Ten Years, Same Handicap

by Johnny
(golfeaser.com)

My handicap index a decade ago was a 14.2. I checked it recently out of morbid curiosity, cross-referenced against my current one, and found a 14.6, which after ten years of golf, three swing changes, one very expensive weekend with a teaching pro, and enough YouTube swing analysis videos to qualify for some kind of honorary degree, is close enough to a flat line that I had to sit with it for a minute.

Ten years. Same handicap. Worse, technically, by four-tenths of a stroke, which is either a rounding error or the single most demoralizing statistic I've ever generated about myself, depending on the day I'm asked.

I want to be clear that this isn't for lack of trying, which is somehow the funnier part. I've bought the alignment sticks. I've bought the tempo trainer that beeps at you disapprovingly when you rush your backswing, used it religiously for about six weeks, then found it in a junk drawer eighteen months later still beeping at nobody. I took actual lessons — plural, from two different pros, four years apart, both of whom identified almost exactly the same flaw in my swing, which either means it's a very persistent flaw or I'm a very persistent case of not fixing what I've been told to fix.

The truly funny part, if I'm being honest about it, is how confidently I've explained away every single non-improvement along the way. The first swing change didn't take because the pro and I "just weren't clicking." The second one didn't take because I switched to a new set of irons mid-lesson-plan, which "reset everything." The tempo trainer would've worked if I'd "actually stuck with it," a sentence I've said about roughly six different training aids now, each time with the same conviction that this excuse, unlike the last five, was the real one.

Mid-handicap purgatory is a real, named place, and I've apparently been living there long enough to know where the good parking is. What I didn't expect, ten years in, is how little that actually bothers me anymore, which might be the most surprising part of the whole thing. I used to treat the flat line as a problem to solve. Somewhere in the last couple of years — I couldn't tell you exactly when — I started treating it more like a fact about myself, the same category as my height or the fact that I'll never be a morning person no matter how many productivity podcasts I listen to.

The guys in my group have started ribbing me about it directly, which somehow helps more than it stings. Dave has taken to calling my index "the eternal 14," delivered with the exact deadpan of a man who knows precisely how many strokes his own has dropped in the same window, which is zero, so he's not exactly launching this from a position of strength. I've started saying it myself before anyone else can — "still a proud 14, still working on it, still not working on it enough" — which takes most of the sting out before it lands.

Setting realistic expectations for your own game is advice I've read a hundred times and only actually believed somewhere around year eight, when the math finally got undeniable enough to argue with. I'm not going to pretend I've fully made peace with it — there's still a small, stubborn part of me that buys the next training aid hoping this is the one, the same way there's a part of every gambler that thinks the next hand is the one. But the confidence has stopped waiting on the number, which turns out to matter a lot more than the number itself.

Ten years, same handicap, give or take four-tenths of a stroke I'm choosing to interpret as a rounding error. I'm one round away from finally breaking through, same as I've been telling myself since roughly 2016. At this point I've decided the joke's actually pretty good, and I've got a full decade of material to keep telling it.