A Puncher’s Chance
Overpowered and Outmanned, Team USA Readies Itself for the Fight

“[H]ope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies.”

Andy Dufresne in The Shawshank Redemption

October, quite possibly the loveliest month of the year. The scorch of summer finally relents. Leaves display their chameleon trait as they release their grip and drift slowly to terra firma. College football is in full swing and, for the eighth time in eight years, Team Europe and Team USA prepare for battle at Kiva Dunes for the coveted Kiva Cup.

The teams have been finalized, the pairings party announced, the official GHIN revision date decided, rooms are booked and travel arranged. The only question that remains is, coming off their first ever victory in 2009, do the Americans have a chance?

The question was not as easy to answer in years past when European handicaps were more amateur than scratch. While billed, sometimes jokingly sometimes not, as the premier event in sub-amateur coastal golf, “sub-amateur” is generally used as a reference to Team USA’s employment of golfers with double digit handicaps. Calling some members of Team USA “amateur” is almost an insult to most true amateurs of the game.

The 2010 European team has taken ’sub-amateur’ to mean golfers with handicaps lower than amateur. The 2010 European team consists of all single digit handicappers. European rookie Andy McRae shot a closing round low score of 68 on Sunday to climb his way in to a fourth place finish at the Alabama State Mid-Amateur Championships. The only American to play this weekend, Mark Skiba, shot a 77 in a friendly at Woodward Country Club. Mark doesn’t get nine strokes off of Andy.

This is a mismatch of Herculean proportion. Had Sin City been around at the time, Vegas would have put better odds on David in his match with Goliath than any one gives Team USA in this year’s Kiva Cup.

Do the Americans have a chance?

As of the October 1, 2010 GHIN index revisions, the average handicap for Team Europe is 3.8 while the average for Team USA is 10.8.

The highest handicap for Team Europe is 7.5, while only two Americans have handicaps lower than 7.5.

The lowest American index is 3.0. Europe has 3 golfers with an index lower, considerably lower, than 3.0.

Team USA’s highest handicap of 22.6 is higher than Team Europe’s lowest five handicaps combined.

Europe’s three lowest handicaps COMBINED is a whopping 0.6! By comparison, the combined total of USA’s lowest three handicaps comes in at a weighty 16.5.

Many say that making all players have a valid handicap would produce a fair competition and a level playing field. Some argue, however, that GHIN, like the doctrine of “separate but equal”, does little more than shade the inequality while doing little to bridge it. “As long as an 81 at EAST produces a lower differential than an 81 at Kiva, we operate on a sandy foundation”, one American said.

Do the Americans have a chance?

“I know no one gives us a chance in this cup. [Team European Captain] Brian Burnett has assembled a semi-pro golf team over there”, Team USA Captain Jim Hartsell said recently. “I hate to bring up a Bear Bryant reference, but, with the exception of maybe Boogie, I do not believe that a single member of Team Europe would have made it through Coach Bryant’s Junction camp. Not a single one. I firmly believe that at least five members, maybe even as many as seven members, of Team USA would have finished that camp. Those seven may have even carried the eighth one with them. We’re fighters. No, I take that back, we’re scrappers. No one is giving us a chance in this thing but, fact is, not too many people have ever given any of us anything. Everything we have has come from hard work, from fighting, from struggling. That’s what we’ll do at Kiva.”

So the Americans have a chance?

One odds maker put the American chances at slim to none.

I don’t understand a lot about golf. I don’t understand why you can’t ground your club in a hazard. I don’t understand why sometimes you can take a drop where your ball went in to a hazard and some times you have to take a stroke and distance penalty, but I do understand math and percentages. Based on an article in Golf Digest, the odds are always in favor of the lower handicap golfer winning a match.

If the index difference is 1-3 strokes, the odds of the lower handicap golfer winning are in the range of 55%. With a 4-12 stroke differential, the odds of the better golfer prevailing jump to about 70%, and when the better golfer’s index is 13 or more strokes lower than his opponent’s, the odds of the better golfer winning are almost 85%.

So, ordering players by handicaps, lowest to highest, 1 through 8, the lowest differential is 3.5. That gives the American a 3 in 10 chance of winning the closest match on the board! Do you understand what that means? The average differential among players ranked 1 through 8 is a whopping 6.9. That’s almost a statistical impossibility!

If the handicaps hold, the chances of any one USA golfer winning his singles match will likely be in the neighborhood of 1 in 7. The odds of 2 or more American golfers winning a singles match decrease exponentially. If the Kiva Cup makes it to Sunday with the USA needing 2 or more points to retain the cup, the Europeans are almost assured of recapturing the cup.

But, do the Americans have a chance?

American Vice-Captain Mark Skiba recalled one of the greatest inspirational lines in cinematic history and answered, “A chance? Oh, I think we always have a chance unless we just don’t show up. More than ‘a chance’, though, we have hope, and hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies.”

Can “chance and hope” overcome Europe’s talented field? We’ll see in a little over two weeks.