Okay, you big girls who carry those low handicap indexes, you can stop reading this now, but for the rest of us this may be something we can relate to.  It’s that frustrating, mind-boggling subject of handicaps and that four letter acronym, GHIN.

Ar-r-g-g-h!  Have you ever been put down by a machine?  Rodney Dangerfield, I relate to you.

After a glorious round of golf at our first Last Monday at the Hyatt Hill Country, I dutifully and happily sat down at the computer and entered my score into GHIN.  This machine had the audacity to come back with a response in red lettering and ask in so many words, “Are you sure?  There ain’t no way…  Who are you kidding!”  I felt like the screen was the size of a billboard screaming at me.

Of course the wording was much more diplomatic, but the implication was that, “You, my dear madam, could not in your wildest dreams have made that score because I know your usual scores.”  (I could swear that these words were said with a nasally sneer.)

Then, to continue the humiliation, in a condescending question, it goes on to say, “Post anyway?”  Again in red lettering.

“Well, yes, damn it!”, as I slap “Enter.”

 

I had two witnesses, Paula Abrams and Nancy Joseph.  They can attest to my score.  They just didn’t realize I was playing out of my head, although Nancy did ask again what my index was.  She wasn’t implying anything in an unkind way.  It’s just that that made two of us who couldn’t make the equation work:  you have a handicap index of X and you’re playing like Y.

The next day though, it was back to reality--13 strokes higher than the previous day.  Oh how I love golf.  It giveth and it taketh away.

To quote Dean Knuth as stated in one of the handicapping articles on the www.usga.org website, “A player’s Handicap Index reflects his potential because it is based upon his best scores posted for a given number of rounds.  Ideally the best 10 of his last 20 rounds.  Since the USGA has his worst 10 scores tossed out, his Handicap Index reflects his best days.”

An occurrence like this makes us all run back to the information on handicaps as we puzzle over the mathematical geniuses who devised this system.  I read it and reread it and it’s still confusing.  I’m looking for nine more miracles like the first Last Monday.  Oh to have more of those “best days”.

Jeanne Parsley
President 2009-2010