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The moment I understood one of golf’s most difficult problems, I was actually on an ice rink.
That was a few years ago when our men’s hockey team, the Strangers, were entering the middle tier of our local beer league. The Strangers had a wide range of players, from some older guys like me to some younger and faster ones who played at a high level. In our first few games we steamrolled the competition, and it was fun. Everyone scored a goal. We drank beer on the bench. One night, on the way to another lopsided win, I remember saying something about how we should hold back or we might get kicked out of the league.
Basically, I suggested filling sandbags.
The next week we moved up to the top division, where the games got tougher and the drinks on the bench were nothing but water. But that’s when I got it. Whether it’s getting more hits than you deserve or scoring goals against slower skaters, sometimes we confuse the path to glory with the path of least resistance.
One may not respect sandbaggers, but one must admire their ingenuity. I have neither the skill nor the foresight to tank rounds at opportune moments, or to keep track of which points come from GHIN and when, or to throw in a point from the Reds after playing from the very back. Or maybe I’m just lazy: it all seems like a lot of work.
When money is involved, sandbagging is especially egregious. In a 1995 piece, “The Dirty Little Secrets of a Sandbagger,” an anonymous source describes to Guy Yocom of Golf Digest the old “Barbecue Tour” of cash-net tournaments in Texas, where everyone felt compelled to improve their handicap in the name of economic survival. “Handicap husling on this ‘tour’ is a way of life,” the reformed sandbagger told Yocom. “From Sherman to Paris, from Tyler to Longview, you either play with an inflated handicap or just donate your entry money to the guys who do it.”
As adept as sandbaggers are at outmaneuvering the competition, their worst offense might be deceiving themselves. In the golf most of us play, the tangible stakes are modest — a few store credits, small settlements over Venmo, the occasional trophy. What we desire most is to get to the next round, or to finish in the top 10. We want to think of those few shots that went exactly where they were supposed to go, exactly when we needed them. But the stories lose power when the cards are stacked: a net score of 4 when it should have been a 5; a Class B championship when you should have been in Class A.
The whole dynamic is reminiscent of the Seinfeld episode where Kramer boasts about dominating his new karate class. Then the truth comes out: the rest of the class is a bunch of 12-year-olds. Faced with reality, even Kramer realizes he’s been fooling himself.
If all this sounds like a lofty opinion, let me remind you where we started. The temptation to manipulate the pitch hits us all at some point, but the reality is inescapable. If all I wanted to do was score as many goals as possible, I could just point the other team to another rink. If success is the only thing that matters, you’re probably not going to get any better.
