The Problem With Handicaps...Golfers?
The Problem With Handicaps...Golfers?
Deep into the second full season of its introduction, it’s no longer the “new World Handicap System” but it still gets talked about ALL the time.
Talk to any golfer for more than 30 seconds and the chances are handicaps will already have been mentioned: perfectly understandable as it’s a universal language by which golfers the world over can judge each other. And judge they do.
Subscribe
Join our mailing list and never miss an update
"The World Handicap system is the worst handicap system ever. Apart from all the other ones."
Robert Hardie
"The World Handicap system is the worst handicap system ever. Apart from all the other ones."
Robert Hardie
Tell some your handicap is more than 18 and they’ll call you a bandit: tell them your handicap is in single figures and you’ll be told you’re playing too much golf.
Everyone’s got a view on everyone else’s handicap - and it’s almost always that it’s too high - but the one thing you never hear a golfer say is “my handicap’s too high”.
WHS gets the blame, which is ridiculous: how difficult would it be to design a system that manages to gives only one person in the world an accurate handicap but gives every other golfer one that’s too high?
X10 Follow
Most Popular
July 2022
Trending Articles
March 2022
The problem is averages. For more than 150 years now the system has been revised and revised in search of something that will give an indication of how good a player is or isn’t and attempt to level the playing field in handicap competitions, but players don’t play the same every time they play and competitions aren’t staged over long periods of the time - they’re on the day.
That’s an impossible dream, just like handicapping horses in flat racing: if that worked every race would end in a dead heat for all the horses running, but they never do. Any time someone wins a club competition, especially by a decent margin, the whispering starts: “we need to do something about their handicap” etc. It’s never very clear who are the “right” people to win competitions are, just that it’s not the ones that do.
Gloriously, every golfer is able to play well below their handicap and well above it in any two consecutive rounds: playing below it is why we keep trying, playing above it keeps us honest about how good or bad we really are.
We should be celebrating someone’s success when they win, not tarnishing it.
