On handicaps, indexes and having a good bet

As the Blue Elephants prepare for our Scotland departure (see this post), I'm reminded of a comment I made several months ago, something like, "There ain't no 'about' when referring to your handicap."

We've all heard it. When asked, "What's your handicap," too often the answer is, "Uh, it's about 8."

I'm putting together a game or two for our guys when we're not playing our matches against the Pink Elephants at Royal Troon. So I solicited from the seven of my fellow "Blues" their current handicap indexes. Six of them came back, all with a decimal point in place. (The seventh, Peter Joos, reported he doesn't have an index, but he told me his Stableford goal during the last several rounds he's played, which tells me what I need to know.)

When four of the "Pinkies" came over to play Bulls Bay in early April (read about this here), there was some controversy about theiir handicaps. Seems their "sponsor," Brother Blair Leburn, inflated their handicaps a bit in order to make them more competitive on this side of the pond.

We'll have none of that this week. Just as "there's no crying in baseball," there are no "abouts" in handicaps. I have all eight of ours, decimal points on seven of them. We may not be competitive - we may even get "slaughtered" - but we'll be playing off our July 1 indexes.

Indeed.