On the Golf Course

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.