[JohnV]

Looking at the scores for Jacobsen and for the team you see the following:

J 73 67 70 74   284
T 65 62 62 61   250
D  8  5    8  13     34

Jacobsen's bogies :  3 2 4 2  He also had 2 doubles on Sunday
If Mr. Walters made net pars on those 13 holes, would be 15 of the 34 shot difference.  So there are still 19 strokes to account for.  If he made net birdies on half  those holes we are down to about 12-13 strokes to account for.  Those would have to be natural birdies or pars with a stroke when Jacobsen made pars or better.

Pretty good playing.

[JohnV]

Regarding handicaps at the ATT.  The president of the NCGA played as a 2  He is a 1.6 so I don't think they adjusted handicaps up.

[Pete_Pittock]

   There were eight pro-am team scores of 61 or 62 posted by those who played all four rounds. Three of the eight were by Jacobson/Walters.
Jacobson posted two doubles bogeys and eleven bogies. A Walters net par on each slip would pick up fifteen stokes of the 34 gained. That leaves five holes a day where Walters would need a net bogey.
    It is within the realm of possibility. The amateur is taking chances and being aggresive on putts 80% of the time with a touring pro partner. Having said that, a professional gambler/big money stakes player is not likely trying his best for the entire round, which is a linchpin of the hdcp system. Their handicap probably should have been cut in half.
    I played a round at Pacific Dunes with a 20 hdcp player as a partner who hits it 280-320 but has to use a compass to find the ball. As my luck would have it, he hits it straight and shoots 78 with two double bogeys, which I covered with pars. We were the last of three groups and the team with net 62 was counting their money until we came in.
   Edit: J VDB - That is scary and now I know why the red warning message comes on.

[Ken Moum]

I say we should post tournament scores, only.
That might solve the problem, real quick.

Wayne - do you have any statistics on what percentage of golfers play in tournaments?

That's usually the question, but the simple answer is that if they never play in competition, they don't need a hadnicap.

Since a relatively small percentage of all golfers carry handicaps, I would bet that a majority of those who carry a handicap play in some kind of competition.

The Aussie/U.K. system is the only one that makes sense IMHO.

The biggest problem with our system is that it doesn't even require cheating. There is a small (tiny?) segment of players who play better when they are under pressure.

Even if they don't fudge their handicaps, they will win most of what they play in. At my club there's one guy like that. He's a mid-single digit, but he can will himself to play better when he needs to.

I've seen him make 5 birdies in our nine-hole matchplay league. He did it against a friend of mine who shot his career low nine of 38, playing off 12.

Despite shooting a net 32, he got killed.

Ken

[Mike Benham]

Since a relatively small percentage of all golfers carry handicaps, I would bet that a majority of those who carry a handicap play in some kind of competition.

Please educate me on the numbers, I really have no idea the number of golfers who golf and the number of golfers who have handicaps, and the number of golfers who play in some kind of competition.

Perhaps John V. can share some stats from the NCGA which has 175,000 members which means there are 175,000 golfers with handicaps ...

[James Bennett]

There is a small (tiny?) segment of players who play better when they are under pressure.

Even if they don't fudge their handicaps, they will win most of what they play in. At my club there's one guy like that. He's a mid-single digit, but he can will himself to play better when he needs to.

Ken

I had the good fortune to play with such a person down Monterey way.  I am glad he felt I was on his team.  Tenacious competitor.  A true 'wolf' in sheeps clothing!

James B

[Jason Connor]

I think the practice point is a  good one.  If a guy is a 15 but he's playing Pebble, he may practice a lot in the prior month. So perhaps he's actually an 12 but his handicap doesn't say that. Then he plays well and plays to a 9.  Not inconceivable and evidence that a handicaps doesn't measure how good a guy is *right now*.  And like Tiger, even amateurs try to peak at the right time (most of us just don't know how).


I tend to carry a handicap and don't play in tournaments (1 a year and I wouldn't need a handicap for it).

I use the handicap to (a) track my own progress and (b) be able to play matches using handicaps with my regular group of golfing friends.


To me the solution is simple.  If you want a "certified playing handicap" you have to play 5 (or 8 or 10) rounds a year with a "random foursome".  Club or muni's could have dedicated tee times for such.  You get randomly assigned into foursome.  Then the rest of the foursome (all are playing for their certified playing handicap that day) sign off on (a) your correct score and (b) that you played by the rules of golf.  To me 5 rounds seems like a small inconvenience for a certified score.  Because if I ever went to Pebble and shot the lights out, I wouldn't want proof that I'm an honest golfer -- because in these events the winner very often gets alleged to be a sandbagger.

These scores plus tournament scores will go to your handicap.  Sure a guy could purposefully suck it up these few rounds a year.  But for the honest guys who just go low on a grand stage, it's a bit of evidence they're good and honest golfers.

