Is it time to bring back the old way of doing handicaps?
The best thing that ever happened to the sport of golf is the Handicapping System. It allows golfers of whatever skill to compete against each other on more or less equal terms.
The worst thing that ever happened to the sport of golf is the Handicapping System. It allows golfers of whatever skill to cheat each other on more or less equal terms.
That’s channeling my inner “Tale of Two Cities” psyche while a sordid spectacle unfolds before us. Our local golfing community is being rocked by another fiasco involving handicaps and many of us who have paid the Handicapping Fee for the year are up in arms.
So what else is new??
These problems pop up so often that some of us might think this song and dance has become an integral part of the game of golf. It has reached a point where no one organizes Net tournaments anymore and our estimation of Handicaps has sunk lower than the 17th green of the Langer course.
A few months back I wrote (in the magazine edition of Inquirer Golf) that we have become a System 36 nation. Yeah, no one trusts the WHS anymore except for these Member-Guest Tournaments which seem to attract and are being run by masochists.
We continue to sell Mulligans, play Best Ball, and Scramble formats then act surprised and angry when someone scores an even birdie round.
But then Aggregate with handicaps is another story. This shouldn’t even be in the menu for Member-Guest Tournaments. This is where all the worms crawl out. This where the System fails us.
Look, while everyone goes after the perpetrators, screaming to high heavens how they could have had the gall, the nerve and the chutzpah to play to a 24 Handicap, we tend to forget that there is a bigger problem lurking behind that handicap computation — the System that allowed this to happen in the first place. We have to get past making this thing personal.
Crucifying the perpetrators will only scratch the itch. We need to take a harder look at the World Handicapping System (WHS) and what it is doing to Philippine golf.
Offhand, the WHS is a mess. Any System that allows the establishment of a dubious 24 handicap shows that it does not have the proper controls in place. Golf clubs have started computing their own handicaps. It really is a mess.
The WHS presented itself as a cure-all System but apparently, it doesn’t cure anything at all. It just makes everything worse and the speed by which our handicaps can change has become a weapon for manipulation.
It used to be that your handicap was adjusted every month or every 15 days and it used to be that we could access the past handicaps of players so we could at least see a pattern in the improvement or deterioration of a players handicap. That way you would have an idea of what skill set a player has.
But something they call the Privacy Act got in the way (although I really don’t know how listing a players handicap for each month during the year violates anyone’s privacy). We have brought ourselves into a Worldwide Handicapping System that doesn’t address our needs, doesn’t take our culture into consideration and ignores the way we play golf here in our country.
It is a System that will work in certain cultures but spectacularly fail in others. It won’t work in societies where there is no honor among thieves. As long as Peer Review is not a part of the handicapping process it will always be GIGO — Garbage In, Garbage Out.
Garbage scores encoded in a machine that doesn’t know these scores are garbage will come up with a garbage handicap of 24. Sadly, we can only watch helplessly since we do not even know where we can complain and/or discuss what needs to be done. This should not become the norm for Philippine golf and the chance of it happening again must be minimized.
Bring us back to the old way of doing handicaps, please. Bring us back to the days when it was local handicap providers that computed our handicaps. Bring us back to the days when there is a face to the people computing our handicaps and someone will be here in our country to take responsibility and do what needs to be done to fix things.
These days we don’t see or feel any connection to whoever is in New Zealand and whoever is in New Zealand doesn’t give a f**k to what’s happening to us.
Hey NGAP, this is not just a matter of setting up computerization and collecting handicapping fees. We also need some authority and controls and golfer education to make sure our handicapping system performs as it should perform.
Our staff who input these scores were not meant to be garbage collectors.
