When I started, I was pretty uptight about wanting to follow the rules, etc. My husband, who had a 12 handicap at the time, would get impatient with how many strokes I took and want me to move my ball into the fairway from the rough, etc., and I would say that I needed to learn how to play from the rough and that I didn’t want any special favors and that I felt disrespected if he made me move my ball, blah blah blah.
Finally, he explained it to me the way some of y’all have put it: I’m not a pro, it’s not a tournament, it’s just practice, we need to keep our speed of play up so as not to ruin the game for those behind us, and we’re supposed to be having fun, not worrying about rules.
So, I relaxed about it.
Now, he cheats by “forgetting” how many strokes he took, if you don’t keep your eye on him!
…and then there’s the notion of people playing with different skill levels. Yeah, I know all about the hadicap system, but my friends and I would rather play without doing advanced mathematics to determine scores. As for the difference between this and a driving range? Yeah, I know it’s not GOLF but the driving range doesn’t give me a chance to walk around, try some slightly harder shots, learn about lies, etc. Yes, at some point (assuming I get better), I will have to actually play by THE RULES, but for now, I am still learning.
Because the infractions are not arbitrary. As you pointed out, I use them to keep the game moving. Trust me, you would not want to be behind me if I had to keep playing by THE RULES.
(Oh, and reductio ad absurdum)
I don’t expect much out of the guys who play a few times per year. I don’t think anyone wants to stand there while a guys takes 5 hacks to get his ball out of some long stuff. And no one is going to bust his balls about it.
If I play with the guys from work, some of them like mulligans. Some don’t. We set the ground rules before we tee off.
I guess the main thing is that some people, whether the stakes are bragging rights or money, are known to be cheaters. These are the guys who ALWAYS find their ball and usually have a pretty good shot. You can’t trust some people not to improve their lie when they’re out of sight. You certainly can’t trust them to assess themselves a penalty if they double hit a ball or ground their club in a hazard.
But, even when you’re just out with your buddies, part of the fun is that you’re at least trying to beat each other on the holes, see if you can get pars, see who does better on a hole. And the challenge in that comes from the rules of the game. If someone is rolling his ball over, or picking up putts. . .what’s the point?
While I see that it’s no fun to be stuck in a divot, it’s also no fun (IMHO) to remove the things that make the game tough.
Should have been a question mark at the end of that last sentence.
And, on the OP’s question, it sounds like my golfing career was similar to the OP’s, with quite infrequent games played just for fun. Never had any professional tuition, and i never really got much better than crap.
But, that said, i did prefer to play the ball as it lay, even in the rough. Like Dinsdale, if the ground was bare or hacked up in such a way that it should have been GUR, then i’d pick the ball up, but otherwise i’d play it where it lay.
One friend that i used to play with had a “preferred lie” rule, whereby even if your ball landed right in the middle of the fairway, you were allowed to pick it up and place it so that it sat up on the grass and allowed for a cleaner swing. I always preferred not to do this, because for me it was as much about playing against myself as against the other guy.
Not familiar with the term but can hazard a guess.
Folks playing winter rules allow you to improve your lie, to accomodate the generally worse conditions in off-season.
Some folks say only in the fairway, others feel free to roll it anywhere.
I’m assuming since Australia is in the S hemisphere, the term jokingly refers to improving your lie all year long.
There ya go. Now we’re getting somewhere. What you’ve said is your HO. In the HO of the guys I play with, since we’re all of different calibers, we improve our lie as needed to keep the playing field even and to keep the game moving.
Trust me, even with the foot wedges and hand irons I use, I am at best going to “win” a coupla holes in a nine.
Maybe I should also point out that I treat scoring like I treat a foreign country; it might be nice to visit, and maybe I want to know what’s going on, but I don’t live there.
It’s a joke from Caddyshack II, where Chevy Chase says “you may improve your lie in the rough, but only if you can roughly prove you’re not lying”. It has come to be a reference to moving your ball into a better position after a particularly bad shot.
I’ve sort of been disagreeing with you as I’ve been reading through the thread, but this idea is one I can get behind.
I used to play with a few other guys. We tried to get out about once a week, but weren’t always successful. Anyway, we enjoyed playing against each other, but we weren’t the best golfers, and saw no need to rub anybody’s face in their lack of golfing skills if they were having a bad day. We always tried to play by the rules, accepting the challenges of bad lies and such; and nobody ever insisted he had a right to kick his ball into a better lie, or to throw it out from behind a tree. But if he was having a lousy day, we didn’t care if he did it once or twice as long as it didn’t become a habit. Better, we felt, to have a group of four friends out on the course rather than three friends and one guy whose vocabulary halfway through has shrunk to statements like, “@#&*#%!”
In fact, we actually had a little “in joke” come out of those games. Imagine Bob is addressing his ball somewhere on the course, getting ready to hit. He starts his backswing and…
swish
“I didn’t see that one, Bob.”
He tries again. swish
“I didn’t see that one either, Bob.”
