Handicapping the Pros

I'm sure this has come up somewhere before, but ...

What if handicaps were kept for the top pros as they are for amateurs?  What would their handicaps be?

Presumably well below "scratch", I would think.

Has anyone ever gone to the trouble of calculating this?

Here's something that was posted on the Sand Trap in 2007 already covering the topic, a little old, but same logic should apply.

http://thesandtrap.com/b/the_numbers_game/calculating_the_handicap_indeces_of_the_pros

Interesting.  It does kind of glide over the question of course ratings for a course set up for pros.

Back in the 1970s Gary Player played an exhibition at one of the tougher local courses.  He shot a 62 and was *very* disappointed not to have broken 60.

As was stated in the original article (which was great, BTW) the tournament setups are different than when a course would be rated by USGA.  Different tee boxes, perhaps.  Certainly tougher conditions, like higher rough and faster greens.  The course rating (scratch player) may not change a whole lot unless yardage was added, but the slope (bogey player) would be drastically higher due to the increase in difficulty.

WOW.

I live by the Memorial Village Golf Club where the tour visits every year and I've spoken to a few of the members during the tournament. They say that the difficulty certainly gets higher as they start to tweak the course's conditions. They use a few tees that aren't open for normal play also. I think Harmonious is right on with his comment.

a friend i graduated hs with plays to a +2 and is an assistant pro to a really nice course near me in the poconos. he played Doral from the tips a week after the Cadillac and shot 3 over playing 'the best round of his life' there. he said judging on how the course played he could legitimately shoot 6-7 OVER par consistently on those conditions. playing on a pro set up course is unlike what most ppl see on any sort of basis. if they played a local muni forgettaboudit...i'd say they're GHIN handicaps would probably be around a +5-+7...

The European Tour/Asian Tour had an event at my club called the Johnnie Walker Classic which Ernie Els shot the record 72 under par score for a european tour event ever. -29 was the score where he won by a ridiculous amount of shots. The previous year it was slightly harder when Retief Goosen shot -14 to win by a few shots too. Since then though the course is much harder as it as been lengthened and many more bunkers added. My lowest score off the blacks is 75 and I played out of my skin to shoot that. Given it was windy unlike when Ernie won it but gee it plays so hard off the back tees.

Is the first part a typo, or am I mis-reading something?  I assume you mean the 2003 Johnnie Walker Classic, where he won by 10 at -29.

There have been a bunch of articles over the years on this topic. My recollection of the main points are:

PGA Tour about +6 to +8

Tiger Woods 2000 year his index would have been +10

Angel Cabrera played to +10 at Augusta when he won the Masters (from an article about the Augusta course rating - of which there is not an official one)

This is done on tricked up courses for which course ratings can't be adjusted as well. To give just 1 accedote:

I was lucky enough to play Pebble Beach this year. I played from the US Open tees. Now, apart from how hard and fast the course was playing during the US Open, the big difference was the rough. The length of it as well as where it came into play. On the 8th hole, my tee shot split the fairway. During the US open it would have been in the left rough. 45 yards was cut down to half that.

These things don't show up in course ratings and as means PGA Tour 'handicaps' would be understated as well.

There's an article in the current Golf Digest magazine that has a comment on this by Dean Knuth, the guy who invented the Slope Rating system.

He says pros who make the cut on the number are playing to a +4, and the winner of a tournament is between a +7 and a +10.

Frankly?  A mulligan or two gives him back well more than just the one or two strokes he retakes, IMHO.  OB, lost ball, and other trouble can easily add up to 3, 4, maybe even 5 strokes across two 'mulligans' in 18 holes.  He may post 2-5, but if he played it down, he's probably more like a 6-10 IMHO.

I'll sometimes (on an empty course) play two balls like a two-person scramble as an exercise to see what my potential is.  Surprisingly, the second ball isn't usually wildly better scoring than the first, but it's usually 2-3 strokes per side.  Those couple/three strokes are usually clustered on only a couple of holes - where the first shot ended up in more than enough trouble where a mulligan would've come in quite handy (like your friend's 'mulligan or two').

I don't post these scores for hcp purposes, but it is an interesting exercise to show how eliminating just a couple bad shots per side can reap much more than just those shot strokes themselves and show you what you CAN score if you played very near your best on any given day.

JMHO