Competitive golf at club level needs a handicap system to thrive and would probably struggle to survive if there were no handicap-adjusted scores as the best players would win all the time and lesser players with a competitive desire would lose interest. On tour, of course, it is a different story with the best player, full stop, winning on any given week and the very best players triumphing multiple times over the course of their careers.
‘Nett scores’ are the by-product of the handicap scheme used at club level - the World Handicap System. First, a bit of a dictionary, or rather Wikipedia, definition: “A net (sometimes written nett) value is the resultant amount after accounting for the sum or difference of two or more variables. In economics, it is frequently used to imply the remaining value after accounting for a specific, commonly understood deduction. In these cases, it is contrasted with the term gross, which refers to the pre-deduction value.”
