Golfpocalypse
Did I dishonor the game via handicap shenanigans?
Erik Isakson
Golfpocalypse is a collection of words about golf (professional and otherwise) with very little in the way of a point, and the Surgeon General says it will make you a worse person. Reach out to The Golfpocalypse with your questions or comments on absolutely anything at shane.spr8@gmail.com.
First off, I have to tell you about my friend Heath. He's the kind of guy you love to play golf with, even though he probably plays three times a year and is not what you'd call "good." What makes him a good partner is his personality—funny, easygoing—but beyond that, he's an athlete and he's strong, so his "bad" is more impressive than most. This is a dude who's 49, but looks ten years younger and still plays goalie in his soccer leagues and lifts weights and etc. He has an annoying, natural muscularity; he looks like an ancient Greek who would murder you with a spear. Despite the lack of experience, he hits his irons farther than me and always gets them airborn. It's just that they rarely go straight, and he has very little idea what to do around the greens, so the numbers pile up.
However, he has a definite clutch gene. I'm lucky to have a large community of golf friends, some local and some around the country, all of us varying degrees of nuts about the sport, and we devise a few ways to compete against each other throughout the year. We have a Ryder Cup-style event in the fall, a net stroke play event in the spring, and then we have a couple tournaments where we don't travel, and compete using handicaps at our home courses. Last year, in a brand new one-day event called the "Hometown Classic," 23 played their own courses, teeing off at roughly the same time, and via a nifty website we had a leaderboard that accounted for different handicaps, courses, and tees, letting us post our score and track each other throughout the day. It's a blast.
A few of our players at the Hometown Classic, like Heath, are extremely casual and don't have handicaps. That doesn't present a problem at our Ryder Cup, where we can match them by skill (Heath, despite never breaking 100, has notched a few big wins at that event). It was a problem at the Hometown Classic, and with little idea how to treat players like Heath, we let him play off a 40 handicap. It worked for the three other very casual players, who finished far down the leaderboard. It did not work for Heath—the sick SOB shot 105 and massacred everyone. It was a 64 net, and while it was a terrific performance by his standards and worthy of a title, it was also a case where in order to beat him, I would've had to shoot 73 ... two shots better than my best score ever.
Fast forward to last weekend. Our group's fourth "major," devised this year, is a 32-person bracket played out over the year in net stroke play matches. In the first round, I played Heath, and with last year in mind, we instituted a new rule that unless someone had an established GHIN, the highest handicap you could play off was a 27.5. I was responsible for the rule, and it felt fair.
The result? I shot 87, Heath shot 135, and in a round where the average margin of victory was five shots, I beat him—net—by 32.
Oops!
Now, clearly I did not intend for this to happen. If Heath had shot 105 again, we would have had a very close match. However, I can't shake the feeling that I inadvertently gamed the system somehow, making it impossible for him to win.
And there's a larger question here—how do you account for the volatility of very high handicappers? Don't get me wrong, I have high volatility potential too, but it's not 30 strokes worth, and those extremes happen far less frequently. The USGA has a concept called "handicap allowance" to account for some of this stuff, but the recommendation is only 95% in individual stroke play, and again, that's if you know a guy's handicap. If not, well ... who knows?
In theory, it could be worse in match play, and I've actually witnessed this on the other end. I'm somebody who can go out and shoot in the high 80s while taking three triples along the way, and if you give me strokes against a better player on a strict handicap system in match play, I'll beat them simply because my drastic errors only count as one hole against me. And the USGA's recommended handicap allowance on match play? Nonexistent. (Golf Digest has its own match play event that I don't play in, but sources have grumbled to me already about this exact problem.)
Long story short, I don't know if there's a good system for any of this, whether you know someone's handicap or not. Why? The problem is variance. Whether you're talking stroke play, where someone like Heath can shoot 135 or 105 on a given day, or match play, where someone like me can lose all his strokes on a few holes, the high variance golfer is going to enjoy a massive advantage over a better golfer on a good day.
And on a bad day? Well, you'll lose by 32 shots. I didn't feel great about that as the winner, and after Heath consented to me writing about him in Digest, he added, "also mention how I hate golf now."
In other words, everyone left unhappy. Golf did its job.
FIVE TOUR THOUGHTS: RBC HERITAGE EDITION
Andrew Redington
1. Mannnn, JT winning to break the drought, right after Rory wins to break his and get the career slam? This stuff is officially rigged. Believe nothing. Monahan is scripting the whole thing.
2. Seriously, though, that was about as fun as the week after the most ridiculous and emotional tournament in the history of golf could be. I had to take a break from Hilton Head on Thursday and Friday—I was simply running on golf fumes, but I covered the final round and thought the ending was pretty perfect. Only two guys brought it on Sunday, and they ended up in a playoff together, but Thomas winning was the best result from a few different narrative angles, the most prominent of which—in my very biased mind—is that Ryder Cup intrigue is really starting to build. It's not even May, yes Rory might win on his favorite course and give us a calendar slam scare, and yes, we could talk about JT contending at the PGA even though his off-the-tee weakness right now doesn't suit Quail Hollow ... but come on, finally an American won a big event, and we're all thinking Ryder Cup. Right? Right???!!
