"I am curious how many people play 100% by the rules of golf every single round they play. I am not really talking about mulligans or winter rules. I am talking, like I am climbing into a bunker and my club accidentally barely touches the sand. Or I am under a tree, and in my practice backswing, I knock of a droplet of water off a leaf. That sort of stuff, that does not have an any impactful effect or advantage on your next shot. I am meaning your casual games, not tounament rounds of any kind."
Sean Leary:
That's a good question even though we have had it before. The absolute KING of that kind of thread in my experience was Tom Huckaby.
But I can only give you my own answer and I will tell you I have been pretty unique, actually really unique in some ways in my approximately thirty year career in golf.
Once I really started to play at around 35 it only took me about two years to get good---tournament ready and at scratch. After that I played some recreational golf but not very much and it just got less as time went on. It was all pretty much just tournament golf and just practicing alone for the last 15-20 years of it and playing every year over forty tournaments.
But in match play both recreational which actually almost always had some small wager going or even in tournament match play I was very regular about using Dec 2-5/1 with my opponents unless I felt there was some gaming going on with them and then I would keep them right at the technical letter of the Rules of Golf.
But I was sort of fortunate because right around the time I started playing that much I actually memorized the entire Rules and Decisions books and so the Rules of Golf for no particularly good reason I can remember other than just getting interested in them and most all their little nuances became pretty much totally familiar to me and I came to admire them too and their unique principles so it just got to be like second nature to me to use them completely whenever playing golf. I think it all made me feel good about myself, I think it actually made me proud of myself that way and it's kind of odd, I guess, but kind of cool too how golf can give you stuff like that if you let it.
I've thought back recently on some of these things through my life and I know I got lucky in my life because I may never have figured out some of these things on my own with no help. My father gave me a lot and he did it in a way that was the opposite of a disciplinarian. He really knew his stuff with golf and he had the friends of great golf all around him too.
I think those guys knew that golf offered them a real microcosim of the ultimate stage of character expression and they respected the game and each other through it; they never seemed to try to abuse it, that I was ever aware of. And when someone would come their way who did it was very interesting how they handled it.
There was this saying painted above the blackboard in one of the rooms at St Marks School where I took history classes for years that said; "Character is what you are in the dark."
To me, these days, I think the game of golf in the framework of that saying is just about synonymous with "the dark" and that's so analogous to being just out there by yourself with your clubs and ball particularly when you know nobody's watching you but you.