In Defense of Cheating at Golf

Bending the rules for beginners could make game play fairer, and faster.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
In Defense of Cheating at Golf by Drew Millard. Drew
Millard is the author of How Golf Can Save Your
Life and the co host of Macho Pod read by
Danny Scott. If you have never spent hours outdoors in
wet bulb temperatures, I cannot recommend strongly enough that you
avoid doing so at all costs. The combination of high

(00:21):
humidity and heat prevents sweat from evaporating and thereby cooling
us down, instead making it feel even hotter. Prolonged exposure
can lead to heat exhaustion, or even death or as
was the case for me last month, cheating at golf.
I was playing at a course full of rolling hills
in Delaware, close to the Atlantic Ocean. I birdied the first,

(00:43):
a lovely little number with a creek and an elevated green,
and managed to save par. On the second. I duffed
my tee shot on the par five third, then banged
a long three wood to get back in position, only
to misjudge the turf conditions on my approach and hit
a fat eight iron right into the side of a
steep hill overgrown with scraggle. A couple hacks with my

(01:04):
wedge and an encounter with quicksand later I too putted
for one of the finer triple bogies of my life.
As I set up on the fourth tee, the air
around me began to feel like hot soup. My hands
were sweating so much that I lost my grip on
my six iron mid swing, leading to a burbling nothing
of a shot Over the next couple of holes. I

(01:24):
drank two bottles of gatorade, refilled them with water, and
drank those two. Nothing helped. My head began to buzz.
I brushed salt off my forearms. I needed to finish
this round as quickly as possible, so I crumpled up
my scorecard and began shamelessly dropping balls in favorable locations,
conceding putts, and doing whatever else I needed to hasten

(01:45):
my escape. I made it twelve miserable holes before admitting defeat.
I am haunted by the thought of what might have
happened if I'd tried to grit my way through the
entire eighteen My case might be a bit extreme, but
it's emblematic of why I am fully in favor of
cheating at golf. One of the larger challenges confronting the
game today is the pace of play. Golf courses have

(02:07):
gotten more crowded due to a pandemic induced explosion in
the sport's popularity, and as a result, they've also gotten slower.
It's an organic supply and demand issue that only gets
worse when less skilled players head out for a loop.
I love these beginners and am genuinely thrilled that this
game that I love so much has grown the way
it has, But playing behind them is a slog. It

(02:30):
can be maddening to watch a player in front of
you hit their ball into the woods, spend five minutes
looking for it, slap it out into the fairway, only
to hit it back in, repeating the process ad infinitum.
This can't be a fun way to experience a golf course.
The United States Golf Association, at least to a certain degree,
knows this. As part of its ongoing quest to modernize golf,

(02:52):
in twenty nineteen, it instituted a rule declaring that players
should take no more than forty seconds to prepare for
a shot, along with other game quickening provisions like creating
a maximum score per hole and allowing players to leave
the flagstick in when they putt. Excuse the pun, but
you've got to applaud their foresight. The problem is that
the people who could benefit most from these recent changes

(03:14):
likely don't know they exist, and even if they did
and followed them to a t, they'd almost invariably string
together a quick succession of seven bad shots, perhaps punctuated
by one good one, only to pick up before even
sniffing the green. That is a recipe for frustration, not fun,
and I would much rather see the same hypothetical golfer
take a mulligan or two before hitting a serviceable shot.

(03:38):
Golf currently relies on its handicap system to ensure an
even playing field between players of unequal skill. However, that
system only levels things out on the scorecard after the
round is done and only applies within the context of competition. Instead,
we need to reconsider what's appropriate for a golfer to
do on the course given their unique circumstances. So here's

(03:59):
a proposal to help golf litigate itself out of its
current slow play pickle. Some might call it cheating, but
why not call it a few more rules. High handicappers
and no handicappers should feel free to tee off from
wherever they want, be allotted a generous number of free drops,
and receive blanket immunity from a predesignated trouble hazard like bunkers,

(04:21):
water hazards, or the woods that might otherwise trip them
up and leave them frustrated. Novice golfers deserve to experience
the joy of thwacking the ball into the fairway, and
with a few metaphorical bowling bumpers, they would be out
of the way faster, win win. The codification of cheating
would require buy in from the larger golf community. Of course,

(04:42):
in order to cheat honorably, one must do so openly,
and that requires others to withhold judgment. Golfers everywhere would
need to recognize that cheating is a phase, a crutch
one leans on until they've developed the requisite skill. Not
to Donald Trump, a man who owns numerous golf courses
and has been playing for decades is a good enough
golfer that he ought not to cheat, and yet he

(05:03):
appears to shamelessly on his own courses and in front
of the press. I'm loath to suggest exact handicapped thresholds,
because as golfers get better, there is a gradual organic
drop off in how much they need to rely on
the proverbial foot wedge. Bad shots cease to be caused
for a reload and instead present opportunities to test one's
metal and combine their problem solving skills with their physical acumen.

(05:27):
There are those who will disagree vehemently, who would advocate
that bad golfers get lessons or stick to driving ranges
and top golf until they're ready for a real course.
But that's no fun, and there's no better way to
help someone learn than by letting them work it out
for themselves. To argue otherwise is to invoke a Thatcherist
strain of reasoning, advocating for a world in which the

(05:48):
skilled yank the ladder up behind them and demand that
those at the bottom use their hustle and ingenuity to
grind their way to the top. These people want the
rules to be equally applied across an uneven distribution of
skill and experience. Instead, we ought to celebrate that each
golfer is unique and deserves to have fun on the course.
If that means bending, breaking, or wholesale rewriting the rules,

(06:10):
then so be it. For a sport with such a
stodgy reputation. Golf has a sneaky knack for adapting itself
to the times. It is a game obsessed with its
own expansion, whether that means loosening its dress codes or
embracing simulators as gateways into the game. But it still
hasn't nailed down exactly how it converts an interested neophyte

(06:30):
into a passionate player, simply because the transition from the
anything goes keep trying until your satisfied. Nature of the
practice area has never been able to translate to the
golf course proper. But there is a way to remove
this barrier to entry and democratize the game in the process.
We just have to be brave enough to admit that
sometimes it's fair to let people cheat.