The word golf seems to draw very different human reactions. People who play it can’t get enough of it. They talk about it. They can go into very specific, and some would say annoying, details on golf courses, certain holes, the slope of the green, what clubs they used and on and on. They watch it on TV, and aspire to hit the ball 340 yards, right down the middle, like Rory McIlroy or Dustin Johnson. And, of course, there is no better way to spend 4 or 5 hours.
People who don’t play, can’t even grasp the concept. Grown men and women wasting time and money hitting a ball around acres and acres trying to accomplish something the overwhelming majority will never do, shoot par. If they catch you watching it on TV, they will say go watch this somewhere else. I want to watch…just fill in the blank…anything else. The dramatic finishes at Chambers Bay and the British Open don’t seem to mean anything to them, if you can believe it.
You have probably figured out that I am a golfer. I admit I’m hooked. There are many pluses. You’re out in the fresh air. You are getting exercise. Well, you do walk from the cart to the ball. Hit the ball, and walk back to the cart. But, you can walk the 18 holes, just like they do on TV. It can be used to better your business, raise money for a good cause, and it’s a social game. You can go play with friends, or you can go by yourself and hook up with complete strangers. I found this a little intimidating at first.. But, I’ve done it many times. Met dozens of people. I can’t really remember anyone being a jerk. Everyone welcomes you into their group. And if you play terribly, you can hope you never see them again.
Some people have trouble even admitting it’s a sport. I feel the same way about race car driving. I know the old argument about middle aged men, in bad pants, but those days are long over. Tiger Woods changed everything. This new generation of young golfers..McIlroy, Speith, the Johnsons, Bubba, and hundreds more are highly trained, highly conditioned athletes. You don’t hit a ball over 300 yards, fade it, draw it without trememdous strength, and the hand-eye coordination of a surgeon.
There is much more than just hitting it straight and far. The fairway shots, the chipping, the putting. Hitting the ball from 200 yards away and landing it within feet, or even inches of the hole. Millions have tried. Few succeed, unless you just get lucky once a season.
Some would argue other sports take so much more skill. In baseball, you have to hit a round ball with a round bat that’s coming at you at 95 miles an hour. You have catch a ball that’s coming at you even faster, or run it down in the gap, time your dive and hold onto it has you bounce off the ground.
In football, in addition to blocking and tackling, and eluding tacklers, quarterbacks have to able to throw the ball 60 or 70 yards in the air and drop it into the outstretched hands of receiver running at full speed. The receiver has no easy job either. Remember, there is usually a guy running after him trying to break up the play, intercept the ball, or crush the receiver if he catches it.
In basketball, there’s a big round ball, and a little hoop ten feet off the ground. Players running full speed, stopping, and hitting from 30 feet, or jumping two or three feet off the ground and dunking over someone six and half to seven feet tall who wants to knock it ten rows into the stands,
In hockey, well it’s men on ice skates, with sticks, flying around, passing around a donut sized puck. Not only can they score from just about anywhere on the ice, they can put the puck on a teammate’s stick who is flying down the ice like a racehorse.
What do all these other sports have in common? The ball or the puck is always moving as you try to hit it, or catch it, or steal it from an opponent. Again, tremendous hand eye coordination. In golf, the ball just sits there. There in lies the problem.
In golf, you play the course and the ball. Oh, you may play against your friends to see who finishes with the better score. But to do that, you have to master the little white ball. It sits there on a tee, or on the nice short grass of the fairway, or the thick weeds of the rough, or the lovely white sand of the bunkers, and the glass like greens. It’s you and the ball. It sits there looking up at you. It dares you to hit it. You have to check the lie, the distance, what club you’re going to use, where’s the water, what about the trees, and, of course, the bunkers or sand traps. By the way, is there anymore negative terms in sports than bunker or sand trap. Bunkers conjure up images of the battlefield, and sand trap sounds like something that could take your foot off.
So, you say, what’s the problem? The ball is sitting there, not moving. You have a club in your hands. You are in complete control. You have selected the right club. Checked the distance. Checked all those obstacles we just talked about. You take the right stance. Just like the one in the golf video who’ve watched dozens of times. Then, the most unpredictable split second in sports. The time between the start of your swing and the impact on the ball. You can tell by the sound, even before you see the flight or roll of the ball. It’s the purest sound in the golfers’ world, if you hit it right. It you mis-hit it by that tiny fraction of an inch, it sounds like the waiter dropping your dinner plate on the restaurant’s tile floor.
Either way, it’s on to the next shot. Because the little white ball is waiting for you.
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