Golf Fore the Good

Golfers in the North East find winter to be a quiet time; not the best for golf, but a time to reflect on your past season, work on your mental game and spend time with friends. Many courses are closed up tight, their tee boxes vacant until spring. Those that remain open are often windswept and bleak. Their fairways remain green but somehow look wild and untamed, as if awaiting even a brief moment of sunshine and warmth to tempt some hardy souls up on the tee.

Golfers being golfers, you’re still likely to find at least a few would-be players inside a course clubhouse on any given day. The game remains a part of us, despite the weather. The camaraderie doesn’t end because the weather keeps us off the course.

One gray and frigid afternoon I popped into the golf course concession for a cup of soup and some conversation. I found my friend poking through old photo albums of club events. What made me think this way, I’m not sure, but I thought, uh-oh, how many friends within those photographs have already died and left us?

I picked up one of the photo books and began to thumb through it. There, on the very first page of the very first album I spied the image of a friend who had passed not long ago. Before I’d turned a dozen pages, I count five or more such faces. The photos were a stark reminder of how many members and friends we have lost, in the span of just a dozen years.

No doubt the pictures were a reminder of our losses. Perhaps unjustly taken from us, few of those we’d lost had been old and gray. Many left us prematurely, long before their laughter should have died.

Turning page after page, even tinged with sadness, I couldn’t help but smile. Those pictures told the story of our friendships. How often we’d laughed and cried together, as golfers and as friends. Oh, how we have laughed!

Looking through the old photographs, the faces depicted there were filled with smiles, preserving the evidence of amity for years to come. How aptly the ladies’ league had titled their end of season member guest tournament; “Remember the good times.” I saw how young some of us had looked back then; and thought how so many of our lives had changed in varied ways; and how you need to seize the moment, however trite it sounds.

For every true golfer, most every round of golf is too short. Each shot is not perfect, our score not always what we hope for. Still we golf; for fun, companionship and simply the joy of playing the game.

Life and golf; neither one is ever easy. Sometimes we suffer unexplained losses, but if we’d never played the game, we would never really know what we had lost.

In loving memory of Leslie Cullity

We’ll miss your laughter and your love