This is the funniest golf misunderstanding we've ever heard

The longer you play golf, the more its specific rhythms become second nature: the rules, the etiquette, the language. It’s easy to forget that for somebody who comes to the sport with no background, especially as an adult, it can feel like landing on a foreign planet. Outside of the simple act of striking the ball into the hole in the fewest strokes possible, there is an entire culture to process, and some of the peripheral details that seem so ordinary to the rest of us can be totally confusing for the beginner, and ripe for misinterpretation.

And sometimes, that misinterpretation is incredibly funny.

Grace Hamm is 30, she works in tech in the Toronto area and she's everything you could want in a new golfer. Her husband got her into the game three years ago, and though she played casually at first, that changed when she bought him a set of four lessons for his birthday. It was cheaper to buy a semi-private package, so she joined him. When the lessons were over, she thought she’d better keep practicing or it’d be a big waste of money.

"I get a bit crazy about these things," she explained to me over a Zoom call, "and we had a sim in our condo at the time, so I'd book it for literally two or three hours at a time, four or five times a week."

In other words, Grace became a golf obsessive in no time. Today, she plays courses like Lakeview and Copetown Woods around Toronto, and on her best day ever, she broke 100 by a single stroke. Her story is a testament to how golf can quickly captivate a novice, although if you're the jealous type, you may not like that she made an actual albatross a year into playing by hitting the two most perfect shots of her life on a short par 5, dunking the 150-yard approach with a 5-hybrid.

But the albatross isn't Grace's best golf story. Not even close. And it's definitely not the funniest.

When she first started playing on actual courses, she adopted her husband's habit of using the 18Birdies app to track her scores. The app can track as much info as you want, but Grace didn’t bother with granular data like fairways hit and number of putts. After each hole, though, when she opened her phone, the app wanted her to click a checkmark or an X next to a term she didn’t understand: green in regulation.

What could that mean? Was it important?

Eventually, she decided it must be exactly what it sounded like: The app was asking about the condition of the green. As in, was the green itself in regulation?

"I thought, oh, that's kind of weird," she said of her first time seeing GIR on the app. But she didn't think it mattered enough to ask anyone else, and after taking one last glance at the green, she reached her verdict.

It seems fine, she thought, and she clicked the checkmark.

That established a pattern. Each hole, she'd survey the green, evaluate its condition, and decide whether it passed the test.

" I was thinking, ‘oh, the greens I've seen on TV are perfect,’" she remembered. "Like, immaculate. Maybe it's just relating to that."

Grace was a forgiving grader. Most of the time, she'd hit the green-in-regulation checkmark all 18 times—while shooting well into the 100s—and she only resorted to the X when the conditions were really rough (think summer-scorched scorched grass, a bumpy surface or some other defect). She doesn't remember mentioning her interpretation of GIR to her husband, and if she did, she didn't get a clarifying answer. Sometimes, struggling with a borderline call, she'd ask one of her playing partners if the green seemed to be in regulation, but they would just answer politely without realizing why she was asking.

As to the question of why the app wanted the information in the first place, Grace rationalized it as an advanced statistic. Probably, she thought, it was a way of putting your score in context—maybe you took a big number on the hole, but the green was in rough shape. How that would ever be used, she didn’t know, but she trusted that it was meaningful in some way.

Eventually, Grace started entering her total putts in 18Birdies, at which point the app would answer the "Green in Regulation" question for her, based on her score and total putts. Unfortunately, that only confused her even more: How did the app know if the green was in regulation or not? And why was it saying "no" to the green-in-regulation question on so many holes, even when the conditions looked pristine?

That was harder to answer, but she figured it was because enough golfers had already come through and rated the green themselves, in the same way that a traffic app like Waze knows from other users when there's a car stalled on the side of the road. If enough people said the green wasn’t in regulation, the app no longer needed her input.

This went on for years.

And then, a month ago, she came across an Instagram reel that promised to explain GIR. She clicked play, thinking it might clear up a few lingering questions, and she couldn't believe what she saw. Green in regulation, the video explained, is about how many shots you take to reach the green. There's no way, she thought, but soon the entire concept became crystal clear.

As the reality sank in, and the shock wore off, she had one unavoidable reaction: she couldn't stop laughing. Laughing at herself, at the absurdity, at the sheer amount of time she spent judging greens based on a total misconception.

The next time she played with her husband, she burst out laughing again when they reached the first green and had to explain the whole thing to him. Then she posted about it on Reddit, and they thought it was even funnier. I contacted her through that post, which led to our Zoom call. The really great thing about the whole situation is that while others would dig a hole in the ground and never mention it again, Grace has a tremendous, self-deprecating sense of humor. How could she not, when the memory of analyzing all those greens still makes her laugh multiple times each day?

In her Reddit post, people chimed in with other misinterpretations they've run across—people who think a "gimme" means that the first putt counts, or groups of guys who say "nice up and down" to each other after the chip but before the putt, as if the "up" and the "down" are just about the ball rising and then landing on the green. If you've got your own story of a good golf misunderstanding, by all means send it along.

In the meantime, we have to thank Grace again for having the confidence to share her story, embarrassment be damned. She's a credit to the game of golf, and if she ever plays with a stranger and finds the conversation stalling out, she's got a perpetual ace up her sleeve—the story of her diligent attempt to rate every green she ever played.