There it is: in black and white with a dash of red and blue, a mass of digits and dates and scores. It is a tiny snippet, less than the size of a deck of cards, covered with ciphers, that reduces your entire golf season to a single, calculated figure. It’s your year-end handicap card.
Many golfers lucky enough to live where year round golf weather is a given may not be aware of the seasonality of our handicap index up here in the north. Due to the change of seasons, most golf clubs north of the Mason-Dixon Line maintain a limited schedule of revisions of a golfer’s USGA handicap index.
We often go to ridiculous lengths to convince ourselves that we still have playable weather but eventually even the hard core must admit that golf becomes a different game in the northern climes in winter.
If you’ve ever played a round and invoked the leaf rule after what looked like a perfectly good shot, or taken relief from a snow bank, or lofted a perfect wedge into a frozen green and watched it skitter across and 20 yards off the back of the green, you know what I mean. You can feel the pain.
The USGA, in its infinite wisdom, has had the very rational forethought to put a system in place by which we golfers are not penalized for our punishing conditions. Procedure stipulates that we stop posting scores played on our northern tracks before the really cruel weather sets in.
Not until spring arrives and offers golfers slightly better, though often still challenging, playing conditions will the USGA deem it necessary for us to post our scores again, here in the hinterland of Southern New England.
Therefore, as decreed by the USGA, a golfer must live with that final number, that last revision of the year, through the long dark days of winter. Like it or not, if effect you are branded, a marked golfer.
It’s a lot like getting a tattoo.
You aren’t really sure if you want in the first place. You can’t decide what it is you want if you do get one. After you get it, you can’t decide if you like it.
You might wish that you’d gotten something different. Maybe you’re happy with the way it turned out but scared that you won’t like it later.
People don’t necessarily have to actually see it, but you’ll still know you’ve got one. Someone might know that you have one but you might not want to show it to them.
Sometimes you can’t even figure out how you got the one you have.
You can go online and look at what every one else has but it doesn’t mean a thing because everybody wants something different. What looks good to one person might seem ridiculous to someone else.
You might regret it once you have it but you’re stuck with it, at least for now. You might be able to get rid of it but it’s not going to be easy. Taking it down to nothing is going to be quite a process and it’s probably going to hurt. It is almost guaranteed to look worse than it does now before it goes away.
If you try to modify it, who knows how it will turn out. Making it bigger is almost always easy but making it smaller is unusually difficult. It must be nice to have one that is so tiny that you hardly ever think about it.
If you ever finally get one down to nothing you’re probably never going to want it back.
You might as well sit back, relax, and get used to it, at least for the moment. It’s going to be a long winter. Eventually you’ll peel off layers and layers of winter clothing and hit the links. Then you’ll be faced with the cold hard realization that the darn thing is still there, just the same as it was last fall.
There is hope. It turns out that this tattoo is only temporary. Soon enough you’ll be playing so much golf you’ll find yourself looking forward to getting another one, what ever it turns out to be.