[Jed Peters]

Looking at the scores for Jacobsen and for the team you see the following:

J 73 67 70 74   284
T 65 62 62 61   250
D  8  5    8  13     34

Jacobsen's bogies :  3 2 4 2  He also had 2 doubles on Sunday
If Mr. Walters made net pars on those 13 holes, would be 15 of the 34 shot difference.  So there are still 19 strokes to account for.  If he made net birdies on half  those holes we are down to about 12-13 strokes to account for.  Those would have to be natural birdies or pars with a stroke when Jacobsen made pars or better.

Pretty good playing.

This is what I was saying earlier.  It's the ham and egg factor.  You can't let the 18 hole medal play, scorecard-and-pencil mindset invade your analysis of this team's scoring.

They played 72 separate holes.  Jacobsen made a score on each.  So did Walters. 

Jacobsen made 15 birdies and 2 eagles.

That's 19 under.

They shot -38.

That means that Jacobsen accounted for 50% of the team's under par scoring -- assuming that Walters didn't make any net eagles on any of those holes (which he very well may have).

But if you look at it as Jacobsen shooting -4 and the team being -38, it looks like Jacobsen accounted for only 10.5% of the team's success.

That's a BIG difference, in terms of how you look at it.

Look at it this way:

Jacobsen played 17 holes 19 under.

That means he played 55 holes 15 OVER.

If Walters played those 55 holes (or any subset thereof) in -19 (net), they're there - and each of Jacobsen and Walters would have accounted for 50% of the team's success! 

JVB said that there are 19 stokes unaccounted for.  He's right.  They're the 17 holes Jacobsen played in -19.

You gotta look at the "ham and egg" factor.

Two scratch players can both shoot 72 on a course rated 70.  But if both make 9 birdies and 9 bogies, and they never birdie the same hole, they just shot 54, net, even though neither sandbagged one iota.  I know that's far-fetched, but the point is that you have to look hole-by-hole, not at total strokes.  Statistically, as stated earlier, if you take 140 teams, somebody is going to be the left side of the curve, not only in terms of beathing their handicap, but also in terms of the amount of "ham and egging" that occurs in their rounds.      



 

Shivas is correct, I've heard this before regarding that pairing.

Ham and Egg it had to be. I'm sure that Bill Walters is a 'bagger, but nevertheless, the fact of the matter is that they played well as a team, no doubt.

[Craig Van Egmond]

Apparently Bill owes it all to a magic putter grip...

"I have never, ever, ever putted that well I don't think," says Walters, who admits to having the yips in the weeks leading up to the tournament but received a magic grip that ended those. "I don't think I ever missed anything inside of 10 feet the entire tournament."

Before the event, Walters met a rep from Super Stroke, the grip that PGA Tour star KJ Choi uses, and practiced with it on the putting green. He didn't miss many and the rep fitted his putter with one and the rest is history. "I will never putt without the Super Stroke again," says Walters. "I was breaking down in my stroke, but the Super Stroke keeps your left shoulder solid and you grip it lightly and you can't break down with it."

Walters also credits his pro for making 16 birdies and 2 eagles during the four rounds, with most coming at a time when Walters was struggling on a hole. "This might have been the best ham and egg job of all time," says Walters.

http://www.golflasvegasnow.com/content/view/625/7/

[Bob_Huntley]

Regarding handicaps at the ATT.  The president of the NCGA played as a 2  He is a 1.6 so I don't think they adjusted handicaps up.

John,

The first round of golf the your President played as a Member at Cypress Point he had an 8 handicap. He shot 67 for a net 59. Whoops.

Bob

[Kalen Braley]

I think there is something that has been lost in all the discussion.  A handicap is supposed to be your "best" 10 rounds out of your last 20.  So right off the bat, your handicap is only at best supposed to be a reflection of how you play when your playing well.

So by pure probabilities, if he played 4 rounds during the tournament, then 2 would be his better golf, and 2 his not so better golf.  Even conceding that he played 4 rounds of his better golf, they should still at best only match what his handicap his. But for all 4 of his rounds to be better than his best golf, and to be playing in a tournament where there is more pressure, and potential for gag jobs, this just seems very very unlikely.

It could have been the ultimate ham and egg job where his good holes came on his partners bad holes and visa versa, but this is very unlikely as well.

If it smells fishy, looks fishy, tastes fishy.......

[tlavin]

Ham and egg?

Best ten rounds in twenty?

Let's face it, this pro-am is a joke.  It sounds like a member guest at a private club where the handicap committee consists of the halfway house attendant, the locker room attendant and the guy in charge of the cart barn.  When you're playing for a piece of crystal, one can almost tolerate the expected skullduggery that these traveling golf lizards are capable of, but when you're talking about a "national" pro-am, sponsored by one of our largest corporations that is shown on national television, it is a bit of a scandal that ought to be taken care of.

