I miss the days of grinding to hit the buffer zone – handicaps are worse without it

Some of the rounds of which I’m most proud are not those that won competitions or the days where I couldn’t seem to miss.

They’re the ones where I was struggling, where form and favour deserted me but somehow I managed to fashion a score.

I wouldn’t be picking up a prize – that’s true – but I’d sit at home afterwards and feel pride I’d dug in. That against all odds, amid shanks and tops, I’d battled, grappled, hung on by my fingernails, and used sheer will to turn a looming disaster into something satisfactory.

That’s probably enough adjectives for one article, but you get what I’m trying to say. When adversity arrived, I met it and held it off.

Much of this was made possible, even encouraged, by the ability to reach out to a target. Prior to the arrival of the World Handicap System, this was the buffer zone in the old CONGU UHS.

If there is one thing I do get all rose-tinted spectacles about when it comes to remembering the old ways it is this.

It’s already fading in my thoughts, as we approach the fifth anniversary of WHS, but for those of you who forget facts even more than me, let’s indulge ourselves with a brief trip down memory lane.

The buffer zone was a cushion, a mechanism that allowed your score to be worse than the Competition Standard Scratch without you automatically tacking on the dreaded point one.

How big that buffer was depended on how good a player you were. For the old category one players (scratch to five) it was CSS plus one stroke. If your handicap was higher than 36, it was CSS plus six.

For a lot of my competition life, my buffer was CSS plus two because my handicap would swing between 9 and 12.

I knew this before I went out and those of us who had played a lot of events round a particular course could usually estimate the CSS.

Did the buffer zone play a really important role in our handicaps?

But the buffer zone had a curious impact on many of our games outside of just keeping our handicaps in place. It gave us something to aim for, something to keep fighting towards, when we weren’t going to figure in the higher echelons of the leaderboard.

It kept us going, spurred us on, and stopped us throwing in the towel even if there had been a barrage of bogeys.

As I submit more scores under the WHS, I realise this is something missing with what we’ve got now.

WHS was successfully marketed to a degree on the end of the point one. Don’t worry if you’ve had a bad round, the message read, if it’s not one of your best eight it won’t count.

What I’ve subsequently learned from an extended spell of bad form is that while it might not be one of your best eight right now, it could be in the future unless you pull your finger out.

While I’ve never consciously downed tools and given up, no matter how bad things have become on the course, it is impossible to keep the same intensity going when you get midway through a round – if it’s been going wrong – and you realise there is nothing to play for.

The twos club can rouse you, but there isn’t the adrenaline. It’s nice if I manage to put together a run of pars, but I’m not getting the immediate dopamine hit from achieving something I can see straight away.

And, conversely, it just doesn’t sting as much when you miss a four-footer that would have held your hard-earned handicap mark in place.

While I don’t think this alters the integrity of the WHS, certainly not in the way manipulation does, I do wonder how many of us lift off the throttle a little when it becomes clear it’s not going to be our day.

Do you trust yourself to give it your best in a general play round when you know it’s unlikely your score will ever appear in your top eight differentials? Would that have been different had there still been an objective at reach?

The buffer zone is long gone and it won’t be returning. But handicapping, in my opinion, is the worse for its absence and a similar mechanism that replicated that feeling you get when you’ve risen from the golfing dead would make the WHS all the better.

Have your say

What do you think? Would WHS be better off if there was a buffer zone equivalent within the software? Or is Steve is just pining for old times that are never returning? Let him know by emailing s.carroll@nationalclubgolfer.com or leave us a comment on X.

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