Big Dogs Barney and Riley tebowing after both birdieing the signature hole on their home course (No. 7). This is the hole where Jim fell into the lake while trying to chip from the bulkhead.

I’ve written a couple of times about the Big Dogs, a regular men’s group at the second-best golf club in the world, in northern Florida. (You can read the previous installments here and here.) The Big Dogs have an attractively complicated regular game, which they call the Dogfight and which they keep track of with both an Excel spreadsheet and a private website. They use their own version of Stableford scoring, and based on it they assign each player what they call a Power Ranking. The player they call the Commandant uses the Power Rankings when making up teams each week. Here’s what one of their spreadsheets looks like:

Mike Riley, who introduced me to the Big Dogs, also provided background information on some of the members, along with photos. Here’s Riley:

And here are highlights from his report:

The putter above belongs to Jim, the player who had to be rescued from the lake. Riley writes: “Jim is an excellent putter. He also has a grill and an ice chest mounted to his cart. He says that when you decide to break a club you should always do it where your other clubs can see it, because that way they’ll be less likely to misbehave. GIT stands for ‘get it there.’ When things are going poorly, Jim says, ‘I don’t know if I’ve had all I can take, but I’ve had all I want.’ He’s a lawyer.” For a couple of weeks after Jim fell into the lake, the Big Dogs hung a life preserver on the bulkhead, in case it happened again:

Riley continues: “One of our better players is Brown. During our big invitational one year, he missed short birdie putts on No. 3 and No. 4. After hitting his drive on No. 56, he tied his putter to the back of his cart and let it drag down the cart path for the duration of the hole. We learned that putters do spark when dragged down a concrete cart path. We did not penalize him for changing the characteristics of a club during a round.”

The cart in the photo above belongs to the player known as Cookie Monster. The streamer attached to the roof of the golf cart (upper left) is an illegal anemometer. The player known as III (Three) has a much fancier illegal anemometer, attached to his cellphone (see photo below). And that’s Cookie on the right, getting ready to tee off:

Riley adds, “III had personalized golf towels made for ‘everybody who has a nickname.’ [See Cookie’s towel, on his West Virginia golf bag, two photos up.] III also has a tee shirt that he wears into the clubhouse only when he shoots 72 or better.” Here he is, in his tee shirt, with Christian, who was the captain of his team that day:

There used to be a subset of the Big Dogs known as the Bottom Feeders. “They were named after fish that feed off the bottom of the Gulf,” Riley writes. “They were the three, four, or five players who fed themselves off the bottom of the Dogfight. This was back when everybody played the blue tees and breaking 80 was a chore. If you broke 80, you were ‘proof,’ which meant that you pushed all your nassaus against anyone else who broke 80, whether you actually beat them or not. If you were a Bottom Feeder, you had to have a sticker on your cart identifying you as such. The Bottom Feeder game no longer exists.”

At one point, the Big Dogs were embroiled in a fake lawsuit involving Jim and the Bottom Feeders, but it’s too complicated to go into. The case was resolved, more or less, out of court.

The Dogfight is made up partly of two-man nassaus in which everyone plays everyone else. “Players are allowed to scratch matches that they feel aren’t even,” Riley writes. “Some are more liberal than others in their definition of even. You scratch a match by drawing a line through it on the bet sheet.” The players in the photo above are scratching matches before teeing off. From left to right, they are KB, Drew, Mackey, Clay, and Lanny.

Cookie scratching matches on the bet sheet.

Like all golf groups, the Big Dogs have their own lingo. Some examples, with Riley’s explanations:

“I’m playing Friday.” Rob often says this on Tuesday, then never shows on Friday. When anyone says they’re going to do something and you don’t think they have any intention of actually doing it, you say, “O.K., Rob.”

A “cod lock” is any bet where the outcome is almost certain. “Scratch all my Mackey bets” is something that certain players always say because Mackey scratches all bets that aren’t cod locks.”

“Nobody cares if you suck fast.” This is something I told Barney when I joined the Dogfight. It means that if Barney plays fast no one will mind that he sucks at golf. [Similarly, when I took up golf, my friend Jim told me that my terrible shots wouldn’t matter as long as I kept up with everyone else, because “Nobody ever gave a shit about how anybody else played golf.”]

“My long was good but my wide sucked.” Used for a putt with good speed but a bad line. Can also be reversed.

“I got it.” Means “I’m about to hit.” Usually used to indicate that I am about to hit even though it’s not my turn to play. Jerry does this more than anyone else, especially when things are going bad for his team.

“Make a Hoochie knot.” Building a lie by slamming your club into the ground behind your ball, making it easier to deck a driver on a par 5. Brown is the master of this tactic.

James S. Payne, a professor of special education at Ole Miss, where Riley played on the golf team all four years, explains the origin of the Hoochie Knot in this video:

I’d be very interested in learning about local lingo at other golf clubs, either by email or in the comment section, below. I’m also interested, of course, in regular golf groups that routinely have almost as much fun as the Big Dogs and my own Sunday Morning Group.

Lightning strike at the world’s second-best golf club. All the Big Dogs escaped.