The games golfers play

Golf Digest, July, 2001 by David Owen

My regular Sunday-morning golf group begins to gather a little before 7:30. Out of a pool of 25 or 30 potential players we seldom have fewer than a dozen and we sometimes have more than 20.

We choose teams by drawing numbered poker chips from someone's hat, and if the total isn't divisible by four we send some of the players out in threesomes. The threesomes begin two strokes under par--an adjustment we borrowed from Augusta National, where the members' weekend games are known, definitively, as "the Games."

We bet, obviously. The wager is $10, half of which goes to the winning team and half of which goes into a pool for skins. (If there are five skins, each one is worth a fifth of the pool--a skins variant known as "payball.") The game is net best ball, first-tee do-over, no junk, no gimmes. We play off the lowest handicap, but nobody gets more than one stroke a hole and nobody strokes on a par 3. Over the course of a season, almost everyone plays with almost everyone else, so yippers, shankers and creative self-handicappers are not treated as pariahs. When we finish, we drink beer and cook hamburgers on the patio between the clubhouse and the practice green. We have three rules about lunch: no plates, no napkins and no salad.

Often, our games end in ties. Matching cards would be boring, and playing extra holes would force the participants to travel too far from the beer cooler, so we conduct all our playoffs on the practice green.

On various occasions we have required tied contestants to: putt balls from a beer can while standing on the seat of a chair on the patio; throw balls onto the roof of the clubhouse so that the balls roll down the porch roof, the porch steps, the patio and the short, steep slope above the practice green; chip balls through the split-rail fence that separates the patio from the parking lot.

Occasionally, a playoff format seems like so much fun that we open it to the whole group. Other players, waiting to tee off on the first tee, sometimes scowl when they see us standing with our backs to the practice green, holding a beer in one hand and weighing a ball in the other, getting ready to throw the balls over our shoulders at one of the holes, and quietly dreading the moment when, finally, it will be time to go home.