The game of golf mirrors the game of life in unmistakable ways. Try as we may, life can't be scripted and neither can golf.
Here's how Bobby Jones, the iconic American golfer and Masters co-founder, compared golf to life in general: "Golf is the closest game to the game we call life. You get bad breaks from good shots; you get good breaks from bad shots -- but you have to play the ball where it lies. The breaks will even themselves up in the long run, if the run is long enough."
Those who play golf take issue with non-golfers who say the sport seems like a waste of time. It's not. And golfers disagree with Mark Twain's observation that "golf is a good walk spoiled." If one sticks with golf long enough, he or she eventually figures out there's much more to the game than just trying to advance a little white ball around a course.
In large measure, how you do anything is how you do everything, so you can learn a lot about yourself playing golf because it's a game you mostly play against yourself. The way you react to things on the golf course exposes how you react to other things in life.
A close friend told me that years ago he would sometimes throw his golf club after he hit a bad shot. Then one day he was playing with three strangers who would simply stare at him in silent contempt when he would launch one of his clubs into the air. On the drive home, he asked himself why he would humiliate himself that way and the only answer was that he wanted to renounce any responsibility for making a bad shot and wanted those three strangers to understand he was a much better golfer than the way he was playing that day. So my friend committed to never throwing another club. It wasn't long before he was a much better golfer. He'd learned that rage after a bad shot was costing him a lot more than simply trying to recover with the next shot and found that lesson carried over for him off the golf course, too.
Golf is a challenging and humbling game, just as life can be at times. Nobody can hit your shot for you. The player, alone, is entirely responsible for the outcome and must take ownership of the result. If a poor swing or rotten luck leaves your ball in a difficult spot, you simply have to deal with it. In this way golf replicates life because all of us have to confront failures and bad breaks or find a way to dig ourselves out of a hole in which we, and no one else, put ourselves.
Noted sports psychologist Dr. Bob Rotella puts it this way: "Golf is about how well you accept, respond to and score with your misses much more so than it is a game of your perfect shots." Golf is not how. It's how many.
A game of golf will test you mentally and emotionally. Bobby Jones said it best: "Golf is a game that is played on a five-inch course; the distance between your ears." The player must be able to endure adversity and always remember the most important shot in golf is the next one.
If you let it, golf teaches patience, perseverance and resiliency. Moreover, the game teaches civility, honesty and fair play, virtues which are to be valued but often seem absent now in our nation's public discourse. If you've grown weary of hateful speech and unbridled anger, one can find solace on the golf course, a place where there's no television or radio nor sufficient time to peruse the internet.
Here's a closing thought. In the game of golf, hitting shots too far to the left or too far to the right usually leaves the player in trouble, facing a very difficult next shot and likely to pay a price. But landing the golf ball in the center of the fairway or slightly right or left of center puts the player in the best position for an opportunity to successfully advance the ball with his next shot. Our nation's politicians would be well-served, and so would our country, if more of them would try to keep their politics and rhetoric near the middle of the fairway. To do so would eliminate a lot of triple bogies, lead to more pars and make for a much better scorecard for themselves and for the American people.
The mystical, fictional caddie named Bagger Vance captured the essence of golf when he said: "What I'm talking about is a game, a game that can't be won. It can only be played." Just like life.
Commentary on 06/22/2017