GoBucks wrote:I've been where you're at and felt what you're feeling
GoBucks,
I used to feel that way too.
I remember a guy who was a huge abuser of restarts back in the days of the LS Tour. I remember his name too but there's no point in naming him here because he may still play under a different name and has changed his ways.
Back then, you could look at a person's stats and see how many penalty strokes they had acquired in a season and in his lifetime career stats as well. In those days, the first restart was free so you had to restart more than once to get penalty strokes in a tournament. The guy I mentioned up above had more penalty strokes than rounds played and I'm not talking about a handful of rounds, I'm talking about hundreds of rounds played. There was one season where he had played something like 120-130 pro level rounds and his total of penalty strokes approached 200.
The thing that bothered me most wasn't all the restarts he regularly did. It was the fact so many players would talk about him on the LS Tour forum as if he was one of the better players. They'd mention his name when talk turned to the best players, how he was such a good player at pro and champ level, a real nice guy, etc... even though he was continually starting rounds over when they weren't going well. It was as if no one cared he wasn't following the unwritten golf rule that you play it where it lies. Everyone could see by his stats that he was, in a sense, cheating with all the restarts. They were certainly a big factor with his low scoring average so I could never figure out why a lot of players considered him as one of the good guys.
Now, you don't see too many players with penalty strokes and I think that's great. It means more people are playing Links the way it should be played.
Max