It’s golf season ladies and gentlemen. What does that mean? Well it means that it’s time for a bunch of white males between the ages of 12 and 65 to start lying about their golf scores. Show me a guy who is an 8 handicap and I’ll show you a guy who is a 14 handicap that calls himself an 8 handicap. Nearly everyone who I have ever played golf with does it. I’ve even done it. “There’s no chance in hell I’m putting an 11 down on the scorecard. Just give me an 8” says me after I tried to hit the pin-side of the green on 4 consecutive shots and dunked 3 balls into the pond before landing the 4th safely into the sand trap.
That’s the reason I don’t believe your golf score. Golf is effing hard. Chances are at some point during the round you’re going to try something too aggressive for your skillset and you’ll end up with a snowman on a par 4. And it’s probably going to happen twice. It might even happen a third time during your round. If you are swinging 80-100 times throughout the day and you sell insurance during your dayjob then you’re gonna fuck up some of those swings. Football is a game of inches, but golf is a game of nanometers. If you open up your hands half a degree, you’ll be hitting from the pine trees on your next shot. And you know what? It’s all good man. Aside from pro golfers, nobody is expected to be great at golf. There’s no need to provide this illusion of being a scratch golfer when you play once a week.
Yet here we are. Everyone cheats. I found a NYT article that conducted a poll with over 7,000 golfers where 70% admitted they cheat on a golf course. Another study polled 400 “top business executives” and 82% of them admitted to cheating (LOL at that number being anything besides 100%). The part that chaps my ass is when you watch your buddy go through 3 sleeves of titlelist pro v1s during the day and then have the nerve to put down an 84 at the end of the round. Dude you swung three times from the same sand trap on #18 how the hell did you end up with a bogey there?
This summer I ask all of you to take the personal challenge of recording an honest-to-god score where you count every single stroke, every single penalty, every “practice swing” where the club head misses the ball entirely. If you can break 100 then in my opinion you are an above average golfer. I didn’t do any sort of research to arrive at that number aside from my own personal experience and average athleticism.
If you are still reading at this point and thinking “I don’t know what the hell snake is talking about. I give an honest-to-god score every time I play” then this paragraph is for you. Here are a few ways you are probably cheating at golf without admitting it.
- “Pick it up. That’s a gimme.”
- NOPE. NO. Nowhere in the USGA handbook does it say “if your ball is 9 feet from the hole and your buddy who’s seven beers deep is feeling generous then go ahead and pick it up. No need to putt out.” If the ball hasn’t reached the bottom of the cup then you haven’t finished the fucking hole. If it’s such an easy putt that you consider it a gimme, then go ahead and tap it in, Happy Gilmore.
- “I can’t find my ball and I don’t want to hold up the guys behind us. I’ll just drop one here.”
- That goddam groundskeeper! Nobody could find a ball in this jungle! Have you considered that you are probably having a hard time finding your ball because you missed the fairway by 70 yards to the right? You don’t get to reward yourself for this situation. And the beauty of this is that most guys will not only avoid taking the penalty stroke, they’ll also drop 30 yards closer to the green than where they should be AND give themselves a nice friendly lie.
- “Everyone good with using one mulligan today?”
- Please take my word for it that your buddy who suggests this sort of shit is going to use that one mulligan on four different holes. Believe it or not I don’t think you are supposed to use mulligans during a round of golf. I have yet to turn on my tv and see Dustin Johnson go “hey guys I’m going to go ahead and burn my freebie on this hole.”
- “Oh would you look at that. Guess I’ll have to use some relief!”
- FYI just because you have a shit lie behind a tree or your ball is “barely” on the other side of the white stakes doesn’t mean you get relief. Unless your ball is sitting on the cart path or ends up on Mr. Larsons big fat foot then you probably don’t qualify for relief. And in the very rare event that you do get relief, the 20 foot ball retriever in your bag doesn’t count for a club length according to USGA.
- “Good thing I brought my foot wedge today!”
- My personal favorite – the foot wedge! My brother and I were just innocent tikes when our uncle introduced us to this club. Probably hadn’t even drank a case of beer between the two of us at that point. I remember my brother rifling through his bag looking for this coveted “foot” wedge my uncle had asked him to grab. Eventually my uncle assured him not to worry because he had brought his own personal one with him. We were both standing there confused while he kicked my brothers ball out from behind the tree, over the cart path, and back into the fairway. “There it is. You’re lying one.”
If you’re taking notes at home you’ll notice I put an age range on the golfers who cheat. Is it just me or once you get into your 70’s do guys seem to stop caring so much and actually give you an honest score? Maybe I’m just a gullible sucker for a geezer out on the course. But in my experience any old dude I’ve ever played with will hit a golf ball 90 yards at a time while never leaving the short stuff and then be into the cup with two putts or less.
- Pop quiz geezer sports trivia:
- Oldest golfer to ever shoot their age?
- 103 year-old Arthur Thompson in Victoria, British Columbia
- The record for the most strokes below one’s age?
- 86 year-old John Powell with a 64 (22 strokes under age) in La Quinta, CA
- Only golfer to ever lose a partial limb and finish the round?
- Chubbs Peterson in a tournament down in Florida
- Oldest golfer to ever shoot their age?
In all seriousness, I urge you to take the “honest-to-god” golf score challenge and see how you stack up against your cheating self. If you are man enough you can share your score with the world using the #HTGscore hashtag. I can probably count on two hands the number of rounds I’ve played in the last 3 years, but I promise the next time I dust off the wrenches I’ll get us kicked off with a 110. Let’s make this the summer where we normalize triple digits.
PS – RIP Chubbs in movie life and real life
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