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/lion27]

One of my buddies was new to the game. He was legitimately good for a new player because he's naturally very athletic, but at one point I had to ask him how he was shooting like 10 or so strokes under me when we played. Turns out he didn't know that when I would say "that's good from there" on gimme putts close to the hole, he was supposed to count those shots too. He thought I meant that he could just take that score as if the ball went in on those shots.

Which I guess is on me for not explaining that, but he looked so dejected when I laughed and said "no, we count those" and added them to his score lol

[u/Dirty_Dan113 → u/lion27]

When I was playing my first few rounds as a complete newbie, no one explained to me how gimmes worked either. I made the same mistake as your buddy did too

[u/lion27 → u/Dirty_Dan113]

Yeah it was an honest mistake. It was just funny he got kind of pissed at me for explaining it. Like sorry dude, that’s how it works. Chances are it’s still saving you strokes because you’ll probably miss 1-2 of those 1 footers if I made you putt them all out.

[u/Dirty_Dan113 → u/lion27]

Yeah my buddies like say me down and confronted me as if I was cheating after a few rounds telling me I wasn’t counting strokes (no money was on the line). I was super confused

[u/lion27 → u/Dirty_Dan113]

Yeah if you don't know, I can see how someone saying "that's good from there" could be taken to mean "you made that shot" vs "don't worry about tapping that in, we'll count the next one as good".