Is Pro-Am Winner Larry Fitzgerald’s Handicap Legit?

Arizona Cardinal Larry Fitzgerald and pro partner Kevin Streelman won the AT&T Pebble Beach pro-am. That was very cool for the amateur Fitzgerald. However, when an amateur scores significantly better than his GHIN, eyebrows are sure to raise.

Thegolfnews.net’s Ryan Ballengee explains why Fitzgerald didn’t sandbag and instead points fingers at flaws in the handicap system.

Streelman finished at 13 under for the week, making 15 birdies on his own and obviously getting no strokes. Fitzgerald accounted, then, for at least 26 shots to the good for the team total, including gross and net scores that were better than his partner’s throughout the tournament. (On some holes, Fitzgerald could have made a natural birdie like Streelman and earned a net eagle with a stroke. A Fitz par with a stroke means a net birdie that beats a gross par from Streelman, etc.) That basically amounts to six or seven shots per round. That’s a big contribution.

Of course, for the better golfer who has seen a movie like this before, the first thought is to wonder if Larry Fitzgerald, who was getting 13 shots per round in the pro-am competition, is a sandbagging son of a gun.

On first glance at his public GHIN numbers, it doesn’t look good. Fitzgerald carried a 10.6 index heading into the event, and that does translate to 13 strokes per round on Pebble Beach from the tees the amateurs played. While that translation isn’t amiss, Fitzgerald’s handicap history chart shows what would be a suspicious, sudden uptick in his handicap index, particularly since the NFL season ended. After all, before Week 1 this season, Fitzgerald had improved down to a 6.6 index. Had he played the pro-am with that index, he would get five less shots per round, and maybe someone else wins instead.

The first thought is typically that someone in this situation punched in a bunch of bad rounds before the pro-am, jacked up the handicap index and got bonus strokes he used to perfect on the Monterey. Scam sniffed out, right?

Well, it’s more complicated than that, and that’s precisely why I said on Twitter that Fitzgerald was getting too many strokes, not that he is a sandbagger.

Part of the problem is our handicapping system. Our handicapping system in the United States looks at your best 10 rounds out of your last 20 (if you’ve recorded that many), and it assesses your skill based on those. That doesn’t work for a variety of different potential reasons. In Fitzgerald’s case, four bad weeks of golf obscured clearly very good scores during the late summer. However, the USGA system cares more about recency than a longer arc of scores.