Cheating: The Snake In The Garden of Golf

Someone taking shortcuts and cheating on the golf course deliberately irritates me no end.  It doesn’t matter if it is a Sunday foursome playing out a dollar Nassau or if it is a major sectional championship, it’s just wrong.  If sports are the one place on the planet where fairness and fair play are supposedly real, the guys who cheat wantonly are the snakes in that Garden of Eden.

I am not talking about an honest mistake.  We all make ‘em from time to time, and let’s be honest with ourselves: none of us will ever walk across a water hazard.  No, I am talking about guys who know what they are doing, do it anyway and then smile and sign their scorecard as if they hadn’t done a thing wrong.

They’re cheaters and they are the scourge of the middle levels of the game.  We see ‘em all the time, and most of us are too nice, too polite and let’s be honest, too shy to call these con artists out on their misdeeds.

These are the guys who do this: they top a three-wood into a marshy water hazard that’s clearly marked by yellow stakes, but dry enough to walk into to find their ball.  Once they identify their ball by picking it up — if it is their ball — they put it in a different spot, atop all of the flora instead of half embedded in the leaves and twigs.  As if that’s not good enough, they’ll clear away the brush behind their ball in a hazard (like on the edge of a creek) to give their club a better chance of clearing the ball out of the the muck.  Then, after grounding their club they knock aside the leaves and twigs they missed in their earlier landscaping work in their backswing, after which they have a good shot…and get “lucky” enough to escape the jaws of the hazard to leave their ball 4-5 feet away from the cup.

Of course, they make that putt and then have the mitigated gall to laugh and exclaim how they can’t believe they actually birdied the hole after all that — what a comeback from that position!

If you think that story is a little specific, it is.  It happened in the better-ball portion of our member-member last year and it ended up costing my partner and I the tournament.  To say I was ticked would be an understatement.

My partner told me to not call him for his, what, eight strokes because it would “make us look bad.”

I really wanted to, because it was so obvious, so blatant and done with such disregard for the rules of the game and for the guy’s fellow competitor that it simply deserved to go in front of the committee.

Who knows, maybe my partner and I wouldn’t have won anyway.  We weren’t playing that well and we were holding on by the skin of our teeth.  But then again, we were playing the ball as it lied and we definitely counted all of our strokes.  We may not have been happy with our scores that day but those numbers were what they were — the number of strokes and penalty strokes we’d accumulated in our rounds.

So, if anyone wonders why I get riled up when a pro tries to weasel out of a penalty stroke or two, that’s one of the reasons.  They are at the top of this grand old game and not only are those players held to a much higher standard, they are also the ones who are the ones who set the examples the rest of us live by.  None of them would ever try the shenanigans I saw in that marsh that day, but then again, when I see a pro trying to escape the long arm of the Rules of Golf, it makes me wonder if they look the other way when the cameras and instant replay aren’t in their faces.

I didn’t and have regretted it ever since.  It was just so…blatant.  It was wrong and it cheated not only my partner and I, it cheated the other guys who they beat, from the guys who finished behind them in second place to the guys who might have been disappointed they only finished fourth.  It was just wrong all the way around and there’s no place for it in ye olde game o’ golf.