Well, I guess you had to be there. But “I didn’t see that one either, Bob” became a phrase used in many other contexts besides golf. Poor Bob!
Since I spend WAY too much time playing, practicing, watching, and thinking about golf, I thought I’d share this.
I can remember walking down the 6th fairway of my local muni at maybe 7 a.m. on a Sat several years back, and hearing some guy over on the 1st cussing up a storm over a bad shot. I had played golf on and off for over 20 years at the time, but for some reason on that occasion it really struck me how ridiculous it was that someone would get themselves out of bed early on a weekend, come out to a beautiful park, pay $, and then get pissed off! And on the 1st hole no less!
Whether correct or not, my assumption was that most folks who get pissed while golfing do so because they are primarily if not exclusively concerned with recording a low total score. Well guess what? Exactly half the time you are going to score above your average! So, are you going to allow yourself to expend money and effort to getting pissed off 50% of your leisure time?
And unless you are a very good golfer (of which there are quite fewer than you would believe hearing golfers talk!) a good percentage of the time you are going to have enough bad shots or bad holes that you will not have a good total score - say, break 90.
So I decided to identify various things that would contribute to my having “a good round.” In no particular order:
I shoot a good total score (loosely defined as a “keeper” for hcp purposes - lowest 10 of last 20).
I play reasonably quickly, with no excessive delays. To increase the chance of this, I usually golf early in mornings, or other off-times.
I have a good hole or 2. A single birdie - not to mention an eagle, or even a par on a tough hole - can go a long way towards making a good round!
I hit a memorable shot or 2. A screaming drive. A long putt. A nice sand save…
I find some nice golf balls. I’m an inveterate ballhawk, but never in a manner that slows things up.
At least 1 part of my game is working well, or my problems are consistently with one area. Say I’m driving well, but losing shots around the greens. At least I know what to work on.
I have a good time with my buddies. Perhaps the easiest to control.
I have a nice walk in a beautiful environment. Maybe see a neat bird, or a fox or something.
I win $ from my friends. We don’t play for so much that a total loss will kill you. And depending on the wager, you can put up a good score yet lose money, or the other way around. For example, you can shoot horribly, and if you win the skin on the 18th after your partners push several holes in a row, you can be the big winner. Fun even if you are playing for quarter skins.
It’s not as though I have a formal list or anything. The above is just what I came up with while typing today. But the way I approach it, just about every time you step on a golf course, at least 1 of those things is pretty much guaranteed to happen - most often many more than 1. So why get pissed of about the factors that don’t occur, when it is so much more pleasant to enjoy the positives?
I was going to write you a rebuttal when I saw this. That’s my point. I just don’t golf as much as I used to, and I know I’m not playing “real” golf, but I enjoy myself, make no pretense of playing by strict rules, and make sure I keep things moving. Anybody else doesn’t like it? Oh, well.
No, that’s a different story. These people are real cheaters.
IANA Good golfer, actually I suck. But I have found that the only real opponent out there is onesself. No matter who you are playing with or against, your game is only as valid as your integrety. If an opponent cheats, so what, oh well, their loss. If a better player offers you a free drop or an extra mulligan, take it if you feel right or decline if you don’t. It’s not my job to referee anyone elses game, only to keep my own standards at a point where I can feel good about my game, win or lose. After all, it is just a game, whatever the stakes, and a game should be fun, otherwise it is work. So I chop away the cabbage after a 30 yard drive, drop many balls on a wet hole and focus as intently on my third putt as my first and if I lose more money than I can afford, just smile, shake my opponents hand, look him (or her) in the eye and simply roll them in the parking lot after the round.
Last time I got out a week or two ago (incidentally, first time this year, and first time with a brand new set of clubs), I got in 14 holes before it got too dark in the evening. I had a great time at those 14 holes.
But I did play honest, and that did lead to four holes posting double digits. One was 14 strokes. Ouch. But then there were the two pars, the two or three bogeys that could have been pars if not for an errant putt or an embarassing fairway dribbler, that I enjoyed things going more or less right.
I played completely by the rules that time because (1) I was playing with new clubs. I wanted to get an accurate assessment of how much work I had to do to get comfortable with them. (2) I was playing for the first time this year, and wanted to get an accurate assessment of how much my (meager) skill had deteriorated over a lazy winter. (3) I was playing by myself on foot, and was much much faster than anybody else (and there weren’t many others teeing off at 4:30pm). So I wasn’t inconveniencing anybody with my bad play.
That is not to say that the next time I go out and have a playing partner or three, I won’t engage in a little friendly keep-the-game-moving cheating if it genuinely increases the pleasure of my, and everybody else’s, game.
I do feel better about my odds next time out after I went to the driving range today. Found a place with an all-you-can-hit deal, probably shot about 300 balls, and was really getting the feel of most of my clubs (lack of ability to chip and create divots on an astroturf mat aside). Unfortunately, in the words of the Beatles, I’ve got blisters on me fingers (my thumbs anyway).
