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Dear readers, we talk a lot about the decisions members make after they've had too much to drink. Most of those stories involve saying something regrettable to a board member's wife or riding a golf cart somewhere it was never meant to go. This one involves multiple forms of transportation, a Ross Dress for Less and a Delta flight that technically existed.

It started on a Sunday at a resort course in Ventura County. Four guys - let's call them the Gentlemen of Minimal Planning - showed up a little hungover and walked straight into a member tournament they didn't know about. A director of golf, bless him, told them to kill time at the pool and they'd squeeze them on after.

A couple cocktails later, they were on the course playing a 2v2 best ball. Nothing serious. Hit and giggle. Except one of them was quietly playing the round of his life - one or two under heading into the 7th. He striped one from the fairway right at the flag and never found the ball. Gone. Vanished. He was furious, because that's what golf does to you - it lets you taste perfection and then hides it in the rough.

So he steps to the next tee, a short par three, and drops a ball wherever it lands on the tee box. Grabs his sand wedge knowing it's not enough club. Figures he'll just swing out of his shoes and see what happens.

He hits it perfect. Dead at the pin. Good distance. But the green sits uphill, so they can't see where it lands.

The opposing team shanks two into the creek. Our guy's group is so confident his ball is in the hole they tell the other team to take mulligans. Generous kings of a kingdom that hasn't been confirmed yet.

It was in the hole. His first ace ever.

What followed was not a celebration befitting adults. They skipped the next hole entirely because they were sprinting around the green like they'd won the lottery. Which, emotionally, they had.

They went directly to the clubhouse bar. Shots. Beers. The full sacrament.

Thirty minutes later, back on the 10th tee, our ace-maker gets the idea. The kind of idea that only sounds reasonable when you've just witnessed your own personal miracle and chased it with tequila.

"We're flying to Vegas tonight. Playing the Wynn tomorrow. I'm paying for everybody."

This is the same man who ten minutes ago was buying the bar a round for his first hole-in-one. Now he's standing in the fairway on the Delta app, booking four tickets out of Santa Barbara. They didn't want to drive to LAX because that would be - and I quote - "too far."

One buddy calls his hotel contact in Vegas and locks down rooms. Our ace-maker - now fully in host mode - calls the Wynn and books a foursome at $750 a head for the next morning. Three thousand dollars committed before anyone had a change of clothes.

Because that was the next problem. They all lived about twenty minutes away in different directions and had one car between them. No time to go home. No luggage. And four full golf bags they needed to transport.

Their solution was elegant in the way that bad ideas sometimes are: dump all four bags, cram every club into a single oversized travel case and eat the overweight charges at the airport. The plan for replacement bags was - and I'm not embellishing - "we'll just buy new ones at the Wynn pro shop."

Keep in mind: these are not wealthy men. Just thirty-somethings with the financial impulse control of a teenage girl with daddy’s credit card.

They convinced their one sober-adjacent friend to drive. They loaded into the car sitting in lawn chairs with a 150-pound travel bag and literally no possessions. There may have been Pacificos in the vehicle. I am told nothing can be proven.

The clothes situation hit next. They needed outfits for the Vegas bars. The only store open on a Sunday night along the route to Santa Barbara was a Ross Dress for Less. Our ace-maker set the terms: $25 per person, total budget, for an entire outfit.

They walked out with matching all-white polo shoes at five dollars a pair. Polo shirts in colors that can only be described as "clearance rack emergency" - one pink, one with a horse logo the size of a dinner plate. Our ace-maker bought women's jeans in boyfriend fit because they were in budget. They looked, by their own admission, like a traveling circus that had been recently fired.

They arrived at the Santa Barbara terminal - two guys carrying a 150-pound golf bag, Ross shopping bags for luggage, dressed like they'd lost a bet - and found the terminal dark and completely empty.

That's when one of them delivered the line that ended the trip:

"I knew Delta doesn't fly out of Santa Barbara. You booked the wrong airport, you idiot."

The Delta app, it turned out, had used the fine print to route the booking through LAX. The flight existed. The departure point did not.

In the end, they still had to pay for the flights, the hotel rooms and the $3,000 tee time at the Wynn. It was indeed a costly ace, to say the least.

And so, dear readers, we leave you with this final word of advice: a hole-in-one costs you a round at the bar. What it costs you after that is entirely your fault.

Dear Caddie is CCC's advice column for the questions you'd never ask out loud: about etiquette, enemies and everything in between. He’s looped countless rounds with every personality type known to man - and now his wisdom is at your disposal.

Have a question for Dear Caddie? Click here to submit.

Dear Caddie,

I did something shameful. On the 15th hole of my club’s championship, I took a mulligan… and didn’t write it down. It was a small thing. No one saw. The ball had trickled out of bounds by an inch. I just… dropped another, hit it flush, and told myself I deserved a break.

I ended up winning the tournament by one stroke. Everyone clapped. My name’s still up on the board. But every time I walk past it, I swear the “1” in my score winks at me. I can’t sleep. I can’t enjoy golf. Even my range balls are judging me. What should I do?

Regretfully,

- Haunted by a Mulligan

Dear Haunted by a Mulligan,

First, let me be clear: you didn't take a mulligan. A mulligan is what you take on the first tee when your buddies are watching and nobody's keeping score. What you took was a phantom drop on the 15th hole of your club championship, which makes you less "guy who caught a break" and more "guy who should be featured in a future issue of this newsletter."

But I'm not here to bury you. You're already doing that yourself.

The fact that a scoreboard is haunting you like a neon sign outside a cheap motel tells me everything I need to know. You're not a cheater by nature. You're a cheater by circumstance - which is somehow worse, because it means you know exactly what you did, and you did it anyway.

Here's the thing about golf: it's the only sport where the honor system is the sport. There's no ref. No replay. No VAR review. Just you, the card, and whatever you can live with. And right now, you can't live with it. That "1" isn't winking at you - it's staring.

So you've got two roads. The first is confession. Walk into the pro shop. Tell the golf chair. Hand the trophy back. Will it be humiliating? Absolutely. Will people talk? For years. But you'll sleep again, and when you walk past that board, it won't owe you anything.

The second road is silence. Keep the trophy. Let the guilt fade - and it will fade, eventually, the way all guilt does when you feed it enough range sessions and top-shelf bourbon. But know this: you'll spend the rest of your golf life wondering if you're the kind of player who earned it or the kind who just got away with it. And every close putt, every tight ruling, every card you sign - it'll all carry a little asterisk that only you can see.

My advice? Door number one. Not because you owe the club. Not because the rules demand it. Because the version of you that doesn't confess is going to be unbearable at cocktail hour, and frankly, nobody wants that guy in the Men's Grill.

Return the title. Take your medicine. And next year, win it clean.

If you were Freddy, when would you have figured out that you were actually texting Lawrence?

🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️ Right away - if I am at war I'm always on high-alert
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 When Lawrence-as-Janet said: Don't send me any "Brett Favre texts"
🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️ After the first rebuttal - Janet always does what I ask
🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ When Lawrence didn't show up to "watch"

Luckily “When Lawrence didn’t show up to ‘watch’” finished last, but we have questions for those of you who cast that vote! The ‘Brett Favre texts’ reference would definitely be a dead giveaway for us too. Thanks to everyone who voted!

Don’t forget to catch up on past stories at ccconfidential.vip - and while you’re at it, tell a friend!

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