I am interested in the usage of “care to infinitive verb” in the following sentence in Jeffery Archer’s fiction, “Kane & Abel”:
“By the time they reached the eighteenth, Alan was eight holes down, and was about to complete the worst round he cared to remember. He had a five-foot putt that would at least enable him to halve the final hole.”
Oxford Dictionary and another dictionary at hand define “care for/to do something” as “like or be willing to do or have something.”
It sounds somewhat logically uncomfortable to me. We want to erace unpleasant memory by human nature. If it is the worst round (or thing), don’t we hate to remember instead of ‘care (willing) to remember,’ and in Alan’s case, “Alan was about to complete the worst round he’d never care to remember?
Or, is this just the same logic with the expression, “It’s the last thing I hope,” meaning 'I never hope it.'