I love golf yet golf does not love me back and that, in a nutshell, is what I really love about golf. Golf is the eternal struggle to grab hold of something that, at it’s core, is essentially unattainable. Even the best to have ever done it who make millions of dollars annually playing this game will sometimes stare at a shot they just hit and say to themselves.. what the hell just happened? Two time Masters Champion Ben Crenshaw once famously said :” I’m about 5 inches from being an outstanding golfer. That’s the distance my left ear is from my right”. Golf is also ridiculously counter intuitive: to get the ball in the air, you must hit down on it. More often than not the harder you swing the worse the results get. To hit the ball a long way you have swing easy. How is it possible that you can stand on the range and hit shot after shot exactly like you wanted to..and then in the short track from the practice area to the first tee you can forget everything that just happened. It makes no damn sense. A friend of mine once said the golf swing is the most complicated and basically impossible to duplicate act anyone can attempt in sports. Think about it. The golf ball, does not move. It stands there waiting for you to hit it. It only goes where you make it go. It’s not a baseball coming at you at times over 100 miles an hour, it’s not a football that’s thrown that you need to find a way to catch, it’s not a tennis ball that has been somewhere and you have to run it down . The damn thing is just lying there in the grass basically saying to you…don’t screw it up sparky. It’s almost laughing at you, daring you to actually give it a swing.
So why do so many of us love this game? Well…for all of those reasons. The legendary Green Bay Packers Head Coach Vince Lombardi once said to his football team “Gentlemen, we will chase perfection, and we will chase it relentlessly, knowing all the while we can never attain it. But along the way, we shall catch excellence.” I wonder if he knew at the time he had just described the game of golf as well as football. That’s what golf is.. trying catch something that you can never actually control. How many of us have played 3 or 4 holes perfectly and said: “ Okay I got this now” only to see our next tee shot go ten yards or slice miraculously into a pond on another hole? Golf, without getting completely obnoxious or highly sanctimonious about the sport, is the eternal struggle. There will be good shots, there will be bad shots and a bleep ton of mediocrity in between them. How will you handle it? Will you be overly full of yourself when it’s going well and an absolute disaster of a human when it’s going poorly? Golf is about finding your level, understanding that game is a mirror of life and how you deal with all it’s ups and downs will tell you everything you need to know.
Golf is also about the experience, the hang, the conversation with friends out on a beautiful day at fabulous course. For 9 years Herm Edwards and i worked together at ESPN before he decided to return to coaching where he’s absolutely killing it at Arizona State. We played a ton of golf together at some of the greatest courses in the world. He traveled to ESPN from his home in California almost every week. He called me his “road dog” whenever he was away. I can’t remember where we were playing when he said this for the first time.. but it’s stuck with me ever since. Herm looked up at me with a smile on his face and just said “ roadie, somebody had to be us today, might as well be us”. I love that. That is golf.. a lesson on how to try and attain the unattainable, a road map for how we live our lives every day and how we should try and enjoy the good times because the bad times are inevitable. Physical skills are nice, but mental ones are more important. Can you put a bad shot behind you and move on to make the next good one? Because if you just hang in there long enough you’ll find your way out of almost any bad patch you’ve put yourself in. Golf can make you insanely happy and insanely angry.. all in a span of about 5 minutes at times. I played like crap today.. but on the last three holes I couldn’t miss. I hit towering drives, epic approaches and a sand save on 18 that I actually told my partner I was going to make. As for the 1st 15 holes when I sucked? Forgot all about em. I got this figured out now and can’t wait to get back out there when golf will once again remind me.. you haven’t figured out anything.
