Uncle Hugh's Guide to Maintaining a Ten Handicap

Natural athletic ability, as we all know, correlates with good golf about as much as Christina Aguilera correlates with good taste. Each of us has a friend who, despite being able to direct a header into the corner of the net, use a cricket bat with aplomb, or execute a precise drop kick, couldn’t hit an approach from 80 yards to save his life.

Conversely, each of us also knows one or two gents prone to walking into doors who somehow become marvels of coordination the moment they pick up a golf club. This is because the golf swing, a unique animal, cannot be captured merely by extrapolating general physical talent. If you can play football, you can probably play some rugby. If you can handle yourself reasonably well on a rugby pitch, it’s a decent bet you can do the same on a basketball court. From basketball you can transfer a certain amount of skill to volleyball, from volleyball to tennis, and so on. But none of these pursuits can help you hit a 2-iron. Attempting to reapply one to the other can, in fact, prove disastrous (to you, at least. It’s probably a hoot to your mates. I wish I had a pound for every time I’ve heard one of my playing partners say, “There’s another beautiful baseball swing.”) Yes, golf is its own unique beast, and there’s no predicting who can tame it and who can’t.

That said, I’ve always been suspicious of Uncle Hugh. Though he’s in his mid-fifties, carries forty extra pounds and walks like Benny Hill with a double hernia, he claims a ten handicap. Recently I decided to play a round with Uncle Hugh to uncover his secrets. Rounding out our foursome were his wife Aunt Vivian, an attorney who would rather card 180 than violate a rule, and my friend Mitchell, who prefers to be called the Masher as a way of compensating for having never hit a respectable 3-wood in his entire life.

On the first hole, Uncle Hugh whistles his drive into the next county, says “Mully,” and immediately tees up another. Though I make it a rule never to use mulligans — mostly because there’s no reason to believe my second shot will be any better than my first — the majority of golfers consider them the one acceptable pardon in a game as otherwise forgiving as Attila the Hun. So I don’t count this against Uncle Hugh’s score. It’s when he uses mulligans on the next three holes that I start counting.

On the fifth, Uncle Hugh attempts a 7-wood from the left half of the fairway and promptly sends his Double Titanium Maxfli on a trajectory similar to that of an inebriated planet. “Yep,” says Uncle Hugh, removing a new ball and substituting a mid-iron for the 7-wood, “coulda told you I was gonna slice that bastard before I took it out of the bag.”

The score Uncle Hugh reports at the end of the hole curiously omits his delinquent 7-wood as well as its attendant penalty stroke. Thus is revealed one of the rules underlying Uncle Hugh’s formidable game: If the only purpose of a shot was to confirm that you can’t hit a certain club, the shot shouldn’t count. (A school chum of mine used to use similar logic. Studying for his exams, he declared, was a waste of time because he knew he was going to fail anyway. When he did inevitably fail, his point was proven. Who could argue?)

As we make our way to the eighth, Uncle Hugh proves more shrewd than I’d given him credit for. Mitchell, official scorer for the round, has just three-putted at the seventh. His anguish is transparent, and also pitiable in a glad-it-wasn’t-me sort of way. Uncle Hugh chooses this moment to note that he scored five on the previous hole. Though I know it was a six, Mitchell records the five unconsciously, oblivious to everything but the mental tape of his three-putt rewinding again and again. This technique of Uncle Hugh’s is deceptively simple: Mention your score on a given hole when your playing partners are consumed by their own ineptitude. Later, after Mitchell four-putts the thirteenth and Uncle Hugh says, “Another bird,” he might as well be saying, “There’s a stegosaurus.”

