Here we go with another Rules Rundown with Northern Region Executive Director Cameron MacGregor. This time, he discusses some friendly wagers on the course and how to make sure it never undermines the spirit of the game.
Al Czervik: “I bet ya slice into the woods! A hundred bucks!”
Judge Smails: “Gambling is illegal at Bushwood, sir, and I never slice.”
Al Czervik: “Peaches and cream, salt and pepper, peanut butter and jelly… and golf and betting. They go together.”
Anyone who has seen Caddyshack knows that Al Czervik was right about at least one thing: golfers love a wager.
Golf and gambling have a long history together, and there are seemingly endless ways for players to bet on a round. One of the most popular is the Nassau. In a four-ball Nassau, two players compete as a team against two other players, with the lower score of the two partners counting for the team on each hole.
The wager is divided into three separate bets: the front nine, the back nine, and the overall 18 holes. A $10 Nassau means $10 is being played on each of the three bets, so a player could win or lose as much as $30 (provided no press bets wagered).
Handicaps can make these matches competitive even when players have very different skill levels. When players have established Handicap Indexes, strokes can be allocated according to their respective abilities, giving everyone a fairer chance to compete.
I witnessed some pretty creative wagering while caddying at a private club in suburban Detroit years ago. The club had a lot of members involved in the automobile industry, and two of my favorites—we’ll call them Ed and Mike—were car dealership owners who seemed to have more money than sense. They loved to gamble.
I remember walking down the fairway with them when they suddenly wagered $100 on which bird would fly off a telephone wire first. A hundred dollars was a tidy sum back then, especially when we were making only $5 a loop.
The players had nicknames like Riverboat, Dice D, Morgus, and Hambone. They were all characters, and they shared two passions: golf and gambling. Caddyshack had nothing on these guys.
There were $100 Nassau bets, automatic presses, and all sorts of side bets. If you fell two down in your match, an automatic press meant a new bet began right then for the remainder of that nine. And then there was the “Aloha” bet.
The Aloha was reserved for those occasions when you had been beaten so badly that there was no realistic way to win the match. So you played the final hole for the entire remaining wager—a golfer’s version of the Hail Mary pass.
There is, of course, a line between friendly wagering and gambling that undermines the spirit of the game. The USGA permits informal gambling among golfers when it is incidental to playing golf, the players generally know one another, participation is optional, and the money being won comes from the participants themselves.
That tradition has been around for generations.
But today’s technology has changed the landscape.
With a smartphone, a golfer can now place a wager on a professional tournament while it is happening. And increasingly, the betting isn’t limited to who wins the tournament. It can involve individual shots, holes, and countless other “micro-events” taking place during the competition.
That creates a different kind of concern.
Golf is built on integrity, sportsmanship and respect for the other players. Imagine someone with a large wager on the outcome of a particular shot—or a particular hole—trying to influence that outcome by distracting, harassing, or otherwise interfering with a player. Even the possibility of that kind of behavior presents an integrity risk.
I don’t think the answer necessarily has to be a ban on betting on golf. To me, there is an important distinction between wagering on the overall outcome of a competition and wagering on individual shots or in-round micro-events.
The former is simply another way to predict how a competition will end. The latter creates incentives that can interfere with the way the game is supposed to be played.
Golf and a friendly wager have been partners for a very long time. But as technology makes it possible to bet on virtually every moment of a golf tournament, perhaps we need to think carefully about where that partnership should end.
The question isn’t whether golf and betting belong together. They always have. The question is how much betting golf can absorb before it begins to change the way the game is played.
Somewhere, Al Czervik is probably still betting a hundred bucks on which bird flies off the wire first. Today, he’d just have an app to help him keep track.
