The Pacific Amateur (Pac-Am) golf tournament is held in
Bend, Oregon every year. It is run by
the Central Oregon Visitors Association (COVA) to promote tourism in the
shoulder season between golf and skiing.
If you go, you can expect good golf courses, good food, and a great
selection of ales from Bend’s many breweries.
What you cannot expect is an equitable competition.
The Pac-Am attracts approximately 400 golfers each year and
they compete in flights based on age, sex, and handicap. The typical flight has 24 players. After three rounds, the top four players in
each flight compete in the finals at the Crosswater Course at the Sunriver
Resort.
With so many golfers, it is likely that a few will not be in
strict adherence to the USGA Handicap System. The Pac-Am assures its participants that they
will have to pass a handicap background check before they are allowed to
enter. Here are a few warnings from the
Pac-Am website:
Any
unusual posting procedures, such as ceasing to post scores for a period leading
up to the event, may be grounds for disqualification. Any participant found using a fraudulent
Handicap will be expelled from the tournament and all fees will be forfeited.
Participants
in the competitive net divisions will compete using an assigned Tournament
Handicap. The participant will need to
provide a complete scoring history to the Handicap Committee. This handicap is calculated using one to two
methods. The committee may assign a handicap
from a previous month if it deems the participant’s historical handicap is a
better representation of scoring potential.
(Alternatively), the Tournament Handicap can be calculated by using past
Pac-Am tournament scores and scores from other tournaments. Tournament scores (especially those from the
Pac-Am) are weighted more heavily in the calculation to help prevent golfers
from having “repeat career round” during tournaments.
The vetting procedure sounds so strict that no sandbagger
could make it through. In truth, the
Pac-Am’s policy is essentially a paper tiger.
With a limited staff, the Tournament Committee cannot check the bona fides of all entrants. Basically, if your entry check clears, you are
in.
The 2014 Pac-Am demonstrated the Tournament Committee’s
inability to conduct an equitable tournament.
In this tournament, the same player was a repeat winner of the over-all
net competition. The Bend Bulletin (September
26, 2014) in an act of journalistic naiveté extolled the accomplishment. Asked to explain his unlikely performance,
the player said “I really can’t explain
it. I love the course and I think
playing four, five or six days in a row just helps me swing better.” The Tournament Committee was equally
impressed and featured the winner’s picture on its website along with an
article on the remarkable accomplishment of being the first repeat winner in
the Tournament’s history.
No one seemed to ask the obvious question “Is the player’s
handicap legitimate?” [1]
Though the player was from Washington State, he did not have a handicap with any golf club belonging
to the Washington State Golf Association.
When this was brought to the attention of COVA, it responded:
We
are happy to provide you with (the player’s) USGA handicap card, with his index
dated 9/15/2014, issued by his home course.
COVA was incorrect when it wrote the player’s index was
issued by his home course (emphasis
added).
His index was issued by an affiliate club (i.e., no course) through
a company named MyScorecard. MyScorecard
sells a handicapping service for $14.95 a year. Supposedly clubs formed under the aegis of
MyScorecard have peer review. But this
is in theory only. In practice, I bought
a MyScorecard index that had no relationship to my potential ability. I never received a query from my alleged
handicap chairman who could possibly be a figment of someone’s imagination.
Even though the lack of peer review makes it is easy to
cheat with MyScorecard, it does not necessarily follow that this player
cheated. To determine the authenticity
of the index, it is necessary to examine his posted scores. Here is what that examination revealed:
1. The player never posted a score
from Crosswater even though he shot two net 66s in winning the Pac-Am finals in
2013 and 2014.
2. He never posted any round as a
T-Score even though the Pac-Am Tournament Committee was supposedly to weight
these scores heavily in arriving at the player’s tournament handicap.
3. The player played at a higher
index in 2014 than in 2013 even though he won the tournament in 2013. Apparently the Pac-Am Tournament Committee is
not as vigilant in adjusting handicaps based on past performance as its website
claims.
The missing 2013 tournament score (i.e., had it been posted
it would have been in the last twenty scores and used in calculating the
player’s index used for the 2014 tournament) means the player’s handicap was
fraudulent and he should have been stripped of his title as the Pac-Am rules
stipulate. This did not happen. COVA continued to defend the player’s performance
as not extraordinary. By any measure,
however, the performance was extraordinary.
First, the player had to finish in the top four of his flight. The probability of doing this is 1/6. Then he had to win the finals against approximately
40 competitors. The probability of doing
this is 1/40. The probability of doing
this twice in a row is 1/57,600. Even
the probability of a defending champion repeating is 1/240—i.e., highly
unlikely.
COVA did not hand down a harsh verdict on this player’s
performance, and the reason is fairly clear.
To do so would reveal handicaps
are not getting the close scrutiny the Pac-Am claims. Prospective players could be turned off and
participation could be reduced if they believed the tournament was not an
equitable competition. Since COVA’s real purpose is to fill motel
rooms (from which it gets a percentage of the Transient Occupancy Tax),
advertising the misconduct of the player and the ineffectiveness of its staff would
not be in its interest. Best just to
forget about it and hope the player does not come back and “threepeat.”
[1]
Dean Knuth, former Senior Director of Handicapping of the USGA, did pioneering
work on the probability of exceptional scores.—see www.popeoftheslope.com. Knuth recognized the weakness of the USGA’s
handicap system in catching flagrant sandbaggers. He invented the Knuth Point System where a
player’s handicap is reduced based on what he wins and not on what he scores.
