I Have To Do 17 More Of These?

Forget par, golf for value!  I shot 39 cents per stroke

Pretty sure nobody else looks at it that way.  

 Well, Ty Webb goes by height, so it can't be that unusual.

Wait, what? 

So last week was vacation week for Jeremy, and one of the activities that I like doing once or twice a year is playing a round of golf.  Like...real golf, not the mini-type, although that's good too.  I'm much better at mini golf, so it's not really noteworthy.  

Anyway, golf has it all wrong.  It's the only sport I can think of right now in which the lower your score, the better off you've supposedly done.  Racing doesn't count, because times are not scores.  That said, the logic is all wrong, from everybody's point of view.  Take, for example, the owners of the golf course.  They charge people a certain rate for a round of golf regardless of their golfing ability.  The more people the owners can channel through the course, the more money they make...which is fine...but the worse people are at golfing, the longer they take.  Good golfers breeze through a course and allow for higher profits, but they pay the same rate as atrocious golfers who effectively take money out of the course owners' hands.  When it comes to value, bad golfers win here.  

When it comes to course maintenance, it's pretty easy to see why the fewer strokes a player takes, the less they damage the course, and the less maintenance that needs to be done in terms of watering, filling divots, planting grass seed, etc.  Once again, the good golfers get the shaft here, since they do less damage to the course, yet pay the same fee as everyone else.  It makes more financial sense to be lousy at golf. 

And then, the most simple calculation of golf value, the player's.  I, for example, shot a round of golf in which I paid a total of 38.6 cents per stroke.  If I was a good golfer and actually shot par, that number would go UP to a whopping 54 cents per shot.  The more strokes you take, the more value you're getting for your hard-earned money.  I'm paying a certain amount for greens fees, and I feel like I should get as much enjoyment out of that money as possible.  It's the American Way!