The USGA “saved” golf several years ago by banning anchored putting strokes. Personally, I don’t care if you anchor your putter. You can anchor your driver, if you want to.

But now the USGA is saying, beginning in 2016 you cannot post rounds for your handicap if you played alone. No witnesses, not post.

This decision is making people quite upset.

Golf Canada said they will not adhere to the new policy.

Golf publications are up in arms about this. Ryan Herrington, in the November 30, 2015 GolfWorld, said the decision “makes this solitary journey feel a little more like a good walk spoiled.”

Actually, it does the opposite. It liberates us from golf having to be a competition every time we go out, always having to play our very best because every shot has implications.

Handicaps were designed to level out competitions. But just because you might compete at sometime in the future doesn’t mean that every stroke you play has to be hit with that uncertain future in mind.

This new policy gets us one step closer to a recreational game in which we go out to the course, bat the ball around, and have fun in a beautiful, relaxing environment, and nothing more.

And you can do that now if you play alone. (Of course, you don’t have to post any of your rounds if you dump your handicap, but that’s another blog post.)

The point is, many golfers enjoy playing alone, and then there are times you just want to run out, grab a quick nine, enjoy yourself, and then get back to your life.

When you’re out there and you want to hit a do-over, go ahead! If you want to bend the rules or (horrors!) ignore one, go ahead, because you won’t be posting your score.

So go enjoy yourself. You won’t have to worry about the USGA’s handicap gods spoiling your good walk anymore.

Whether they know it or not, the USGA just made recreational golf a better game. I doubt that’s what they intended, though, so let’s just keep this our little secret.

Well, just when golf is getting non-existent at the recreational level (see: weather) and boring at the professional level, Tiger comes to our rescue, as we always hope he will.

This time, it’s his prickly (putting it mildly) response to Dan Jenkins’s mock interview with Woods that is on the newsstands in the December edition of Golf Digest.

Jenkins is a serious golf writer whose side job is as a devastating satirist of the sports world. All Jenkins did is (a) ask Woods a few questions, questions we would like to ask Tiger ourselves, and since Tiger wasn’t there to answer the questions, (b) made up Tiger’s answers.

These answers are not, of course, what Tiger would have said had he actually been asked the questions, but they are the real answers to the questions.

Which upsets Tiger greatly. Mark Steinberg, too, but more on him later.

I think it’s a really funny interview, and any other subject would too. But not Tiger. The Woods image, or what is left of it, is sacrosanct and is not to be trifled with without his permission.

But Jenkins went ahead anyway, the little imp.

Now assuming you paused at the top of this post to read the interview (go ahead, the link’s right there, I can wait), please tell me what is off? What doesn’t hit home?

About the only thing we don’t know is for real is the comment about what a lousy tipper Woods is. But if that’s it, what is all the fuss?

Like Woods writing a 600-word invective (OK, I just assumed Tiger wrote it). In a moment of great irony, Woods said “the concocted article was below the belt.”

Below the belt, yeah, but it wasn’t Jenkins’s article that was below the belt. It was you and Rachel Uchitel, Jaimee Grubbs, Jamie Jungers, Mindy Lawton, oh, you get the point.

Like Steinberg, his agent, releasing a letter complaining about the abysmal journalistic standards GD sunk to by printing the “interview” and demanding a formal apology.

Good grief. Woods and Steinberg still think when they say “Jump,” people are still saying “How high?” All that was over in November 2009.

You know the irony of all this, that Woods and Steinberg are just too self-righteous and opaque to get? That if they had ignored it, there would have been no controversy and in two weeks the interview would have been lost to history.

But just like Jennifer Lawrence, who made a stink about the nudes of her being published online so everyone would know they could be found and went to stare at them for an hour, while the other three women who also had nudes posted of them by the same hacker and said nothing and I’ll bet you don’t even know what their names are, W&S elevated Jenkins’s work to the front pages. They did his PR work for him!

Talk about a pair of boobs.

Tiger Woods. I just love this guy. He so doesn’t get it. He’s grist for every writer’s mill.

Augusta National is a Depression-era course built when 250 yards was a respectable professional distance off the tee. Steel shafts were just being introduced and golf ball technology was still rudimentary. For decades, Augusta was a test that matched the capabilities of the day’s best golfers.

Cracks started appearing when Jack Nicklaus arrived. He played 420-yard holes with a driver and a pitching wedge, not a driver and a 6-iron.

When Tiger Woods came along thirty years later, the course had to be “Tiger-proofed,” because his length overpowered the cozy design. Now, everyone hits the ball as far as he did fifteen years ago.

The latest insult was Bubba Watson, whose length two weeks ago mocked August’s most difficult holes. In ten years, there will be fistfuls of players who hit the ball just as long. What then?

