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My breakthrough understanding of one of golf’s thorniest problems started in an ice rink.

This was a few years ago, when our men’s hockey team, the Strangers, entered a mid-level division of our local beer league. The Strangers covered a broad range of players, from some older guys like me, to some younger and faster who played at a high level. In our first few games we rolled over the competition, and it was fun. Everyone scored. We drank beers on the bench. One night on the way to another lopsided win, I remember saying something about how we should tone it down or we might get tossed out of the division.

Basically, I was proposing sandbagging.



The next week we got moved into the highest division, where the games got tougher, and the drinks on the bench were now just water. But that’s when I got it. Whether it’s getting more strokes than you deserve, or racking up goals against slower skaters, we sometimes confuse the road to glory with the path of least resistance.

You might not respect sandbaggers, but you have to admire their ingenuity. I have neither the skill nor the foresight to tank rounds at opportune moments, or track which scores are coming out of GHIN when, or mix in a score from the reds after really playing from all the way back. Maybe I’m just lazy, too: it all seems like a lot of work.

When money is involved, sandbagging is particularly egregious. In a 1995 feature, “Dirty little secrets of a sandbagger,” an anonymous source describes to Golf Digest’s Guy Yocom the old “barbecue circuit” of money net tournaments in Texas, where everyone felt compelled to massage their handicaps in the name of economic survival. “Handicap hustling 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 fee to the guys who do.”

As adept as sandbaggers are at outmaneuvering the competition, their worst offense might be how they deceive themselves. In the golf most of us play, the tangible stakes are modest—some shop credit, small settlements over Venmo, the occasional trophy. What we crave most is advancing to the next round, or finishing in the top 10. We want to reflect on the handful of shots that went exactly where they were supposed to go right when we needed them to. But the stories lose potency if the deck is stacked: a net 4 when it should have been a 5; a B flight championship when you should have been playing in A.

The whole dynamic is reminiscent of that Seinfeld episode in which Kramer boasts of 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 recognizes he was kidding himself.



If this all sounds like weighing in from on high, I’d remind you where we started. The temptation to tilt the playing field hits all of us at one point, but reality is inevitable. If I only wanted to score as many goals as possible, I could just give the other team directions to a different rink. When success is all that matters, you probably won’t get any better.