Watching the pros at Augusta this week really makes you sit back and think; it’s a crazy game we play. It is amazing that, throughout this elite field of golf professionals playing the Masters tournament, we’re seeing them suffer on-course catastrophes with which we, as amateurs, are so very familiar. Miss a shot in a game of hoops and you’ve lost a few points; one miss-hit in a golf match and you may have easily lost the farm. It is a truly a game of inches. It makes you wonder: how do we possibly expect to compete on any level, with any reasonable competency, at all?
As an amateur golfer, it is still possible to play on an extremely competitive level; many of us do, whether that competition is structured or merely one on one against ourselves or with friends or local leagues. When I first took up the game, someone told me the best way to improve was to set goals. In the early years, I did just that. I didn’t know then what I know now. It seemed so simple then. I didn’t know that the game would get harder, the better I became. Rather oxymoronic, but true. Like riding a bike, I’d say. Not at all, they’d reply. If you don’t keep oiling that swing and play often enough, your golf game totally disappears, completely evaporates; yikes, how true that is, at least for most of us.
Then again, there are always the absolute naturals. In my neck of the woods there are those few players who can put away the sticks for months then pick them up again in the spring and hit it as pure and sweet as if they played every day, all day long. They are iconic. So much more real to us than the professional golfers, we see them up close, we play along with them and yet we are in awe of their abilities. They are steady and strong and proficient far beyond our own, some-what-average capabilities. It is all so relative.
The everyday amateur golfer watches the tour professionals break par, week after week. They craft shots we can only imagine. Their swings, though not always textbook, are reliable and sure. Leader boards flash red numbers, numbers the majority of us will never see trailing our own names, ever. But this weekend, we are reminded, they are playing the same game we play, after all.
There is no joy, no satisfaction, in watching them falter; just the simple realization that they are merely human. Oh, how we feel their pain, for every one of us have suffered a similar fate. Who among us has not attempted a punch shot from the woods only to hear ball hit bark, the sound so sharp it is like a gunshot to the chest? Hasn’t each of us held our breath as we watch our golf shot spin onto a sloped and treacherous green, only to watch it slide back down to some watery hazard, and our heart sink lower than low? A three putt from three feet, how is that possible? And although I’ve come to expect a fourteen stroke swing in my scores from round to round, I can only imagine how it feels to shoot 69 one day and to return the next and shoot 83. Do those fourteen strokes feel like forty? Apparently, anything can, and does, happen; even to the best.
We may not have crashed and burned at Amen Corner but we’ve all had our moments, our personal train wrecks on the golf course. Thankfully, as amateurs, our fortunes do not rise and fall with our golf game. Our errors and miss-hits are not memorialized on film for everlasting critique and review on Sports Roundup. We can play it out, we can leave it behind, if only after a few would-a, could-a, should-as. For us, there is no Q-school to endure, no money list, no pressure; our handicap may go up, it may go down; we have no certainties in our game but this; that as sure as the azaleas will bloom again next year at Augusta, we’ll always come back, to a golf course sometime, somewhere, to play again.
