USGA Handicaps Once Limited to Private Clubs?

[bkuehn1952]

Does anyone know if having a USGA handicap was once limited to private club members? As a public course player, I was never aware of golf handicaps until the 1970's when a public course one year began signing players up for a USGA handicap (for a price, of course). Maybe the ability to have a handicap as a public course player was always there and I just was unaware. Or the public courses were very bad about signing people up. I have made a half-hearted internet search and came up with nothing.

[mcanadiens]

I didn't find a whole lot specific to the question either.

If I had to guess, maybe a lot of public courses simply wouldn't really have the time or interest to maintain handicaps prior to computerized systems. Unlike a private club, with a limited number of members, thousands of different people would play those public courses in a year. It would have been a nightmare for someone to keep track of all that.

 

[iacas]

I don’t think so. Slope wasn’t even introduced until 1987 and my understanding of the history is that the handicap system wasn’t super popular or implemented a bunch before that.

http://www.popeofslope.com/history/slope.html

[WUTiger]

For loads of historic details, check out the Pope of Slope website, shown above.

Website is run by Dean Knuth, onetime head of the USGA Handicap Department.

And, back in the previous century...

    Circa 1968, the club pro where I caddied told us loopers to use the over-par average of best 5 of our last 10 scores.

Uniformity in handicapping basically lagged the development of course rating systems. Oversimplifying the Pope website accounts, ratings systems started in the early 1900s, but varied from club to club and later from region to region.

I have some vintage scorecards of country clubs and public courses, some dating back more than 60 years.

• A 1950 scorecard from the original Bellerive Country Club (it moved to West St. Louis Co. a decade later) had no course ratings listed. A 1975ish scorecard from the new Bellerive did list course ratings for different tees.
• California in 1978 was in transition: Pebble Beach had course ratings for all four tee boxes, but these were in round numbers: 75, 72, and 70. Torrey Pines - North and South courses - both had course ratings with decimal points, i.e., 68.9.
• For run of the mill public courses, ratings were often omitted until 1980s. Ruth Park Golf Club (St. Louis) had no ratings listed on its scorecards until about 10 years ago. I have Ruth Park cards from four different decades. In present day, a few nine-hole layouts still lack ratings/slope on scorecards.

As a caddie, and well up into the 1980s, private clubs or public courses with formal league systems had players turn in their scorecards for club-level audit, and these equity-adjusted scores were entered into HDCP system. Then one day, players started entering their own equity-adjusted scores under the honor system. Can't really remember when the change-over took place.