I have been thinking about how hard golf is and how most people never break 80, let alone shoot par, and remembered this article I wrote that originally published over at World Golf. It has been so long now since I wrote it I thought I’d share it with you here now. Would love to hear your thoughts on the subject of par!
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What is par? The American Heritage Dictionary defines par as “an amount or level considered to be average” or in sports usage “the number of golf strokes considered necessary to complete a hole or course in expert play.”
How — or more to the point, why — did a word meaning average get morphed into expert when it pertains to golf? Experts in golf are a tiny fraction of the golfing population. The rest of us are left struggling to achieve such a high standard which is, perhaps, one of golf’s addictive properties. But does it even have any relevance?
Why do golf holes and golf courses have numbers set for par? Whether par on a hole is 3, 4 or 5, if you shoot 5, your score is still 5. And if your total score for 18 holes is 85, does it really matter if par is 70 or 72? You know if 85 is a good score for you or not. Aren’t personal goals more relevant than par? I guess par can be a good reference point when setting your own goals. For example, if you’re playing a long or tricky “par 4” hole, you might be happy to make a 5 or 6 there. I know some people set their own personal pars that might be equal to an “official” bogey or double bogey on any given hole. So what difference does par make to the average (not par) golfer?
According to the USGA, any hole measuring 400 yards or longer is a par 5 for women, regardless of what the scorecard states. If the scorecard lists a hole at 425 yards as a par 4 and a male and a female both shoot a 4, she gets to feel better about it and consider it a birdie? Yawn. At the end of a round, my score is still what it is so who cares? Handicap calculations are based on the USGA course and slope ratings for both genders from a given set of tees and the formula doesn’t consider par. In fact, the USGA offers a formula for determining the Bogey Rating of a course and recommends that “every golfer worse than a scratch” use it as a “truer yardstick of the challenge.”
I recently played a course with my boyfriend and we both played from the same set of tees at 6575 yards. Here is an example of the Bogey Rating in action:
Him: Slope Rating (121) divided by 5.381 (set value for men), plus the Course Rating (69.0) = Target score of 91.48. Actual score: 88
Me: Slope Rating (138) divided by 4.24 (set value for women), plus the Course Rating (75.2) = Target score of 107.74. Actual score: 100
*Interesting side note: if I use the men’s ratings with the women’s set value or the women’s ratings with the men’s set value, the result is much closer to my actual score.
I have my own, more precise calculator that uses my actual handicap index rather than just a standard bogey golfer index and it gave me a target score of 94, so the 100 I shot was 6 over. Greg’s target would have been 83 so his 88 was 5 over.
On the scorecard, par is 72, but there are 4 “par 4” holes from these tees longer than 400 yards which adds four more strokes to par for women for a 76. If we compared our scores to par instead of our targets, I would have been 24 over and Greg would have been 16 over. Like many golfers of our skill levels (our indices only differ by 2.3), he actually does compare his score to par. I just don’t see the point.
Considering that most golfers aren’t experts, if we’re going to put par on a card, shouldn’t we also list some kind of a bogey golfer par? Since par is synonymous with average, Par could be the higher number for the average player target score and the lower number that is currently called par could be called Expert Target Score (ETS).
In golf, there is nothing average about par.
Next post.
Above are some of the fabulous ball markers I’ve gotten from PBM. The necklace pictured is my own magnetic necklace, not sold by PBM but they do sell some beautiful styles of their own. One thing I really like is that the back of the ball markers have that handy arrow for when you have to move your marker out of someone else’s putting line. You simply flip over your marker and point the arrow in the direction you need to move it back to your spot so you don’t forget. Always a nice feature of a ball marker, in my opinion!