Commentary: In defense of cheating at golf

If you have never spent hours outdoors in wet-bulb temperatures, I cannot recommend strongly enough that you avoid doing so at all costs. The combination of high humidity and heat prevents sweat from evaporating and thereby cooling us down, instead making it feel even hotter. Prolonged exposure can lead to heat exhaustion or even death.

Or, as was the case for me last month, cheating at golf. I was playing at a course full of rolling hills in Delaware, close to the Atlantic Ocean. I birdied the first, a lovely little number with a creek and an elevated green, and managed to save par on the second. I duffed my tee shot on the par-5 third, then banged a long 3-wood to get back in position, only to misjudge the turf conditions on my approach and hit a fat 8-iron right into the side of a steep hill overgrown with scraggle. A couple hacks with my wedge and an encounter with quicksand later, I two-putted for one of the finer triple bogeys of my life.

As I set up on the fourth tee, the air around me began to feel like hot soup. My hands were sweating so much that I lost my grip on my 6-iron midswing, leading to a burbling nothing of a shot. Over the next couple of holes, I drank two bottles of Gatorade, refilled them with water, and drank those too. Nothing helped. My head began to buzz. I brushed salt off my forearms. I needed to finish this round as quickly as possible.

So I crumpled up my scorecard and began shamelessly dropping balls in favorable locations, conceding putts, and doing whatever else I needed to hasten my escape. I made it 12 miserable holes before admitting defeat. I am haunted by the thought of what might have happened if I’d tried to grit my way through the entire 18.

My case might be a bit extreme, but it’s emblematic of why I am fully in favor of cheating at golf. One of the larger challenges confronting the game today is the pace of play. Golf courses have gotten more crowded due to a pandemic-induced explosion in the sport’s popularity, and as a result they’ve also gotten slower. It’s an organic supply-and-demand issue that only gets worse when less-skilled players head out for a loop.

I love these beginners, and am genuinely thrilled that this game that I love so much has grown the way it has. But playing behind them is a slog. It can be maddening to watch a player in front of you hit their ball into the woods, spend five minutes looking for it, slap it out into the fairway, only to hit it back in, repeating the process ad infinitum. This can’t be a fun way to experience a golf course.

The United States Golf Association, at least to a certain degree, knows this. As part of its ongoing quest to modernize golf, in 2019 it instituted a rule declaring that players should take no more than 40 seconds to prepare for a shot, along with other game-quickening provisions, like creating a maximum score per hole and allowing players to leave the flagstick in when they putt. Excuse the pun, but you’ve got to applaud their fore-sight.

The problem is that the people who could benefit most from these recent changes likely don’t know they exist. And even if they did, and followed them to a T, they’d almost invariably string together a quick succession of seven bad shots, perhaps punctuated by one good one, only to pick up before even sniffing the green. That is a recipe for frustration, not fun, and I would much rather see that same hypothetical golfer take a mulligan or two before hitting a serviceable shot.

Golf currently relies on its handicap system to ensure an even playing field between players of unequal skill. However, that system only levels things out on the scorecard after the round is done – and only applies within the context of competition. Instead, we need to reconsider what’s appropriate for a golfer to do on the course given their unique circumstances. So here’s a proposal to help golf litigate itself out of its current slow-play pickle. Some might call it cheating, but why not call it a few more rules?

High handicappers and no-handicappers should feel free to tee off from wherever they want, be allotted a generous number of free drops, and receive blanket immunity from a pre-designated “trouble hazard” like bunkers, water hazards, or the woods that might otherwise trip them up and leave them frustrated. Novice golfers deserve to experience the joy of thwacking the ball into the fairway, and with a few metaphorical bowling bumpers, they would be out of the way faster: win-win.

The codification of cheating would require buy-in from the larger golf community, of course. In order to cheat honorably, one must do so openly, and that requires others to withhold judgment. Golfers everywhere would need to recognize that cheating is a phase, a crutch one leans on until they’ve developed the requisite skill not to. (Donald Trump, a man who owns numerous golf courses and has been playing for decades, is a good enough golfer that he ought not to cheat. And yet he appears to, shamelessly, on his own courses and in front of the press). I’m loathe to suggest exact handicap thresholds, because as golfers get better, there is a gradual, organic dropoff in how much they need to rely on the proverbial foot wedge. Bad shots cease to be cause for a reload, and instead present opportunities to test one’s mettle and combine their problem-solving skills with their physical acumen.

There are those who will disagree vehemently, who would advocate that bad golfers get lessons, or stick to driving ranges and Topgolf until they’re ready for a real course. But that’s no fun, and there’s no better way to help someone learn than by letting them work it out for themselves. To argue otherwise is to invoke a Thatcherist strain of reasoning, advocating for a world in which the skilled yank the ladder up behind them and demand that those at the bottom use their hustle and ingenuity to grind their way to the top. These people want the rules to be equally applied across an uneven distribution of skill and experience. Instead, we ought to celebrate that each golfer is unique and deserves to have fun on the course. If that means bending, breaking or wholesale rewriting the rules, then so be it.

For a sport with such a stodgy reputation, golf has a sneaky knack for adapting itself to the times. It is a game obsessed with its own expansion, whether that means loosening its dress codes or embracing simulators as gateways into the game. But it still hasn’t nailed down exactly how it converts an interested neophyte into a passionate player, simply because the transition from the anything-goes, keep-trying-until-you’re-satisfied nature of the practice area has never been able to translate to the golf course properly. But there is a way to remove this barrier to entry and democratize the game in the process. We just have to be brave enough to admit that sometimes, it’s fair to let people cheat.

Drew Millard is the author of How Golf Can Save Your Life and the cohost of Macho Pod.