Like any group of golfers, the Golf Digest staff can kill hours dissecting a player’s game and whether their handicap fits. When a 13-index stops a towering 8-iron five feet from the flag, the initial reaction is skepticism. Then he takes two out of the bunker a few holes later, and it starts to make sense.
There is no single formula for how golfers waste strokes, but as Luke Kerr-Dineen and I discuss in the most recent episode of the Golf IQ podcast, a closer look at different handicap groups suggests some trends. This is particularly relevant as our season-long Golf Digest Match Play tournament enters its quarterfinal round, where the players range from plus to mid-handicaps. In some cases, the golf swings look similar enough, so you have to look closer to notice the disparity.
High handicaps: Contact errors
Although we’re painting with a broad brush with all of these, much of our analysis is informed by data from our How Do You Compare? interactive that uses stat-tracking from Arccos to showcase how different golfers perform on different parts of the course. The first bucket of golfers is perhaps the easiest to categorize. High-handicap players just make poorer contact with the golf ball — more tops, chunks, slices and hooks. This also means more penalty strokes, and not enough greens in regulation. This isn’t to suggest low-handicap players don’t hit squirrely shots, or for that matter, that high-handicappers can’t occasionally launch the perfect drive. But golf is about consistency, or a lack thereof, and a high-handicap player has the most to gain from learning to find the center of the clubface more often.
Mid-handicaps: Compounded mistakes
Let’s assume that mid-handicap players who regularly shoot in the 80s have at least filtered out the worst mistakes. They generally keep the ball in play and can even string together some pars and occasional birdies. But in a strange way, this can work against them. Although mid-handicappers are still capable of hitting shots off line, they lack the skill and discipline to effectively recover from them. I would know since I fall squarely in this group, and as I wrote about last year, a mid-handicapper’s scorecard is usually marred by highly avoidable double bogeys. The simplest example: a tee shot leaked right, an attempt to reach the green through a narrow window between the trees, the devastating crack of a ball caroming off a branch. There are plenty of other examples: three-putts, too cute wedge shots that still don’t reach the green. The mistakes don’t reflect a lack of ability as much as they do a lack of awareness.
Single-digit handicaps: Sloppy bogeys
The single-digit handicaps might be the most complicated bunch because they often appear to have all the necessary pieces. They hit the ball sufficiently far, and have enough touch with their irons and wedges to give themselves frequent looks at birdie. But again, golf is a game of misses, and the reason a single-digit handicap isn’t scratch is because they’re not yet adept at cleaning up inefficiencies around the margins. According to Arccos, for instance, a 5-handicap’s proximity to the hole from a greenside bunker is 22 feet, and the same player has a little more than a 5 percent make rate for putts between 20-25 feet. In other words, a 5-handicap is highly unlikely to save par from the sand. They might appear to have solved the hardest parts of golf, but every category of golfer has another part they’re still trying to figure out.
This article was originally published on golfdigest.com
