A huge controversy over cheating at a St. Louis-area golf course has gone viral, causing lovers of the game to react in different ways
Earlier this summer, I was on the golf course in a local tournament with my wife and some close friends.
I was standing over a birdie putt that was within the leather.
For those who don’t speak golf, that means the ball was close enough to the hole that the distance was shorter than the length of the grip on my putter. In most casual rounds, somebody might simply say, “That’s good.”
My friend looked at the ball.
Then he looked at me.
“I can’t give the birdie to you. I have to see it.”
There was no problem.
He was right.
I made the putt.
The birdie was earned.
It was a small moment, but it is one of the things I love about golf.
Golf is different.
We don’t have referees following us around the course. We don’t have an umpire standing over our shoulder counting every stroke. We are largely responsible for policing ourselves.
And that raises an interesting question.
Where exactly is the line between playing loose with the rules and actually cheating?
Because if you play enough weekend golf, you know there is a difference.
Sometimes we play the ball up.
Sometimes we take a mulligan.
Sometimes we hit a breakfast ball.
Sometimes we pull a ball out of a hazard and give ourselves a reasonable lie.
Sometimes a group decides that a putt inside the leather is good.
None of that is necessarily cheating.
Those are agreements.
We know what we’re doing. The people we’re playing with know what we’re doing. We have collectively decided that this is the game we’re playing that day.
The line gets crossed somewhere else.
The line gets crossed when you do something because you believe nobody will know.
Moving the ball when nobody is looking.
Improving your lie and pretending you didn’t.
Writing down a score you didn’t shoot.
Faking an outcome.
That is cheating.
Because golf isn’t really built on rules.
It is built on honor.
The rules are important, but the game works because we trust the person standing next to us to tell the truth.
That is what makes the story involving Zach Holland at WingHaven Country Club so troubling.
According to reports, Holland was playing in a member-member tournament when his playing partners later celebrated what appeared to be a hole-in-one on a par-3. Questions arose because nobody had witnessed the tee shot. After video footage was reviewed, Holland admitted that he had put the ball in the hole.
Let’s be clear.
That was an asinine thing to do.
There is no sugarcoating it.
A hole-in-one is one of golf’s great moments precisely because it happens. You don’t get to manufacture one.
Golfers understand that.
If you fake a hole-in-one, you haven’t just broken a tournament rule. You have broken the trust that makes the game what it is.
But there is another part of this story that bothers me.
And it has nothing to do with the scorecard.
It has to do with what happened afterward.
Holland has reportedly received messages and threats. And, more troubling, some of that attention has extended to his wife.
That’s where I think we have lost the plot.
I am not here to be the police of social media.
People are entitled to be angry.
People are entitled to say what Holland did was wrong.
People are entitled to believe he should face consequences.
I agree with all of that.
But somewhere between accountability and cruelty, we cross another line.
And apparently some people crossed it.
We have become very comfortable sitting behind a keyboard and casting stones.
We have watched it happen in politics. We watch public figures turn every disagreement into a battle over morality. We watch people get reduced to caricatures. We watch strangers demand punishment, humiliation and sometimes the destruction of someone’s livelihood because they made a mistake.
And then we carry that behavior into our everyday lives.
A golfer cheats.
A stranger gets angry.
A social-media post appears.
And suddenly the morality police warriors arrive.
The keyboard gives everyone a courtroom.
Everyone gets to be judge.
Everyone gets to be prosecutor.
Everyone gets to pronounce a sentence.
But there is something missing.
The human being.
Zach Holland made a terrible decision.
By the accounts that have been made public, he acknowledged it. He resigned his membership. He accepted that what he did was wrong.
None of that makes the decision right.
But perhaps it is worth remembering that a person can make a profoundly stupid decision without becoming a permanently worthless human being.
And certainly without making his wife or family fair game.
Where is the honor in attacking them?
There isn’t any.
Golf asks us to be honest when nobody is watching.
But I think honor asks something of us on the other side, too.
It asks us to know when enough is enough.
It asks us to distinguish accountability from revenge.
It asks us to remember that the person who made the mistake is still a person.
Maybe that is the part of golf we sometimes forget.
We talk about golf being a game of honor because we are expected to call penalties on ourselves.
But perhaps the harder test comes when someone else deserves the penalty.
Do we administer it fairly?
Or do we keep swinging long after the ball is gone?
I don’t know Zach Holland.
I don’t know what was going through his mind when he made the decision to put that ball in the hole.
I don’t need to.
It was wrong.
He should own it.
But if we are going to invoke the word honor, then we should be willing to live by it ourselves.
Because the scorecard tells us how somebody played.
What we do after the round tells us something much more important.
It tells us who we are.
Enjoy Your Sunday – MWM
Michael Mattingly is a freelance journalist from Smithton, Illinois, with a background in advanced mathematics and creative writing. He is a student of the game of golf, drawn to its pressure, rhythm, and unpredictability.
He is also an avid St. Louis Cardinals fan and a loyal Chicago Bears supporter.
