My golf group treats honest scoring as bad manners

I started playing golf with three neighbors this summer. We are ordinary weekend players: lost balls, uneven swings, one decent shot that keeps everyone optimistic for another hole. Nobody is competing for money, and our scores will never matter outside the small card on the cart.

That is why I did not expect scoring to become the tense part.

The group uses what they call “friendly rules.” A short missed putt may count as made. A ball in a terrible lie gets moved onto grass. If someone hits into the trees, they may drop near where it disappeared and continue without discussing a penalty. I am not bothered by any of that when the point is pace and enjoyment. What bothers me is that everyone still announces a score as if we were playing the same game.

On our last round, one neighbor hit two balls off the tee, picked the better one, moved it away from a root, and took a long putt twice because a cart passed behind him. At the end of the hole he said, “Par.” I wrote down what he said. Another player looked at me and smiled as if we were sharing a joke.

Later, I took an extra shot from a bunker and called my score honestly. The same neighbor told me I was “making it weird” and should just take the number the group expected. He said nobody likes the person who turns a casual Saturday into a rules seminar.

I do not want to be that person. I also do not understand why relaxing the rules requires pretending the total is comparable. We could stop keeping score. We could keep personal scores under whatever rules each person enjoys. We could agree on a few generous house rules before the first tee. Any of those would work for me.

What does not work is the social pressure to approve a score I watched being constructed. Next month we are entering a charity scramble together. The event is still casual, but teams submit results and prizes are involved. I asked how strictly we planned to score. The response was, “Don’t worry, everyone does the same stuff.”

That sentence made me want to withdraw. It also made me wonder whether I am applying tournament seriousness to a fundraiser where the real purpose is donating and spending an afternoon outside. I have no desire to accuse friends of cheating over a small prize. I have an equally strong desire not to sign a card I do not believe.

Would you set the scoring conversation before the event, play but refuse to keep the card, or simply skip it? Where is the line between harmless casual adjustments and asking the most rule-conscious person to participate in a shared fiction?