Solo Posting Golfers: The New Outlaws?
/Gary McCormick examines the USGA decision to demand peer review of all scores posted for handicap purposes and equates the updated decision to the mid-70s gas crisis when the speed limit was changed without any change in enforcement.
Check out the full piece, but this point sort of makes one wonder why, outside of being consistent with the R&A, why the USGA made the change:
The word from our area’s regional golf association, the Northern California Golf Association (NCGA), is that they have received no indication from the USGA, as of this writing, as to how the new rule is to be enforced. While golfers who are members of a club will have their postings scrutinized by the club’s scoring committee, players who are members of “e-clubs”, or who are posting scores for rounds played outside of club events or at other courses, will have no such scrutiny and scores will not be vetted on the basis of the new rule.
What I foresee happening after January 1, 2016 is the establishment of a sort of off-kilter dichotomy – reasonable, honorable golfers who post honestly tabulated scores for those solo early-morning or after-work nine hole rounds, or the rare solo 18-hole round, though scrupulously accurate in their accounting, will become scofflaws when they post their scores online, as many will still do, for their local association’s handicap committee to use in assessing their GHIN rating.
So now many of us will become outlaws; honest, and dishonest, all in the same action – and all because the USGA has decided to reverse a practice which had been in effect for decades.