For
most of my life, I’ve been a sports fan. I’ve spent hundreds if
not thousands of hours watching football and basketball games, and
occasionally I’ll even catch a few innings of baseball, but I just
can’t watch golf on TV. It’s just too weird listening to
announcers speak in whispered tones.
Unfortunately,
I’ve never had any golf lessons, and the three or four
times I’ve been on a course have been a disaster. The other day
Bob, my fanatical golf friend, invited me to join him for eighteen
holes. Why do I say he’s a fanatic? On his wedding day, he brought
his golf clubs to the church. When he was questioned by his
wife-to-be, he replied: “Certainly the wedding won’t take all
day!” Twenty years later she asked Bob if he remembered the day
they were married. “Of course I do,” he replied. “That’s
the time I had two birdies and an eagle.”
Anyway,
after getting to the first hole Bob spent about three minutes giving
me instructions. After arranging my stance he told me to address the
ball. “Hello, ball!” I exclaimed. Bob was not amused, but the
two ladies waiting behind us thought I was hilarious. If they
thought that was funny, they should have watched me go on to kill
earthworms, tear up huge clumps of soil, and knock bark off trees.
So
after I got into the proper stance and took a few practice swings, I
yelled “eight” and proceeded to hit a booming forty-foot drive
into a thicket to the right of the fairway.
“What
are you doing?” Bob screamed. “Why are you yelling ‘eight?’
If you have to yell something, say ‘fore!’”
Looking
back at him with a straight face, I replied: “There’s no way I’m
going to do this hole in four strokes. Even eight is overly
optimistic.”
Golf
is not an easy game. Sometimes even great athletes struggle. For
example, Hank Aaron, one of the all-time baseball greats, said the
following: “It took me seventeen years to get three thousand hits
in baseball. I did it in one afternoon on the golf course.”
That’s nothing, Henry; I must have had three thousand hits on the
first hole to go along with several swings and misses.
There
seems to be an unwritten law of golf that a slow group will be in
front of you while a fast group will be right behind you, urging you
to speed up your game, which, of course, is impossible with the slow pokes in front. This situation puts a lot of pressure on a
duffer like me.
The
great Yankee player Yogi Berra supposedly once said that one cannot
think and hit a baseball at the same time. That goes for golf, too.
I did much better by just placing the ball on the tee, getting into
my stance, and blasting away. Most of my “worm-burners” and
slices came about when I put too much thought into what I was trying
to accomplish.
After
completing the fifth hole I asked Bob what might be wrong with my
game. “You ‘re standing too close to the ball after you’ve hit
it,” he solemnly replied. I asked him how he gets so much backspin
on his shots. “Your tee shots are only going about fifty-five
yards,” he replied. “Why would you want to have any backspin?”
Good point.
Bob
is a decent golfer, but occasionally he cheats, and as they say, a
golfer who swears that he never cheats is also a liar. He’s what
you might call a scratch golfer; he writes down all his good scores
and scratches off the bad ones. Of course, I’m one of the few
players who needs a calculator to keep score.
An
important rule of golf was learned that day: no matter how badly you
are playing, you can and will get worse. The closest thing I came to
a birdie was on hole eleven when my shot banged off a gigantic pine
tree, startling a poor woodpecker that was searching for bugs. At
least I didn’t come close to getting an eagle; they’re
endangered, you know.
You
don’t think Bob is a golf nut? By the time we reached the twelfth
hole a heavy rain was falling. He proceeded to make fun of the
“idiots” he spotted fishing in a nearby river. On the other
hand, as far as Bob is concerned, it’s never too wet to play golf
until the cart capsizes.
Am
I really a terrible golfer? Let me put it this way: I’ve had a
good day if I don’t fall out of the cart. Unfortunately, I didn’t
get a hole-in-one, or even a hole-in-four, for that matter. On the
thirteenth, however, which was one of my better holes, I sank a
two-foot putt for a hole-in-eleven!
Remember,
golf spelled backward is “flog,” and that aptly describes what
I did to the golf balls all day on that course. Mark
Twain
had it right: “Golf is a good walk spoiled.”
In
the future, I’ll stick with bowling. Although my scores in both
sports are similar, I only lose one or two bowling balls per game.