Cheating in competition: your stories

[tuq]

Cliff's Notes at bottom.

Golfing competitively for >25 years now, I have a couple, but the most interesting one occurred a couple of years ago in what was supposed to be a fun get-together.

We put together a 24-man event at Stoneridge Golf Course, a well-maintained course about 90 minutes up the hill in Prescott. Definitely a weird course in that the elevation change was extreme, and from one tee up and a bit of courage a good golfer could drive a good number of their par 4s. This made for a fun scramble course.

I was a captain of one of the teams and was heavily responsible for establishing the format. Everyone threw in $50 on top of the costs for the bus and booze. We drafted teams a couple of nights in advance, two twelve-man teams, most of us knew each other well except for a couple of friends-of-friends. The team with the most points at the end of the day would win $50. In the morning it would be twelve individual matches, with a value of one point per match, 1/2 for ties, handicapped.

The afternoon round is where I was responsible for most of the setup. We ranged in handicap from ~1 to a ~24. That round was to be a four man scramble vs. a group from the other team, no handicaps. If you beat your opponent on a hole (unless you were watching them play in front of or behind you, you really wouldn't know until the round was over) you got a point on that hole. To keep things close, if you took a par or worse you moved UP one teebox, if you got a birdie or better you moved BACK one teebox. There are like five sets of markers on that course and it ensured that until you tipped out you would be moving to a different box every hole. It was a self-handicapper of sorts.

Finally, I convinced the other organizers to put all the "A" players together, and all the "C" players together, with the ones in the middle playing together as well. This meant that the better players weren't counted on to carry their team all round, and that the worst players would be more valued participants as their shots would be used more.

So far, so good. We were a point or two down after the morning round but there were more points available in the afternoon. Everyone finishes and it's revealed that our team had lost by a single point. Wow, close. But then a couple of guys from our "C" group came up hissing that their competitors had SKIPPED a hole, and we checked the card and they gave themselves a BIRDIE on that hole, in big black two-box-tall Sharpie. As our team had only parred we had credited the other team with a point. We consulted the members of that group and they all "suddenly" remembered that they had skipped a hole and somehow forgot to mention it to anybody, and somehow gave themselves a birdie. This resulted in a loss for them on that hole, so instead of a one point lost, we got a one point win. It was super weird and I would have been happy with a chop, which is probably what they would have gotten had they simply played the hole.

It's worth mentioning that two of the guys in that group are notoriously untrustworthy, and one of the other two was an outsider who was likely to just play along. Also, I called out one of them at dinner that night and he has since tried to blackball me from our regular group and makes a big scene about not inviting me to his house parties, LOL.

Wondering if anyone else has come across such collusion or has a story of cheating against them in competition.

Cliff's Notes: opposing team skips a hole, gives themselves a birdie, seemingly a one point win. Their opponents on our team flip out, the birdie becomes a lost hole and we win by a single point.