This is the title I chose for my personal blog, which is meant to give me an outlet for one of my favorite crafts – writing – plus to use an image from my favorite sport, golf.  Out of college, my first job was as a reporter for the Daily Astorian in Astoria, Oregon, and I went on from there to practice writing in all of my professional positions, including as press secretary in Washington, D.C. for a Democrat Congressman from Oregon (Les AuCoin), as an Oregon state government manager in Salem and Portland, as press secretary for Oregon’s last Republican governor (Vic Atiyeh), and as a private sector lobbyist.  This blog also allows me to link another favorite pastime – politics and the art of developing public policy – to what I write.  I could have called this blog “Middle Ground,” for that is what I long for in both politics and golf.  The middle ground is often where the best public policy decisions lie.  And it is where you want to be on a golf course.

Ask most golfers today and they will say that the handicap number assigned to each hole on a golf course illustrates its difficulty.

They’d be wrong…mostly.

The actual definition is this:

“The number one handicap stroke hole should be assigned to the thole where the bogey golfer needs an additional stroke in order to halve the hole with a scratch golfer.”

The fact is, however, that the true meaning of the handicap number probably relates more or less to the difficulty, despite the more specific definition.

All of this came up for me recently when the guys I play golf with at The Palms in La Quinta, California, were flummoxed when the new scorecards for this year did not include handicap numbers for holes played from the gold tees – the tees many old folks use at the course.

So, that started a series of requests to prompt the head pro to come up with gold tee numbers.  It was strange that this was not on the scorecard because, if nothing else, the cards last year included gold tee numbers.  So, why not this year?

After a few days, all was well when one of my friends obtained a list of the handicap numbers that we could use to keep score – including “net scores” on the gold tee holes because net scores translate to who wins money in the games every week.

One issue was that the process caused a number of players to come up with their own handicap hole numbers and that’s where the misconception arose.  Some of them didn’t know the real definition.

That prompted me to seek information from the Southern California Golf Association (SCGA) to which I belong, along with the Oregon Golf Association.

The SCGA provided the official definition quoted above.

And, to go to an extreme, what follows is the SCGA’s further guidance on the issue, which will appeal only to those, like me, who don’t have much else to do in retirement than play and think about golf.

“So how does the club determine where the strokes should be allocated? Section 17 of the USGA Handicap System offers two methods by which a course can apply stroke allocation to their golf holes.  It can be a time consuming and mathematically challenging process if done by hand, but one of the benefits member clubs will realize by the SCGA’s January 2010 change to the GHIN handicap system is the ability for the club to capture the scoring information and run the analysis themselves.

“Comparison Method:  Scores of low handicap players are compared to scores of higher handicap players from the same set of tees.  The club collects a sampling of 200 gross, hole-by-hole scores from players whose course handicap does not exceed an 8 for men (Group A), and another sampling of 200 from players whose course handicap is in the 20 to 28 range (Group B).

“Scores should be gross and not adjusted for Equitable Stroke Control. Scores for each hole are then averaged for Group A and Group B, and the difference is then determined for each hole by subtracting the average of Group A from the average of Group B.  The holes would then be ranked starting with the hole where the biggest difference is between Group A average scores and Group B average scores.  Thus, showing the number one handicap stroke hole where the bogey golfer needs that additional stroke.

“Regression Method:  Allows the collection of 400 gross scores from players of all handicap levels.  Scores need to be gross, not adjusted, and scores must be provided from the same set of tees and from the same gender golfer.  Each hole is evaluated by the score and player’s course handicap.”

Then The Palms, with either method, assigns number values to the holes and produces – usually at least – a scorecard bearing the numbers.  That almost happened this year – the proper scorecards, though their lack has now been corrected.

See, there you have it – and aren’t you glad you now know more than you used to know before I went on to this extreme.