At the ninth, with his ball resting against the base of a tree, Uncle Hugh announces that one is allowed to move his ball one club length if it is obstructed by a tree under six feet. Neither I nor Aunt Viv nor Mitchell argue — mostly because we’re trying to figure out exactly which tree Uncle Hugh is referring to. It couldn’t be the one blocking his ball, since that tree is about twice Uncle Hugh’s height, and surely Uncle Hugh realises he is over three feet tall. Another of the tenets in his growing guidebook surfaces: If you aren’t happy with the spot where your ball lands, you are permitted to interpret a rule in a manner ludicrous enough that your playing partners would rather have you move it than engage in a debate that would insult the intelligence of Homo Erectus. Uncle Hugh kicks his ball about four club lengths away from the tree, rather than one. His arsenal is impressive indeed.

As we near the turn, with my game unravelling quickly, Aunt Viv spending most of the time on her cell phone, and Mitchell the Masher ready to sell his soul for a two-putt, Uncle Hugh catches a pretty 6-iron that leaves him a downhill seven-footer for even. He strolls onto the green, assesses the line, then scoops up his ball and says, “I’ll take a par.”

Use of this phrase always troubles me. You can’t just take a par; you have to earn one. In any case, Uncle Hugh has made it plain that he considers this putt, which would make most people curl up into the fetal position, automatic.

We all have our specialty shots, I suppose. Perhaps Uncle Hugh is buying into the delusion that if you’ve made a shot once, it’s at least a hypothetical possibility that you’ll make it every time. According to this logic, if he has made one downhill seven-footer in his life, there is no reason not to pick up this putt. Next time I have a 190-yard approach into a cross-wind, I’ll pick up my ball, too, citing the one miracle 3-wood I hit twelve years ago.

When Uncle Hugh comes up short on the water-guarded par-three twelfth, he takes his drop on the side of the pond nearest the green, despite the rulebook’s fairly clear view on this. Thus lying two, he places his ball just off the fringe. I mentally note another of his statutes: The location of a drop is in the eye of the beholder.

At the sixteenth, Uncle Hugh botches his second shot, an ill-advised 4-iron from rough as high as my ankles. He looks at the club in utter bafflement, like a tennis player searching for the hole in his racquet. It’s as though his brain is trying to compute data it can’t handle. Uncle Hugh’s bewilderment represents the paradox faced by every recreational golfer. Why, if we choose the right club and take the right swing, does the ball still end up in such unwelcome places? The answer, of course, is that we seldom take the right swing.

Uncle Hugh drops a new ball in the same spot. Well, not quite the same spot — more like ten yards up and five yards onto the fairway. Another of his rules emerges: If you thought everything about your swing was right, and it still went wrong, you really ought not to be penalised.

Like any great performer, Uncle Hugh leaves the best for last. At eighteen he invokes the golf equivalent of abracadabra, the magical incantation that immutably changes one’s score forever. At the end of the hole, when Mitchell asks Uncle Hugh his score, he replies, “Gimme a five.” Just like that, the three shots he took to get to the bunker, as well as the three he took to get out of it, are erased.

Uncle Hugh isn’t technically lying or cheating in responding this way. He’s merely choosing to answer the question, “What would you like to have gotten?” instead of, “What did you get?” I’d be inclined to take up this semantic question with Aunt Viv if she didn’t look like she wanted to bury her head in the sand and die.

Over a beer in the clubhouse Mitchell announces the final tallies for the round, including Uncle Hugh’s 85. When Uncle Hugh excuses himself for a moment, the Masher leans toward me and murmurs, “Or 103, if you live in the real world.” I’m not sure whether the 103 is exact — for most of the back nine, Mitch looked like a rabid dog ready to strike — but the precise number matters little. Uncle Hugh has eliminated somewhere in the neighbourhood of eighteen strokes. Aunt Viv finishes at 106, the Masher at 112. My own score is 110 — but it’s an honest 110, and honesty is all one can ask for. (I suppose one could also ask for a short game, but that doesn’t appear possible, so honesty will have to suffice.)

A few minutes later, listening to Uncle Hugh describe his eagle on eleven, I feel I’ve accomplished something important today, something crucial to the duffer’s self-worth: while I don’t feel any better about my own game, I certainly feel a lot better about his.

Golf Monthly 

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I.J. Schecter
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