3. I'm sure JT's relationship with his caddie Matt Minister, aka "Rev," is fine, but dang, it's got to suck for him to sit at home with a back injury and watch the guy he's looped for since last year win in his literally his second start since he left. It's like seeing your girlfriend find a new guy, and she's instantly happier and more successful, but she's still saying, "no, no, we're getting back together in a month." Why? Why do you still love me when you're so happy elsewhere?
Okay, maybe it's not exactly like that, but I still think it has to be a bitter-ish pill to swallow. On the plus side, Minister will want to get his own win with JT even worse now, like a second wife who wants a child with her husband to feel as legitimate as the previous wif—my God, I need to stop doing this.
4. Spieth is going to win the PGA for the career slam, isn't he? It feels like three years worth bad news has finally succumbed to a torrent of positivity, and this is the only way I can see this mini-spell ending. Have you ever played hold 'em and gone AA, KK, AA in consecutive hands? Spieth at Quail Hollow is the last pocket aces, you can just feel it.
5. The ratings for the final round in Hilton Head were astounding, the biggest number since 2002. That's partly a product of how wildly exciting the Masters was—there's an enormous tail there—and partly because JT was in the mix. And in the context of everything we've lived through since the big schism, you have to ask: Is the Tour in its best position relative to LIV ... ever? I'm not saying they've won the war, because the PIF can still just buy a lot of good players, but jokes about Monahan authoring all this aside, it really does feel like the Tour couldn't have scripted a better few weeks for itself. This coming offseason is going to be fascinating, because it feels like LIV needs some kind of dramatic victory to restore any semblance of balance.
THE ABSOLUTE IRONCLAD LOCKS OF THE WEEK
Golfpocalypse is not a gambling advice service, and you should never heed anything written here. Better picks are here.
Career Record: 7-69. I even cheated on the DP World Tour by picking a first-round leader, and it still didn't work out. My children are never going to college.
It's Zurich time on the PGA Tour, and you better believe I'm riding the hot hand and taking Rory and Shane to back-to-back this sucker. I'm almost scared to see what a "monkey off his back" Rory looks like, and this is his first chance to show us.
At the LPGA's Chevron Championship, our first major of the year, let's keep the "hot hand" theme going and take the Swedish bomber Ingrid Lindblad, who is super fun and who might shock the world after her debut victory last week.
At the Hainan Classic on the DP World Tour, I have to tell you, I'm completely lost with these guys and I'm not sure I really care. So let's go with Joost Luiten and potentially retire this tour from our picks. WHO CARES?
The old boys are down in Atlanta for the Mitsubishi Electric Classic, and I'm taking Paddy Harrington to join Rory and Shane and make it the greatest week in Irish golf history, at least since two weeks ago.
At LIV Golf Mexico, call me crazy but I like Ogey "Bucket Hands" Barrasso to win by a dozen.
THE "DUMB TAKE I KIND OF BELIEVE"
Recreational golfers should carry flags and have to learn some basic semaphore code so that we can ask each other over long distances if we can play through on the next hole, or at least yell at each other from long distance via angry flag motions. I feel golfers could invent brand new swear words in semaphore.
READER EMAIL OF THE WEEK
I asked this week for stories of the worst you've felt about your behavior on the golf course, short of cheating, and Andrew wrote with this incredibly relatable moment:
At my home course a couple of years ago, a twosome behind us hit up on us. Nobody got hit, but it could have been a bad one. We gave the obligatory “hands in the air” pose and the guys came up and apologized in a “I didn’t hit ya, did I?” way. They were clearly two guys who haven’t spent a ton of time on the golf course. A few holes later, we got held up by the group ahead of us, and the guys came up and tried to be friendly again— telling us about shots they had hit and asking how it was going. I was a total dick to them. Big leagued them like a stuffy gatekeeper. I felt immediately bad after the exchange, even telling my playing partner how bad I felt, and I’ve thought about it occasionally since. Hope this works for whatever you’re working on! Feel free to share my name if you want; I don’t care either way. Maybe I need the public shaming.
Andrew, weird as it sounds, I feel like the good news is that you feel bad ... it means you're a good person. The bad news is those men never played golf, or felt any happiness, ever again. I imagine they're both dead now. (Kidding ... but this is how my OCD brain would work in this scenario for literal decades after.)
Previously on Golfpocalypse:
Rory's Masters win was the ultimate "dudes crying" moment in golf
I want to be a draw alpha, not a fade beta
If you had to give up golf or sex for the rest of your life, which would it be?
I am the recent victim of golf snobbery, and I'm mad
Should the Tour just move to an F1 style schedule and be done with it?
I was the world's most annoying teenage golf maintenance worker
Can golf still be a spiritual experience in 2024?
There is nothing stranger than a golfer's brain...just ask us
I have the dumbest golf pet peeve, but I can't shake it
If you talk about politics on the course, please, for God's sake, stop
Loving Golf in 2024 is about finding where the money isn't
I believed in the magic of Tiger Woods when I was a kid, but I'm a cynic now
If you can enjoy playing golf alone, you have achieved Nirvana
I took 12 stitches to the head for golf before I even loved it
An annual 'Friends Ryder Cup' trip is the greatest thing in golf
Marshals at public golf courses need to get way meaner
I, and I alone, have the genius tweak to fix the Tour Championship
It cannot be fun to play golf when you're egregiously bad
Confession: I break clubs when I'm mad
Playing golf in bad weather makes me feel alive
Caring what other people think of your golf game is annoying to other people
Sympathize with Rory, because choking sucks