Chronicles of a Six Handicap

Six handicaps don’t win club championships.

They don’t shoot even par over three days. They don’t answer every bogey with a birdie. Half the time, they don’t even know where their next tee shot is going.

When I signed up for the club championship, I did so without any delusions of grandeur. As a competitive person, that’s not an easy thing for me to admit. But it’s the truth.

One of my favorite things about Tiger is that he never teed it up believing anything but that he was going to win. I love that mentality: the killer instinct, win or go home. But Tiger never had to play a plus-four off the tips as a six handicap.

I was never going to win the club championship. That didn’t mean I couldn’t compete.

I play most of my golf by the book. I play the ball as it lies. I putt everything out. I count every shot, including the ones I’d rather forget. I’m not out there just to have fun, at least not in the way most people mean it. For me, the challenge is the fun. I want the birdie putt to matter. I want to see if I can answer a double bogey. I want to know, at the end of the day, exactly what I shot.

On a normal round, I have to manufacture that pressure myself: break 80, play the next six holes in one over, save par after burying a tee shot in someone’s backyard. The club championship just makes it official.

This was my second year in the field. Last year I entered as one of the lowest-ranked players in the tournament. Nerves were high and expectations were low. I strung together three rounds close to my handicap and called it a win.

This year started in a similar fashion.

I opened with an 80, not my best stuff, but I generally knew where the ball was headed. That was good for a tie for 25th, hardly Butler Cabin territory, but respectable for a guy who’d entered ranked 35th out of 40 coming in.

Naturally, I went home and got about five hours of sleep, too wired about backing up a solid round with a great one.

It was an early tee time in Central Texas, and I was already sweating through my shirt on the range, tired, dehydrated, and utterly convinced I was about to start knocking down flagsticks.

The flagsticks were never in danger.

In twelve hours I’d gone from reasonable command of the golf ball to no idea where it was going. I had a two-way miss, and I spent the entire round trying to fix one side only to bleed shots on the other. That went on for eighteen holes and six balls out of bounds. On 17, I tacked on a two-stroke penalty for playing the wrong ball. By then I was just hitting whatever I could find.

By the back nine, I’d stopped trying to post a respectable number and started trying not to get disqualified for running out of golf balls.

It was the kind of round that leaves you asking questions. What’s wrong with my swing? Am I actually a six handicap, or a thirty? Did I just take up this game last week?

It might have been the worst round I’ve played in years. Given the timing, it might have been the worst of my life.

A bad finish usually stings because you can point to the shots you gave away and convince yourself the good score was in there somewhere, if only you hadn’t let it slip. This wasn’t that. There was no good round hiding underneath it. I had nothing, all day. Sometimes golf just does that to you.

That’s just golf. You can’t expect to have any good rounds if you don’t own the bad ones.

The championship, for me, was already over. Any respectable finish had evaporated in the 105 degree heat index, and I had no real reason to believe the swing that produced six out-of-bounds balls would somehow correct itself overnight.

But I still had another round to play.

I wasn’t playing for a trophy anymore, or a top-15 finish. I was playing for pride. I needed to prove to myself that I wasn’t the golfer from the day before.

The next morning, I cranked Rage Against the Machine on the drive in, gave myself less time on the range, and tried not to read too much into the fact that I was still spraying it both ways.

My opening tee shot was ugly. So ugly it didn’t even reach the fairway bunker 250 yards out. The next one, a nine-iron, missed slightly right but stayed in the neighborhood. I could work with that. I scratched out a par.

The par-three second played about 155 yards to a front-right pin. Right was dead, so I aimed for the fat of the green and pushed it slightly, and nearly jarred it. My pitch mark was six inches from the cup. I tapped in for birdie.

I hadn’t suddenly found a perfect golf swing. I just kept hitting the next shot.

The previous day’s round followed me around the course.

On almost every hole, the demons were there in plain sight, reminding me the exact mistake I’d made there the day before. My primary focus was just not to repeat them. Most of the time, I didn’t. Not in the sense that I was piping drives 300 yards down the middle. Instead, yesterday’s 50-yard block became today’s weak pull that was safely in play and lived to be hit again.

It wasn’t pretty. It was usable.

I still made three doubles on the inward nine, derived mostly from some weak and noncommittal putts. But I kept the ball on the property and signed for a 78, the lowest round of my short club championship career. It didn’t move me into contention. It proved exactly what I’d gone out there to prove: round two was terrible, but it wasn’t who I was.

Given everything that came before it, that 78 might be the gutsiest round I’ve ever played.

The six handicap didn’t win the club championship.

He never really had a chance. But the beautiful thing about golf is that you always get to decide what you’re playing for, and then go play for it.

That, more than any trophy, is what keeps us coming back.

Two Inches Short is a place where amateur golfers can unapologetically be themselves. It’s where we can all relate to the greatest game ever played at a level we can all understand.

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“Making triple bogey from the middle of the fairway isn’t just about skill, it’s a lifestyle.”