The Augusta membership is proud of its course, unique in the world and one of the world’s most challenging. Yet, the membership is trapped by it, too. The Masters has always been played there; it was meant to be played there. The Masters and August National are one and the same. There is no other place where the Masters can be held.

The USGA is rotating its championship to newer courses able to keep up with today’s golfers, Merion East notwithstanding. That course was tricked up beyond belief in order to stand up.

The R&A is doing its best to keep its legendary courses in the Open rotation, but cracks are showing up in that strategy, too. The Old Course at St. Andrews is nearing the same fate as Augusta — too short, and running out of room to add length for the sake for length, not for the sake of strategy.

The table has been turned on these ancient courses. Instead of challenging golfers, they are now being challenged by the golfers. Professional golfers will soon be dominating them no matter what is done.

It could easily be the case that in fifteen years Augusta National will have no more slack to give. Its only defenses would be the pin locations on its forbidding greens. The tournament could be won the by the golfer who has the fewest three-putt greens over the four days of competition. A sad fate.

At this point in the essay, I am supposed to present my proposal for a way out of this jam. How to salvage a seemingly lost situation. In this case, that might not be possible. The hard fact is that Augusta National was designed to play at about 6,800 – 7,000 yards. It has been stretched beyond that about as far as it will go. When its current 7,400 yards is no longer enough, the course might have to be retired.

That happens to everyone and everything. We have our heyday, we have our glory. The time comes when we are overtaken, and we must take a seat on the sideline. The question is, will the Augusta membership be able to retire their course with dignity when the time comes, which it surely will?

[ Note: A few weeks after this essay was published I got vilified on a golf forum by people who thought I was advocating shooting stray dogs and knocking down old ladies crossing the street. How DARE I say something less than reverential about a golf course that is more holy than the Vatican? Wow. ]

There is a movement afoot to get golfers to play nine holes instead of eighteen. That’s a really good idea.

One of the problems with golf is that eighteen holes is almost a full-day affair unless you tee off at 7 in the morning. Say you tee off at 10. By the time you get home, it will be about 4 in the afternoon, and there’s the whole day. If you had played only nine holes, you would be back home two hours earlier, or more.

Nine holes is enough golf to hit all the shots, get your golf fix in for the day or week. Since you haven’t been on your feet for four hours, you’ll feel much more refreshed when you finish.

Those of us with back problems can play and not subject our back to too much stress. Those of you without back problems can avoid them by not swinging a golf club when you’re a bit tired. Doing that puts more strain on your back than your swing already gives it.

This might be just one of my values, but I prefer to stop doing something when I still have the feeling I would like to do more, than stop because I’ve had enough. That for me is the difference between nine holes and eighteen.

As far as your handicap goes, you can still turn in your scores. The first nine sits in the background and gets combined to make a composite eighteen when you turn in the second nine some days later. The course rating is the sum of the two nine-hole course ratings. The slope rating is the average of the two slope ratings, .5 rounded up.

The movement I referred to above is part of a way to get new golfers introduced to the game. Eighteen holes is a lot for golf for a newbie. Nine holes is much more enjoyable and a smaller chunk to bite off at the start.

I think it’s the same for experienced golfers, too. I haven’t played eighteen holes all year and I don’t miss it a bit.

Visit www.therecreationalgolfer.com

I would like to ask a favor of you. If you have read BRG, especially the Left-Hander’s Edition, would you please go to Amazon and write a review? I’m asking so maybe I can make a few bucks off them (though believe me, I’m not getting rich), but more so you can help me spread advice to a larger number of recreational golfers that is correct, relevant, and targeted to what they/we need to know–which is why I wrote them.

Original book

Left-hander’s edition

Thank you for your help.

Golfers of a certain vintage know that the modern golf ball helps us hit the ball farther than we could with a wound golf ball. Jack Nicklaus wants to change all that.

He wants to dial back the ball by twenty percent, not just so the pros won’t hit it so far, but so all of us, you, me, we don’t hit it so far, either. And he thinks that would be a good thing.

Yesterday I watched the David Feherty interview with him. Nicklaus was talking about 17,000 courses that would be brought back into play if the ball were to be contained. Too many courses have to be 7,000 yards. That takes too much land, too much water, too much time to play.

If courses measured 5,600 yards that would get more people on the course, conserve resources, be more fun.

It’s not that Augusta has had to lengthen itself by 500 yards in order for it not to become obsolete, he said. It’s all the courses. What’s wrong with a course that was built for a different age gracefully aging out of competition, somewhat like Nicklaus himself did?

