Has it ever been done?

[Alex1975]

My friends father retired aged 69 off 8 handicap and within a year got down to 3.
He played off that for a few years and remained single figures into his 80's.
He died on the course in his 90th year.

Absolute club legend.

Epic!

 

[patricks148]

last time i looked we had 15 or more scratch and better members out of about 750 members, some of which a are country and lady.

 

[Sports_Fanatic]

Ha how weird we both posted that at same time

Bizarre, shame he went off radar when his back went and didn't feel able to conclude the blog

 

[Sports_Fanatic]

US handicaps so slightly different scoring but this table was on the Dan plan from a couple of years ago:

http://thedanplan.com/average-golf-handicap/

Top 20% of golfers were under 9, Top 1% were scratch or better.

https://scratchtoscratch.wordpress.com/about/ and his book Dream on was a player trying to go from not breaking a 100 to a scratch round. Very different to a scratch handicap but I guess it means in theory it's perfectly possible.

Best I've played with was a guy who did Europro and was +4. Completely different game to what I was playing off 13.

Forgot to say, think how much more satisfaction John Richardson (dream on author/golfer) would have had if he didn't have a show of complex and had kept it to himself. None of those pesky book deals etc 😀

 

[HawkeyeMS]

It must have been done, but I doubt there are many. The thing golf needs is time and most adults don't have enough of that. We have at 4 scratch, 2 at +1 and 1 at +4 eek out of 504 members. For what it's worth, there are 81 currently at single figures.

 

[Spear-Chucker]

We have two scratch players (one of which is away an uni) so only one regular for want of a better expression. After that we have a 1 and then me. That's from a population of around 320 members.

I've not met anyone who came to the game as an adult who then got to scratch, the lowest age someone started who got to that level to my knowledge, was around 16. They still took the best part of 10 years to achieve it though!

I'm sure it's been done, somewhere, but the time demand must have been massive - golf is a game of learned behaviours and there's no substitute for time with a club in your hand or preparing mentally. All of which is damned hard to manage with family, friends, career and other interests.

 

[LincolnShep]

Just because I am wondering and there are no statistics on this online which I could find: how many amateur golfers (in the UK, let's say) are actually scratch players?

I couldn't find UK stats but this page gives some USGA stats. 0.68% are +0.9 to 0.0, and 0.95% are 0.1 to 1.0. Very (!) roughly you could estimate that half of these (0.82%) are between +0.5 and 0.4.

 

[Canfordhacker]

3 out of 500 at my club. And I can see that I have the 187th best handicap...

 

[Lord Tyrion]

Time to play, flexibility, fearlessness, less injury prone, overall fitness and I'm pretty sure it's scientifically proven that younger people are better learners both mentally and cognitively

This. My son, just turned 17 and he and his mates play obsessively throughout the season and all are a pleasure to play with. They all have h/caps dropping at a rate.

 

[Leftie]

Of all members ....

1% scratch or better

6% cat 1

5% of the ladies are cat 1

 

[chimpo1]

You get teenagers that are scratch and have played the game for under 8 years.

Cant see why some starting at 7 and being scratch at 15 has an advantage over someone starting at 25 or 30.

It's about the amount of time that you can put into the game. Before 16 you have an almost unlimited amount of time to spend practicing and competing. Most scratch adults will tell you they spent all their childhood at the course from morning until dark. Once adulthood kicks in that time is no longer available.

 

[Simbo]

Can't remember where I got the info from but in the UK out of 4 million golfers, I'm think that 5% are category 1 or better with less than 1% playing off scratch or better.

 

[Capella]

I did find numbers for Germany (they are from 2010, but they are the only ones I could find). Less than 1 % category 1 players, doesn't have any info on how many are scratch or better. That supports my theory that we Germans just suck at this game (or it might be due to the fact that in Germany, every golfer has to have a handicap, you can't play on any of the regular courses without one, so you have a lot more registered players who hardly play at all and are somewhere between -54 and -36, not because they are beginners necessarily, but because they just don't play in competitions at all.)

 

[HomerJSimpson]

No idea to the OP although we did have one guy off +1. Since he left no-one and that's not changing anytime soon

 

[Leftie]

Can't remember where I got the info from but in the UK out of 4 million golfers, I'm think that 5% are category 1 or better with less than 1% playing off scratch or better.

You must have read my post (30) below

Well, near enough :thup:

 

[Cherry13]

My only suggestion for someone would be jimmy bullard, he's off +1 currently.
I don't think he started playing seriously until later on in twenties.