to see if it is cut or cracked,
• to identify it, when it may be cleaned only as far as needed,
• because it was in another player's way, or
• to see if it lies somewhere relief is allowed, unless relief is then taken.

A ball in the way, or helping:

• A player may have another player's ball marked and lifted if it might interfere with their stance, swing or line, or be a distraction. Off the green that ball must not be cleaned.
• A ball on the green that might help a player, for example as a backstop behind the hole, may be lifted by its owner or at any player's request.
• In stroke play, players who agree to leave a ball in place to help one of them get two penalty strokes each.

Playing the ball as it lies would mean little if it could be picked up and wiped at will. Lifting is tied to a reason and to a mark, so that it goes back where it was.