Here’s the question I have for Jack. The very first course I played was Eastmoreland Golf Course, a municipal course in Portland, Oregon. I still play there. It was built in 1928, so it is not a case of using excess land to build a modern course. It’s there, nothing is going to change.

Length from the white tees is 6,106 yards. Not excessive by any means. The second hole, though is par 4, 427 yards. When I was in high school (mid-1960s), it was the same length. I have a scorecard from back then to show it.

Now when I was in high school, I hit my a driver and a 3-wood, and I still wasn’t up to the green. This hole was a three-shotter for me. Now, a drive and a 21-degree hybrid get me on.

Tell me, Jack, how is dialing back my distance so this hole becomes a three-shooter again going to make my golfing experience better?

My best drives go 235 yards. How is cutting that back twenty percent, so I can only drive the ball 188 yards, going to let me have more fun?

Leave our game alone. It’s fine the way it is.

The scary thing, is, though, dialing back the golf ball could well be the USGA’s next itch to scratch.

Visit www.therecreationalgolfer.com

The past few years I have written a U.S. Open preview about the course, the field, and all the usual things you want to read about in a preview, looking for some nugget of information or point of view that no one else has.

This year I want to do something different. It’s because so much is being made of whether Merion East is obsolete as a championship course, with the USGA trying to let us know that it isn’t.

This year is the 100th anniversary of Francis Ouimet’s victory over Harry Vardon and Ted Ray, the American kid beating the two English titans and putting American golf in the map. It was the equivalent of the (very) local phenom beating Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson in an 18-hole playoff, and beating them decisively.

The problem is, Ouimet won that Open not here, but at The Country Club in Boston, a course that truly is no longer suitable for championship play. But why here, is the puzzle.

East Merion: so small, so short. The 2007 U.S. Amateur was held here as a test to see if modern hitters would overpower the course or whether it would hold its own. East Merion passed the test, and the green light was on for another Open.

The course is historical, but it belongs to another time. The power game that is played now will not be evident. Last year there was so much fuss about Olympic, which was long enough, but so demanding off the tee that the driver would be taken out of play.

East Merion is the same. The winner will have to play a precise round of golf four days in a row, and that hardly suggests we’ll see many drivers. That shouldn’t happen in the U.S. Open.

This tournament is the toughest test of every club in the bag, every shot you have. To make arguably the most important club in the bag irrelevant goes dead against that concept.

The course is so short that longer hitters on the LPGA circuit could compete. Why none of them tried to qualify, I’ll never know.

The USGA is trying so hard to preserve golf as it was that they don’t see golf as it is: an evolving game that deserves to move away from its past while still paying homage to it.

All this is not to say the the pros will have a field day this week. USGA greenskeepers could set up your local layout and protect par against a top PGA field.

Golfers come and go. There’s no more Ben Hogan. Arnold Palmer doesn’t play in the Open any more, neither does Jack Nicklaus. We regret their passing while realizing that this is part of life moving on.

There comes a time when history must be regarded as history, when we just have to let go. New golfers playing a different game deserve new courses that showcase that game. Older courses, built for older styles of golf, should be allowed to retire and be appreciated by the recreational golfers for whom they are still suitable.

I love this course, and I wish it well this week. But after that, let’s start building new courses worthy of determining golf’s champion, and hold the competition at those places. See you in two years at Chambers Bay.

Several PGA Tour players are “exploring their options” regarding the recent ban by the USGA on the anchored putting stroke.

A group of nine players has retained Henry L. Manion III of the law firm of Cooley Manion Jones. The group includes Tim Clark, Carl Petterson, and Adam Scott.

On the one hand, courts are reluctant to say that the governing body of a sport cannot make its own rules. On the other hand, if this rule prevents a player from pursuing his livelihood, a case could be made for eliminating the rule.

The rule, 14-1b, which is not based on any evidenced competitive advantage, but on cosmetics and an odd conception of golf’s traditions, takes effect in 2016.

The R&A and USGA announced earlier today that the proposed anchored putting ban would be put into effect beginning in 2016. A jointly-issued report explaining the decision was issued.

At 40 pages, and reading like a legal brief, the report tries to backfill a position that boils down to, “It looks funny.”

The basis of their position is that the anchored stroke is not in the tradition of the game, which is that the golf ball must be hit with a freely swinging club. In the entire 40 pages, is always comes back to that.

Let’s look at what golf is. The essence of the game is simple. You put a ball on the ground, at a designated spot, and try to hit it into an associated hole, which lies at some remove, in as few hits as you can. That’s it!

To make golf a game, two other principles were established. You have to have to hit the ball. You can’t scoop it or push it. Also, you have to play the ball from where it lies.

