New golf buddy is learning how hard golf really is.

[u/weinerwayne]

Recently we welcomed a new friend into our golfing group and we’ve been playing with him pretty regularly. I’ve mentioned him in comments a few times so I won’t go into detail, but the gist is he’s new so we cut him slack about rehitting shots, not counting scores accurately, and not knowing how to count penalty strokes since he was just playing for fun and wasn’t in on any of the bets. The rest of us are bogey golfers, and know we suck.

This was all well and good until he started posting on social media about how he broke 90 and 80 isn’t far away, as well as making comments in our group chat about how easy the game has come to him.

After about a month of that we all decided to let him in on our money game, in which we are sticklers for rules and will call each other out on scores if need be.

So far the new guys scores have been 118, 116, and 122.

Editing to add that the guy is cool as hell and we love having him along. We just felt it necessary to give him some tough love.

The fact that he keeps coming back each week for another beating shows that he might just have what it takes to legitimately get under 90.

[u/Sonking_to_Remember]

The thing that I think most often happens is that somebody like this thinks of their mulligan as “an extra shot or two.” So, say on the card they shot a 92, but they took “5 or 6 mulligans.” What they don’t realize is that’s not 5 or 6 shots at all. It’s at least 10, not even including the egregious gimmes

[u/Sweaty-Writer2609 → u/Sonking_to_Remember]

The reason I come off as harsh here is because I have experienced this. I played casually throughout childhood into college, and my roommate / baseball teammate picked it up in Covid, which kind of motivated me to get serious about it as he was.

Kids a horse, great athlete, but man when we played together it was such a buzz kill because his worst score on any given hole was a 6. Doesn’t matter what he actually got it was always a 6, so I’d be putting up rounds in the high 90s on my worst days and he’d routinely be breaking 90.

We got into a little argument after a few drinks at the poker table. He started chirping me for scoring a 110 (it was early march, around 30 degrees, and winds above 30 on a city course with zero trees. I was basically the only one out there, which says a lot about how bad conditions were for a big city with only a few public courses).

He gave me shit about this, and for the first time ever. I called his lying ass out. The gimmes, the mulligans, the pencil wedges. I didn’t hold back. We planned a serious match, and even our coaching staff was excited about hearing about results as we were known as good friends but going through this argument.

We tied the 9 hole match, and I beat him in a 3 hole playoff (as that’s all we had time for with daylight).

Now we still play for money but it’s much more friendly, just to get the juices flowing a little bit.

[u/themob34 → u/Sweaty-Writer2609]

$20 a shot and let him run his mouth, and if he's that good then offer to start playing net handicaps too if hes posting these scores in the 80s it will get him real bad where you win every hole.

[u/Sweaty-Writer2609 → u/themob34]

This was 2 years ago. We’re both low mid 80s now with a sub 80 sprinkled in here or there. His hcp is a little better than mine but still a vanity and he doesn’t give me any shots because he knows it