All they need is a real handicap committee.  The way we do it at Beverly is to give a player his lowest handicap of the past two years.  If we think we smell a phony, his handicap gets whacked.  If he still plays, you know he's a phony.  If he doesn't, he usually gets branded a whiner.  Either way, you should have the ability to control the handicap beyond a person's GHIN handicap.

[Craig Van Egmond]

The guy is a hustler and he sure hustled the AT&T. 

[JohnV]

Regarding handicaps at the ATT.  The president of the NCGA played as a 2  He is a 1.6 so I don't think they adjusted handicaps up.

John,

The first round of golf the your President played as a Member at Cypress Point he had an 8 handicap. He shot 67 for a net 59. Whoops.

Bob

Bob, I believe you are speaking of our CEO, not our President.  Our President is Mark House and he is not a member of Cypress.

David Bill is a pretty legitimate 4 to 5 from what I've seen of his game, which is his current index.  He might be capable of 67 on very rare occasions if his putter was working very well.

[George Pazin]

John, I see to recall reading somewhere that they typically add a couple strokes to handicaps at the Pebble tourney because most aren't used to playing on TV or in front of those kind of crowds. Maybe your friend requested that they not do that to him to avoid any appearance of impropriety.

I think what brings these questions up all the time is simply that it seems unlikely to ham and egg quite that well. Yet Jason the statistician points out that someone almost has to do it.

Does anyone know what they have as Berman's handicap? He makes me look like a dashing young Seve.

[JohnV]

Berman is listed on ghin.com as a 15.2.

He played in the ATT as an 18.

The slope from the White tees at Poppy is 134 which makes him an 18.

I also checked the other four board members of the NCGA who played and their handicaps all worked out to be correct vs. their indexes so it appears that the ATT doesn't adjust them.

They may have stopped that when slope came along as the higher slope of these courses would give the players more strokes to begin with.

They also don't give more than 18 strokes to anyone.

[Garland Bayley]

...
Does anyone know what they have as Berman's handicap? He makes me look like a dashing young Seve.

Cept, he doesn't hit it far enough to get into as much trouble as you do. How many times you think you can try to be a hero and duck hook it into the ocean on 18?

[George Pazin]

...
Does anyone know what they have as Berman's handicap? He makes me look like a dashing young Seve.

Cept, he doesn't hit it far enough to get into as much trouble as you do. How many times you think you can try to be a hero and duck hook it into the ocean on 18?

Let's just say Phil's 11 on 14 would pale by comparison....

[JR Potts]

Ham and egg?

Best ten rounds in twenty?

Let's face it, this pro-am is a joke.  It sounds like a member guest at a private club where the handicap committee consists of the halfway house attendant, the locker room attendant and the guy in charge of the cart barn.  When you're playing for a piece of crystal, one can almost tolerate the expected skullduggery that these traveling golf lizards are capable of, but when you're talking about a "national" pro-am, sponsored by one of our largest corporations that is shown on national television, it is a bit of a scandal that ought to be taken care of.

All they need is a real handicap committee.  The way we do it at Beverly is to give a player his lowest handicap of the past two years.  If we think we smell a phony, his handicap gets whacked.  If he still plays, you know he's a phony.  If he doesn't, he usually gets branded a whiner.  Either way, you should have the ability to control the handicap beyond a person's GHIN handicap.

Thank god they didn't do this at the "Good to Get Out"!   I would be $4,000 poorer.

[Pete_Pittock]

According to this story by Golf Channel's Brian Hewitt there was no sandbagging.

In the wake of the flap surrounding the team portion of the AT&T Pebble Beach National Pro-Am, amateur Billy Walters has been cleared by tournament officials amid questions that his 11 handicap was inflated.
 
Walters, is the erstwhile Las Vegas golf hustler, who won the event with pro partner Fredrik Jacobson by a record 10 shots. When Jacobson finished 4-under on his ball, many people assumed Walters accounted for the other 34 of the team’s 38 under total. In actuality, Jacobson made 15 birdies and two eagles over 72 holes. And Walters, who didn’t break 80 on his own ball in any of the four rounds, played well on the holes Jacobson faltered.
 
It was classic “ham and egg” as Walters described it.
 
Meanwhile a former USGA official told GOLF CHANNEL the pros are the ones that need to be investigated in the handicap department.
 
“The pros are grossly over-handicapped,” said the official. “If the pros had a handicap, they would come in at +5 to +7. Put Vijay Singh on a high slope rated course with a +7.1 Handicap Index and his Course Handicap would be +9. He plays as a scratch so he gets nine free shots every round. That’s 36 freebies over four days.”
 
“The pros,” said the official, “are the real but silent handicap crooks here.”
 
I would snarkily add that the former USGA official forgot to mention that is the same pro was put  on an average 113 slope course he would only get
28 freebies over four days.

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