Mike Zisman
Rolling out the World Handicap System
Afters years of negotiations, calculations and fine tuning, the World Handicap System becomes a live reality on
January 1, 2020. It is the result of an epic collaboration between the USGA, R&A and the world’s national associations to convert the world’s six current handicap systems into one universal model. We spoke to
Mike Zisman, CEO of Golf Genius, which has created the software to enable the roll-out of WHS in the United States
Mike Zisman likes to borrow one of Albert Einstein’s famous lines: “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler”.
Zisman is CEO of Golf Genius Software, the company that is implementing the new World Handicap System on behalf of the United States Golf Association (USGA), and this Einstein advice lends well to the work carried out under the auspices of the USGA and the R&A—which combine to govern the rules of world golf—to establish a new, universal handicap system, which is set to go live—in the United States at least—in January, 2020.
Zisman has form in software development. Having earned his PhD—in operations research and scheduling systems—at the Wharton School in Philadelphia, the Pittsburgh native established Soft-Switch Inc., which made a fortune ahead of the internet’s break-out by taking internal email systems of large organizations and connecting them together into a forerunner of the global email network we now take for granted.
“In the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, the work we did was central in commercializing email,” explains Zisman, who lives in Wayne. Pa., just west of Philadelphia. “Email was very popular in academic circles, which is where I first came across it. Our software helped to inter-connect all the different systems that corporations were using and it really made email viable for large corporations. The product was a software switch between different email systems and it was very widely used in 80 of the Fortune 100 companies, and internationally.”
Zisman sold Soft-Switch to Lotus Development for $62 million in 1994, before IBM paid $3 billion for Lotus a year later. After a decade with IBM, Zisman retired early to play golf—“I am a member at several clubs but mainly at Merion,” he says, “which is literally 10 minutes from my house”—until, one day, he was organizing a guys’ golf trip to Sea Island, Ga., when he had a lightbulb moment; Zisman was convinced he could create software to organise golf trips and groupings much more efficiently. He launched Golf Trip Genius in 2009, wrote much of the software coding himself and this year, a decade later, Golf Genius expects to schedule 22 million rounds of golf in 40 countries. As well as fixing up pairings, Golf Genius provides live scoring and leaderboards via an app, and tournament management for clubs.
You could be 12 hackers on a patchy muni but when you check your hole-by-hole scoring on your phone it feels like the Ryder Cup.
Now working with the USGA on the launch of the World Handicap System might be Zisman’s biggest challenge yet.
“We are implementing the World Handicap System for the USGA, which represents probably 40 percent of the golfers in the world,” says Zisman. “We will launch in January so the US will certainly be among the first countries to implement the World Handicap System.”
Australia is set to go live in early 2020 while the UK is holding fire until November.
Mike Davis, CEO of the USGA, said earlier this year: “The World Handicap System is the latest example of our work to make the game more welcoming. Golfers throughout the world will be able to play equitably [and] measure their success… this monumental collaborative effort will benefit everyone in golf.”
“The World Handicap System [will] make the game more welcoming”
- Mike Davis, USGA
Adds Zisman: “WHS is words on paper. It describes how to calculate a handicap in very precise terms but no-one is going to calculate handicaps using pencil and paper, so until it is converted to software it does not deliver any value to the world. We are in a technology world and it is the software that makes this stuff work. That sounds a little selfserving because that is what we do, but that is the reality.
“It is a challenging project but one of the unique things about our company is that we know software and we know golf. Prior to WHS everyone had their own handicap system and as part of our tournament management product we had to interface all of those different handicapping systems, whether in the US, Australia or Canada. We have been able to analyse WHS from a mathematical background to work out how handicaps will change, whose handicaps are going to change and by how much, so that part has been very exciting.”
Six differing handicap systems used worldwide will be combined into one system. One of the primary changes to handicapping in the United States will be a simplification of the Handicap Index calculation.
“The way we calculate handicaps now is by taking the best 10 out of 20 scores, take the average and then multiply by 0.96. Well, you know what, where does that 0.96 come from? Nobody knows!” says Zisman. In Australia that “magic number” is 0.93.
“With WHS we will just take the average of the best eight scores. We all understand that.”
Wrote Zisman in a White Paper earlier this year: “WHS is not a compromise solution, but a harmonization of the six systems, bringing together the essential strengths of each. Very importantly, WHS will also simplify the entire system. In our view, this simplification is as important as the harmonization.”
Or in other words, what Einstein said.
ONE WORLD, ONE SYSTEM
A summary of how WHS handicaps will be calculated: