Golf is funny about its rules and what’s allowable and what isn’t. Doesn’t really matter if it is match play, stroke play or a team competition. You can’t kneel on a towel on wet ground to hit a ball or you’ll be “improving your lie.” If blade of grass flies through the air on your backswing while hitting out of a hazard, you’ll get rung up for some kind of golf felony.

And then there are the rules for a scramble.

Don’t bother looking them up, because there aren’t any. It’s like the famed South Louisiana card game bouree; you play however you want and you better just hope a melee doesn’t breakout at some point during the proceedings.

Earlier this week, I was afforded the opportunity to play in the legendary FCA four-man scramble. It’s been around awhile; Moses was on the winning team that first year.

In the FCA Tournament, the bending of the rules seems to be a little less rampant than in other Monday four-man scrambles (often referred to “Disease Of The Week” Tournaments). I mean, who wants to run the risk of a plague of locusts by moving your ball a scoreboard length instead of a scorecard length to conveniently avoid that gigantic oak between your team and the green?

But in non-religion-based tournaments, there are a couple of time-honored axioms, most notably “If you aren’t cheating, you’re cheating yourself” and “if you aren’t cheating, you aren’t trying.”

Now, don’t get too caught up on the word “cheating,” because it is a sliding scale. More like fudging. No one is hitting off a bed or rocks or off a tree root like you would in a regular event. Nobody is re-creating a lie in a hazard after a teammate has already hit. It’s pretty much understood that you just try to stay somewhere within a par-5 of the Rules Of Golf and assume (perhaps incorrectly) that everybody else will too.

Don’t get me started about the role mulligans play during a scramble. If there were mulligan police at a scramble, we’d be building more jails every week.

And rest assured that no matter how well you play, there is one scramble rule that will always apply — you’ll get pencil whipped at the clubhouse. Which is exactly what happened us. Never missed a fairway, never missed a green and made almost every we looked at. Shot about 10 strokes better than we should have … and lost a scorecard playoff for first.

To a foursome from a church. At the FCA Tournament, somehow that figures.