Have you ever heard a person tell you “I played really great today, didn’t leave a single shot out there”? Of course not. It just doesn’t happen, either the result or the description. But give a golfer half a chance - via a direct question, or perhaps a lull in the conversation - and they’ll tell you what is wrong with their game in greater detail than you could possibly ever need or want, and if you weren’t a golfer yourself, you’d question why they bother playing at all if this is their experience.
Some people will interpret the question “How’d you play?” as a request for a literal blow by blow account of both their misfortune, and the extraordinary and persistently undeserved good luck of their playing partner, and by the time their colourful narrative reached has the second fairway, or rather the bunker fifteen yards right of it - where a sudden vicious gust of wind blew their ball - you will quietly hope for their phone to ring, or for the practice fire evacuation to finally, unexpectedly take place. Or perhaps, if they are really drilling down into the detail, you might glance up and wonder if a sudden, violent lightning storm might kindly intervene. At this rate, you’ll be late for your own tee-time / teatime, so any interruption to their flow would be a miracle, as far as you are concerned.
But, just like the eager expectancy you had for your own last game before normal service resumed - usually around the third green - any hope of being spared the full edition of the poor golfer’s tale of woe is extinguished as he walks you through eighteen holes of hardship and misery, his face twisted as he relives the recent trauma with no stone — or loose impediment - left unturned. You reach the final green of this narrative clinging on to your own will to live by the finest of threads, but then something happens, a sudden shift in the tone of your narrator.
In amongst so many unlucky or awful strokes, and after a litany of errors both mental and physical, the golfer got up and down at the last - from a truly dreadful lie, of course, if we are to believe his account - or perhaps holed a long putt, their forty-third of the day, and as they deliver this punchline to a story that took almost as long to relay as to actually play, that familiar, hopeful smile that belongs not to him alone, or to you for that matter, but to all golfers, starts to spread across his face.
It is as if, amidst all the agony of this infuriating game, there exists some sort of timeshare arrangement, whereby every player gets to have an occasional glimpse of what golf - or life - could be like, and despite the fact that this glimpse is no more than a tantalising moment, it is enough.
For in updating you on his journey, he has not only lessened the trauma of today’s bewilderingly poor effort - a problem shared, etc. - but he has got to the bit where the game gave him his scant reward for showing up - a tiny consolation prize, a wooden spoon if you like - the one shot that will mean he now cannot wait until Tuesday, when he can roll-up again, and do it all over.
Because in between all those putts, the bout of the dreaded shanks on ten and eleven, the fats, thins, slices, duffs, snap-hooks, bad bounces, lost balls, wrong balls, and everything else, he has finished with a shot that he will remember above all the rest - the tiny dose of magic that the game will drip-feed every player when they are at their lowest ebb.
And, like the fool he is, he will remember those rare glorious strokes above all of the compelling evidence which proves that these are no more than sheer flukes, the law of averages kicking in at long last. For golf has got its teeth into him, and suffer as he might, he’d not have it any other way. And although the moment you asked him “How’d you play?” you instantly regretted doing so, when that eventual smile broke across his face at the memory of the one redeeming feature of a three hour torture session, you know exactly how he felt, and that sense of empathy for a fellow golf addict returned.
But playing golf badly is so much better than not playing golf, which is why we’ll see each other back at the Club in a few days. Until then…
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Can’t wait to read the book Richard. Your understanding of the inner plights and deep thoughts of the golfer, Greenkeeper, Club Secretary and more is simply uncanny
The one shot that brings you back… possibly the most powerful and mysterious force in the game