On July 4th each year, our club has a flag tournament. In short, when you putt out on the 18th hole and you have shot better than your handicap, you get to use however many strokes you have left in a new mini-tournament. You tee off again on #1 and play until you run out of strokes. Then you 'plant' the flag. For example, you have five strokes left and you par the first hole, which is a par four - that is four of the five strokes. You hit the drive on #2 and put the flag where your tee ball comes to rest. The winner obviously is the golfer that advanced the flag the farthest.

Keep in mind, an average golfer 'shoots' his/her handicap approximately 20% of the time. To shoot five strokes better than your handicap, the odds are 174 to 1.

Go to the score board and check out the people who qualified for this tournament. That's a good place to start catching those sandbagging scoundrels.

Before we go any farther. We do not have a handicap. We have a U.S.G.A. index. We take that index to the course, determine what set of tees we are playing and convert our index to a handicap for that round of golf only. Then we go back to only having an index. It is conceivable a 12.0 index golfer could play three distinct golf courses and have three distinctly different handicaps. So, when someone asks what your handicap is, you say, "I don't know, but my U.S.G.A. index is 12.0."