Golf is a great game. Easy on your nerves, the ball goes where you want it to, and you have a pleasant time just smiling and hitting. The foregoing is true if you happen to be a character in a fantasy story. Unfortunately, I am not. Probably even if I were, I would still be a lousy golfer. Despite any trials and tribulations involved, lots of people, for some reason, go out and play a round or two as much as they can. Most of them have great confidence that sooner or later they will have a perfect round – or at least get a hole-in-one or even an eagle. Some even aspire to an albatross, but that is most likely excessive. I will not even mention the extremely rare “Condor”, which is 4-under-par on a hole.
Basically that is a hole-in-one on a par five, which believe it or not has happened at least four times in recorded golf.
As to my golf game, I seldom think about a hole-in-one or an eagle. An eagle or an albatross would only happen if a fox picked up my ball and ran to the green and dropped it into the cup. Even then my so-called friends would probably claim that it did not count. Naturally, I have a defense for my lousy golf, which is that I never really played until The Blonde in the house and I moved to The Villages. Even then for the first thirteen years or so, I played only executive golf once a week. The rest of the time I was playing softball. I did find that my softball swing transferred easily to my golf swing. Unfortunately, I discovered fairly quickly that that was not a good thing.
Since playing golf, I have always believed that my lousy golf game was due 100 percent to my own efforts (miserable as they were). None of problems could be traced to the clubs, the balls, the course or anything else in the way. Now I believe it is only 85 percent my fault. My oldest son set me up with a group who fits clubs to your swing. He sent me to be fitted for irons, which I could never hit correctly – except by accident. Darned if they did not make irons with an appropriate head, shaft and grips which they put together. I find that I now have a reasonable chance of hitting irons in the way they are supposed to be hit. The other stupid irons I have been playing with were actually responsible for some of my lousy golf! I now feel 15 percent better on the course.
That does not mean that I will hit my age on a course or worry some of my playing partners that I might match their scores. After all, I am still 85 percent lousy. Part of my problem I blame on Hugh Rotherham, who as you most likely know was the Secretary of the Coventry Golf Club in England back in 1890. He standardized the number of shots that a good golfer should take on each hole. If it weren’t for him, I would not know how lousy a golfer I am.
In golf it is always good to have someone or something to blame!
Barry Evans writes about Life in The Villages every week in Villages-News.com.
