              |
 |
 May 2005 Back to Table of Contents Back to Archives Main Page Section: Feature What Game Are You Playing? By Biff Henrich
The first thing I see on TV are mobs of people on the golf course. I get that it’s a professional event with an audience, but what I don’t get is why are they standing in the playing field right where I would hit the ball? They are hanging out along the edges of the trees and standing in the deep grass, which is precisely where I would be headed. Get those people out of there. It’s dangerous. If I had to move a crowd out of the way each time I hit the ball, it would take twice as long to play as it does now. It takes four to seven hours to play on many public courses as it is. I guess this is why it is also known as the game for life.
Golf is not the walk in the park it appears. There are steep hills to climb and streams to cross and forests to inspect. Inspect closely to determine the most likely direction to hit a ball that is nestled up against a tree root, through the trees. But the challenge is the excitement. Is the best move to go left over the short bushes but under the Sycamore branch, or between the vee formed by the dead tree trunk and the fallen limb? Over the bush is the safe route, but through the vee is the shorter route. It’s always a trade off. This may be the perfect example of why I should have taken a statistics course in college. It’s also a routine shot for the average golfer. I would wager that most weekend golfers do this better than the pros. We have had plenty of practice and the pros never practice this kind of stuff. They wouldn’t have the experience to handle the situation. Their playing milieu is too limited. Golf for the average player is always a new and different adventure. You can play the same course over and over and the experience and view of the course is never the same twice. The pros can’t say that. Same course, different day. They actually have a strategy they follow on each hole and the nerve to think that it might be repeatedly useful. To them, a tree may be poorly placed in the design of the course. To the regular golfer it is a safety feature so your ball doesn’t go too far left and out of bounds and into a dark ravine filled with undocumented wildlife. My father taught me golf when I was a kid, and he played for most of his adult life. He was pretty good at it and certainly was consistently better than I am. Toward the end of his playing days he confided in me that there were two things in life that he still wanted to accomplish. One of them was to get a hole in one, the holy grail of the average golfer. The pros routinely have several, but for the rest of us, it’s merely an elusive dream, a freak accident waiting to unfold before our eyes. One Sunday afternoon, I get a call from Florida from my father. This is a little weird because my mother is the one who calls. He gets on to talk but he doesn’t dial. I’m on red alert for reading between the lines. As he puts it, “A guy in my group got a hole in one today.” It finally dawns on me that he has gotten the hole in one. The short story is he hits the ball left of the hole on a par three, right into the overhanging branches of a shaggy tree. The ball bounces out and a bunch of guys in their seventies lose sight of it. They have to go look for it as they have since they started playing the game so they can hit it again. After getting no “Polo” response, one guy, for some reason, as a last resort, looks in the hole. There is the ball. Ace. Off the club, through the leaves, off the branch, on the ground, nothing but cup. Can Tiger do that? I doubt it. He never practiced golf. back to top back to table of contents Current Issue | About Forever Young | Where to Find | Advertise | Our Advertisers | Community Calendar | Contest | Clubs | Contact Us | Archives | Home |
