Golf Fore the Good

With localized thunderstorms keeping me away from the golf course, I spent a good portion of the weekend watching the Olympic trials for the US gymnastics teams on TV. I guess you’d call those kids professional amateurs. Now, what they were doing creates some pressure; playing a casual round of golf with your friends… not so much. Whether we score a prefect round or not, it just doesn’t make much never mind. Not a one of the amateur golfers I know will be going to the Olympics.

Mid-handicappers often tend to forget we play the game for fun. Those niners, well, surely they must grow frustrated with not reaching a hundred and ten yard par three in regulation, but you rarely hear them complaining about their game. It is what it is. Super-low handicappers might get a little aggravated when they blow up and perhaps, let’s say, double a hole, but most of them get it back on track quickly; which is exactly why they are as good as they are. They leave the bad stuff behind.

We mid-handicappers, though, we have issues, most of which are all in our heads. We can’t seem to forego the bad stuff. Not only do we not leave it behind, we pack our bags –and our minds - full of it and carry it around with us. It can get to be one heck of a load.

One shot at a time. How often have we been told, that is the way to play golf? Math wizard or not, most of us know how we stand in relation to par as we navigate our way through eighteen holes. More often than not, when a mid-handicapper realizes they’re on their way to shooting a personal best that is the very moment their score goes to hell in a hand basket.

I have a friend who keeps her score in her head in such a way that she not only knows precisely where she stands for a current score but also exactly what her score will be if she completes the round as she hopes or expects. She can’t help it, she says – it’s a math thing. What she –and I, too, so often guilty of the same offense – need to realize is that there are no crystal balls on the golf course, other than whatever sleeves of Volvik Crystal golf balls are being batted about. We can’t know what we’re going to shoot. We shouldn’t surmise. No good can come from looking ahead, aside from the immediate target at hand.

This same aforementioned friend just shot her best round in years the other day. My first response was to be totally delighted for her. My second was to ask, what was it that she did differently? “The math, “ she said. “I didn’t do the math.”

I had a pretty good round myself the other day. I wasn’t keeping the card for the match, and though I knew what I was shooting, I was trying very hard not to think about it. There was a ball park number lurking in my head but we made the turn without any confirmation of scores. I’d had a birdie and a double which helps to muddle the stats – as long as you move along, one shot at a time, advancing the ball, enjoying the game. I was happy not knowing, and if I was plus or minus one or two strokes from where I thought I was, all the better. I had nothing to lose if I didn’t know where I stood.

Down the home stretch, I was still blissfully unaware of my score, at least to some degree, though I knew within a stroke or two. I played the last three holes much better than I usually do when I get way ahead of myself and start doing the math; that one shot at a time thing seemed to be working for me.

As a child, I loved math. As a designer, an engineer of sorts, I used it often. It is logical; it makes sense; it makes things work. As a matter of fact, on the golf course, math can be of positive value. Distance; wind speed; carry; even the stimpmeter with its angles and degrees; math is a part of the game.

Birdie, bogie or triple; what one needs to comprehend are not the numbers themselves, but only one singular stroke at a time. Whatever follows may have nothing to do with what came before, for the game is nothing but the sum of its parts - one shot at a time.