Golf rules: World Handicap System giving ‘bandits’ more scope to deceive

In our complicated relationship with cheating, golf makes no allowances.

Unlike in field sports, for example, where any number of atrocities are pardoned by fans and commentators in the name of winning, golf takes a puritanical view.

Not only must the rules be obeyed, but you are expected to apply a more developed conscience to the process than you would, say, to your tax returns, or road signs.

The difficulty is that golf gives you more opportunities for wrong-doing than any other sport on earth. You don’t even have to mean it – although, just like in the criminal justice system, ignorance is not a defence.

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Golf’s rule book was streamlined a few years ago, and some of the nettles were cut down, but the official pocket-sized edition of the Rules of Golf, designed for in-play use, still runs to 160 pages.

You can even do wrong while you think you’re being nice. Have you ever been asked by one of your playing companions, before they play their shot, ‘What club did you hit there?’

Did you tell them, without a second thought, or did you reply by saying, ‘If I answer your question, we’ll both have to take a one shot penalty.’ According to Rule 10.2a, on page 58 of the handbook, that is the only acceptable answer. On second reading, it might even be a penalty to ask, without an answer. Either way, there’s not a barrister in the Law Library that will get you off.

Unintentional breaches of the rules are a daily hazard of club golf. Fiddling with your handicap, however, is an altogether different matter. Unlike most other sports, in which being competitive ceases to be a realistic option after a certain age, golf’s handicap system gives everyone a chance to compete, regardless of their birth cert or their talent. It is designed to be a giant equaliser.

Sport is full of overblown trivialities; in golf, every swing carries the risk of explosive exasperation, and a range of other unedifying responses. Once you step onto the first tee you’re entering a world of potholes and pratfalls, but you’re not thinking about that until the first calamity; small ‘c’.

In that whirlwind of possible outcomes, club golfers care more about their handicap than they would ever confess. Having a single figure handicap, for example, carries a status that everyone recognises. There is a certain vanity in trying to drive your handicap as low as you can, but it is an honourable impulse too. At all levels of the game, the greatest opponent in golf is yourself. In that remorseless conflict, your handicap is the umpire that keeps score.

That is part of the reason why “handicap bandits” are so reviled. According to the data, a typical club golfer plays to their handicap about once in every seven rounds. Any run of form that beats the average is a source of delight. Any behaviour that queers the pitch is cause of outrage, and gossipy condemnation.

It is two years ago, this week, since the handicap system for club golfers was radically overhauled. The World Handicap System [WHS] was a monumental piece of work, four years in the making.

Until then, there had been six different handicap systems around the world. The system in Britain and Ireland, for example, was different to the United States; South Africa and Australia had different systems; even Argentina, not one of the game’s superpowers, had a way of doing it that was peculiar to them.

Unifying the world’s 15 million club golfers under one, coherent, intuitive system had obvious advantages: for one thing, your handicap was now linked to the difficulty of your home course, and would be adjusted to the difficulty of any course you visited, home or abroad.

The system was also weighted to take a long view. Your handicap index would now be calculated from your best eight scores from your last 20 recorded rounds, and because it was a rolling average the system wasn’t inclined to make hasty judgements about the state of your game.

Among the claims made for the system before it was introduced, though, was that it would be harder for handicap bandits to cheat. In the event, that hasn’t been the case; more than that, the biggest and most furious complaint against the new system is that handicap cheats have more scope than ever.

In this system, out of competition rounds were given an enhanced status. In a desire to capture a rounded picture of any player’s game, at any given time, every player was encouraged to log casual rounds into the system, verified, of course, by their playing partner. But what it meant, for example, was that casual nine-hole rounds could also count.

For handicap cheats, that was an invitation to accelerate the process of manipulation. In the past, only 18 hole competitions could impact your handicap, and it could only climb in small increments, capped at one shot in any given year. Now, your handicap can rise by as many as five shots in a year, and if you play enough logged rounds, you don’t have to wait long to see a change.

So, where’s the problem? Is it the system? Or is it us, the 280,000 Irish club golfers, and local wardens of the system?

Uniquely, golf remains a game of self-regulation, which gives the rules a kind of divine omnipresence: you walk with them for 18 holes, and are expected to apply them with good conscience. Trust on that scale might be a hopelessly romantic notion, but golf depends on it. In the clubhouse, or the car park, nobody tells amusing stories about the fast one they pulled out on the course. Who would laugh?

According to Rule 1.2, players are expected to “act with integrity”. So, have you ever refused to sign a playing partner’s card, because you didn’t believe they had conducted their round in the spirit of the game?

No? Me neither.