Every rule is designed either to support those concepts, or to provide guidance when unusual circumstances arise (for example, what do you do when you hit your ball into a pond?)

There is a large book of decisions, which is essentially a casebook, that shows how the rules are applied to specific instances, and prevents players from taking undue advantage of a rule.

An appropriate analogy would be that the rules are the statutes of golf, and the decisions are the administrative rules that implement the statutes.

Golf’s two governing bodies, however, decided to create a new tradition, which is that the club is always freely swung.

Of course, you have to freely swing a driver. If you want to anchor your driver, go ahead. Maybe you could hit the ball 100 yards that way. Or if you want to anchor your sand wedge for hitting in a bunker, please do, but good luck getting the ball out.

Those strokes require the club to be freely swung. That’s not golf; it’s physics.

Putting is different, though. You can anchor your club and still strike the ball effectively given the demands of the stroke. That’s physics, too.

A legalistic argument establishes the authority for making such a rules change. On page 21, the report lists examples of rules changes made in other sports for the good of those games. This is to say that the USGA has the right to change rules for the good of the game.

– in American football that restricted the “bump and run” technique and eliminated or altered many other established techniques of using the head, hands or body in blocking, tackling or running;

– the lowering of the pitching mound and changes in the size of the strike zone in baseball;

– the creation of the three-point shot in basketball and various rule changes limiting the use of hands and altering other defensive techniques;

In the case of football, some rules were changed to remove dangerous practices that caused player injuries. In all three of these sports, rules were changed to introduce more scoring due to advances in defensive strategies. The games were getting boring for spectators, without whom the sport would really not exist.

Golf is not a spectator sport. It is a recreational game. Rules are not needed to protect us from being injured by our playing partners, or from boring the thousands of fans who don’t watch us play.

The entire argument centers around the notion that banning anchored putting is in the best interests of the game, but we are never informed exactly what those interests are.

Perhaps the silliest argument, and one I can’t believe they even bring up, regards bifurcation.

– An integral part of the game’s appeal is that golfers of all levels can play the same courses with the same equipment and under the same Rules, enabling even the casual golfer to compare his or her performance to that of the most elite players and, at times, to play as good a shot as the elite player.

First of all, do full-grown adults still think “I’m, Rory McIlroy,” when they’re about to hit a wedge to a tucked pin? I thought you stopped doing that when you were 12.

And second, let me compare you to Tiger Woods once and for all. If Tiger were to play your course twice, so he could learn it, he would play from the tips and never shoot over 62 thereafter. Any questions?

And, yes, I have sunk a 30-foot putt. That in no way made me think I was ready for the Tour.

They say,

– The USGA and The R&A are committed to the principle that a single set of Rules for all players of the game, irrespective of ability, is one of golf’s greatest strengths.

So what is softball all about? What is flag/touch football all about? What is no-check hockey all about?

Bobby Jones, the force behind banning the croquet-style putting stroke, said, “There are two kinds of golf — just plain golf and tournament golf.” How true that is.

Just as there are two versions of the three sports I mentioned, so are there two kinds of golf. I’m out there to have fun with my friends. I’m not trying to win a major competitive championship.

Here is a one-page set of rules that would be all that’s necessary for an honorable and enjoyable game of golf. The the pro’s dot the i’s and cross the t’s.

And while we’re on the subject, bifurcation exists right now. I reference the groove rule.

There are many other arguments in the report that I could respond to, but this post is long enough already. With all due respect to USGA President Nager, a high-powerd attorney, I hope he never takes arguments as flimsy as this into the Supreme Court chambers. He wouldn’t last two seconds.

To conclude my rant, the report keeps referring to the long-term good of the game without really saying how anchored putting would adversely affect it.

Golf is a recreational game. We just want to have fun. If you want to anchor your putter, that’s fine with me. I still have fun. My golfing experience is in no way diminished in the presence of someone who anchors.

Just as the guy I played with once who beat this weed near his ball into submission so he could have an unobstructed chip doesn’t bother me. If that’s the way he wants to play golf, it doesn’t take anything away from the way I play.

The USGA has no authority over my game that I do not give it. There is no need to quit playing because you can’t anchor anymore (or beginning in 2016), or even stop anchoring because the USGA has a rule.

The solution is to sever your relation to the USGA. Just go out and play. Forget about having a handicap. Yes, that means forgoing tournaments, and there would be some loss in that. But golf is your game, and you can choose your own approach to it.

I played golf for over 40 years without having a handicap, and I did just fine. Had lots of fun. I have a handicap now, but it will be frozen from this day forward. I’m not turning in any more scores. When my USGA membership comes up for renewal, I will decline.

I just want to play golf.

And so you know, I don’t anchor. I tried it once and found it to be too much bother.