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More than any other human activity we can name, golf reflects life - what we learn, how we proceed, the goals we entertain, the skills we have, and the attitudes we carry. KeyGolf looks at one illustration of how individual resources have been affected, before and after, by the love affair most golfers have with The Game.
Unless luck intervened during school years, teachers "got on our case" a lot about studying. Instead of bringing "our noses to the grindstone," however, that urging left a strong impression that no one studied enough. It shaped a perception that, collectively, students were imperfect and formed a self-image to go with it. That deposited a standard of mediocrity that only a brave few dared to violate by making excellent grades. Easier to bow to the need to stay in good grace with a majority of classmates than to look good to teachers. Only a few wound up as "good" as teachers urged.
Clearly, our teachers didn't know that we were going to grow up to be golfers - that special species that studies everything. Physics, aerodynamics, agronomy, botany, psychology, philosophy, mythology, physiology, anatomy, sociology, desert and jungle warfare, hydrology, weather, health, geography, topography, travel, transportation, politics, economics, diplomacy, communication, language and religion. Those may not have got enough of our curiosity then, but they absorb a lot of every golfer`s attention now, whether we see it and learn or just piddle around the edges.
Our teachers need not have worried so much. They just didn't know about the mania that would command so much of our energy as "aging" golfers, ever searching for the perfect game. Had they known about the all-consuming passion to come, they could have built an entire curriculum around that heart beat!
Whether intentionally, unwittingly, or by the quirks of necessity, as golfers, we call on every one of those references regularly, some more often than others, at our best or worst, in the hope that we'll "get it all together."
Physics, for instance, holds the key to understanding and generating centrifugal force in the club head. Without aerodynamic consideration, we wouldn't stand a chance of understanding ball flight or hitting those draws and fades. Managing a variety of lies requires help from agronomy. Getting out of a jungle involves botanical awareness, if only in recognizing when to take a drop.
The need for proper attitude and emotion for the game brings us in close touch with psychology. Philosophy is the slave of 19th hole analysis and tomorrow's predictions. Sociology contributes to picking the "right" partners and relying on regular foursomes. Physiology has been consulted for bad backs, easing anxiety and keeping the swing together.
Anatomy informs our ability to determine a standard for the size and shape it takes to excel at the game. Mythology loads the perception of how we should play, flavors reports of playing ability and occasionally reflects in score keeping activities.
What wasn't known about desert and jungle warfare has been picked up in sand traps and sawgrass. Living in Florida, or around any one of today's ecological wonder courses makes it hard to survive without hydrology to assess the hazardous reaches of lakes, streams, rivers and oceans, not to mention the recognition and declaration of casual water.
Regular attention to the weather channel is at least as vital to golfers as remembering to pack a wallet. Few would dare play this game without regard for impending winds, rain, snow, heat, cold and lightning, even though any kind of light is enough to keep golfers on the course.
We've got geography for tee position, shot-planning and calculating yardages. Topography comes in handy for recognizing a fairway when we see one and reading our putts. We negotiate our wagers, based on the economy at hand, politicize our presses, religiously accepting any donation that happens to come in our direction.
Travel and transportation are essential to the game. You first have to find your way to the course, transfer your gear to another form of transport, and then find your way around the track (a little map-reading ability never hurt anybody), without having the wheels come off.
If your car breaks down, nobody cares, but let a golfcart break! A bad battery on the golf course is more embarrassing than running out of gas on the interstate. We take care of those golfcarts and keep them in shape. We can find and maneuver any course in the land, whether it's on the map or not, and most of us would like to have the chance to do that!
Linguistics and communication are essential. After all we must instruct, berate, reprimand and cajole ourselves, our partners and opponents. Does anybody play a round without admonishing the ball? Without good communication skills, we'd never get a tee time. Only an advanced linguist knows how to properly address an errant shot, more often than not in the universal language of "french." Without a taste of law, we wouldn't know what to do with a lateral hazard or the habitat of a burrowing animal.
And, of course, we must not overlook the religious fervor that swells in the hearts of players as they regularly visit that great cathedral of the out-of-doors, with its long and narrow aisle-ways and it's 18 stations of the course. From the first genuflect to tee it up, to the last green, when we finally bow to our last putt, we play with heartfelt devotion (laced with occasional frustration) and bouyant hope that would leave St. Francis in second place. We play like there's no tomorrow, but count on there being one, anyway.
Our teachers worried about our KNOWING. Thanks to golf, we have acquired KNOW HOW. The problem is that almost no one paid attention to putting those two together. With only a few exceptions, most of us had little, if any, chance to learn how to use whatever information we did get. Little thought was given to learning how to learn or how to convert information into positive, successful action.
That's often left us bewildered, in life, in golf, in business, in almost any arena you can name. We've been conditioned to keep our knowledge and skill separate from each other. What we know may not feed our action and what we do may not reflect our knowledge. We spend incredible amounts of energy in aimless wandering through the catalogues and "windmills" of our minds. We really don't know what applies to what, how things fit together, what works consistently, what creates self-inflicted wounds, what we need to keep and what we can afford to give up. That "stuff" just sits there, feeding itself, not doing much of anything except bumping around in our heads and cluttering our minds.
That's when and where the hacking starts - in the head. It's honest hacking, though. We've been conditioned. We notice it more in golf than in other things. The solitary nature of this game makes it harder to shift the blame. We're caught holding the club every time. It gets harder, from shot to shot, to find enough "distractions" to blame for bad swings.
It all starts with excessive thinking in an unmanaged way. Hacking in the head produces hacking in the hands. We need accurate knowledge and effective thinking at the proper time. Otherwise, we are vulnerable to shooting ourselves in the foot, not necessarily from bad thoughts, but because the good thoughts are implemented at the wrong times.
Golf has it all. It meets you coming and going. It's an unparalled teacher, while, at the same time requiring the best of all integrated knowledge and skill for success and satisfaction.
Maybe that's why it's addictive and a lot like life.
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Updated 07-23-04