The Poseur's Guide to Golf

The poseur who can get a strong enough grasp about the game of golf stands to do something that many other poseurs cannot: improve the quality of life. The Poseur's Guide to Golf is not in any way intended to help you get onto the PGA tour, but if you can master a tenuous grasp of the game you just may be able to transform a simple dinner party or luncheon attended by you and your boss into a chance to ingratiate yourself with that boss that can potentially lead to advancement in your career.

The Poseur's Guide to Golf: Grips
A cursory glance at Tiger Woods or any other golfer on the PGA tour may lead you to believe that gripping a golf club is just a matter of picking it up and holding the club between your hands. In fact, being a poseur on the subject of golf means being able to use terms like the vardon grip or the interlocking grip with some degree of authority. The poseur needs to be able to say that it was either Jack Nicklaus or Tiger Woods who convinced him to change from the baseball grip to the interlocking grip. The poseur also needs to understand that it is perfectly okay to refer to the vardon grip as the overlapping grip since they are the same thing.

The Poseur's Guide to Golf: Handicap
The poseur should not attempt to explain how a handicap is achieved in golf because very, very few people know exactly how the handicap is calculated. The poseur who acts like he knows the intricacies of calculating a golf handicap is the poseur who will be exposed for the fraud he really is. Keep the attacks of fraud at bay merely by knowing what a golf handicap is and providing a reasonable prevarication about what your handicap is. The handicap is golf's way of leveling the playing field so that two people of very different skill levels can play against each other in a way that more closely appropriates the concept of fairness. When the complicated calculating is done, the lower the handicap score, the better the golfer you are. If you want to be successful as a golf poseur, pick a handicap that doesn't force you into proving your mad skills on the course, but also that isn't so high that you lose all credibility in your effort to become a poseur.

The Poseur's Guide to Golf: Clubs
The poseur should not experience a racing heart when they look at a caddy lugging around a bag full of clubs. You can successfully pull off knowing about golf without knowing what every single club is specialized for. Essentially you need to be able to discuss intelligently a handful different types of clubs. The driver is the hardest to hit for a beginner, but carries the ball the farthest. That bag may potentially be filled with 7 irons, but most likely the golfers with whom you are discussing the game will use 7 through 9 the most. You've got a pitching wedge which is used for short shots made from the thicker grass known as the rough and you've got a sand wedge which is used for hitting balls out of sand bunkers. Then there is the putter and if you don't know what a putter is, then you should start out by trying to become a miniature golf poseur.

The Poseur's Guide to Golf: Scoring

Scoring is easy enough to figure out, but the poseur needs to become familiar with certain terms. Each hole comes with a number figure that is an estimate of the average number of shots it will take to get the ball from the tee into the cup. That number is known as par. When you can get the ball into the cup using one less stroke than the average, that there is called a birdie. An eagle is the golf scoring term for getting the ball into cup two strokes less than part. One shot more than part is called a bogey. Two over par is imaginatively known as a double bogey. The poseur should never, ever, under any circumstances slip up and brag about having accomplished an albatross. This big bird is a big lie that will reveal you as the poseur you are. An albatross is when you can get the ball into the cup using three strokes less than par.

The Poseur's Guide to Golf: Golf course

That fancy stretch of land that is usually hidden behind a fence and features a country club is called the golf course. The poseur cannot get by simply referring to the course. A golf course is composed of many different smaller elements that integrate into the whole. The fairway is that stretch of bright green grass that you will be look straight at when you, in your mind, place your golf ball down on the wooden tee. The green is the usually somewhat circular piece of real estate down at the end of the hole where a flag is stuck down into the cup. You can tell the green by its status of having the shortest grass on the course. The rough is that long, thicker grass that grows down the edges of the fairway. Keep in mind that the thickness of the rough can vary from slight to extreme. You will also find "natural" hazards at various points between the tee and the green that are exhibited in the form of sand bunkers, water hazards and trees.

The Poseur's Guide to Golf: Etiquette

Golf is considered a gentlemen's game though, as Tiger Woods proved, not every player is actually a gentleman. Etiquette plays a big part in the actual progress of the game from one hole to the next and the poseur needs to become acquainted with the most important and popularly followed rules of etiquette. Everybody keeps quiet when a player is taking a shot at any spot along the golf course. Footprints in the sand bunkers are politely raked away before leaving. When a swing creates a divot, which is a hole in the ground, etiquette requires that you replace the missing terrain and, perhaps most importantly for the poseur, you never do anything that causes a delay that creates a bottleneck behind you of players waiting for their rightful turn at the tee.

The Poseur's Guide to Golf: Cheating

Lying about your score is common enough on golf courses across the country, but even putting down the wrong score accidentally is enough to get a PGA pro in big time trouble. The poseur won't have occasion to actually lie about his score after the fact, but you want to avoid lying about how good you actually are. When it comes to cheating, golf is a funny game. So many arcane rules exist that nobody on earth could rattle all of them off. That said, the poseur should be aware of ways to cheat in golf that aren't necessarily considered cheating. Some common golf cheats that aren't golf cheats include invoking a rule that the ball has come to rest on an area of ground in need of repair but since no hard and fast rules exist, the need for repair is very subjective. Casual air is a term applied to a wind that is hard and fast enough to allow a few blades of glass dropped at shoulder height to be carried about the length of two golf clubs away and this casual air identification can be used to bring back into play balls that were hit out of bounds or a ball that flies unexpectedly far over the green.