Some groups would allow a mulligan only on the first hole, some would allow one mulligan per nine holes. The commitment to play by the rules is a personal choice.īefore I started playing golf on a regular basis, I would play casually with several friends. My experience is that a person has to take golf fairly seriously before they take the time an effort to learn the rules. I think that there are several ways of looking at this.īefore a person may be deemed to "cheat" you have to assume that there is a set of rules, that the player knows and has agreed to play by the rules, and then has chosen to consciously disregard one or more rules. Some of my best golf bull sessions have been when my buddies and I discuss our greatest failures, rather than our successes. In such cases you only cheat yourself out of the satisfaction of knowing that you played your best and recorded an honest score.Īnd I can say from experience that there is still a lot of satisfaction in that, even if the score is a 90 something when your course handicap is 12. even if the advantage is only stroking your own ego. I mean doing something improperly, then gaining an advantage by doing so. Or it was a simple putt and he makes those all the time so why waste an extra 10 seconds by actually playing the shot? And so on.Īnd by cheating I don't simply mean not playing by the rules. Then they rationalize it to themselves that the bad lie was unfair because a tour pro would never have to deal with such primitive conditions. So they find ways to shave strokes, not by practice and lessons, but by bumping a ball out of a bad lie, or giving themselves a 3 foot putt that they might actually make less than 50% of the time. I think it's the inability of many players to admit to themselves that they aren't as good as they tell everyone they are. What's the motivation behind cheating? Is it purely ego? Golf is known as the gentlemans game, yet it seems pretty common for golfers to cheat. I didn't want to hijack the "Who plays by the rules" thread, but I'm curious about this.
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