The meme is two photos, top and bottom. The top one depicts “Hole #1” and sees Leonard DeCaprio as the Wolf of Wall Street – hair perfect, clean shaven, confident and cool in a smooth tailored suit. The master of his domain.
The lower photo is “Hole #18” and shows Leo in The Revenant – shaggy, desperate, a fur-trapper carrying a dead guy on his shoulders while under attack by Arikara warriors.
It’s about light and shade, yin and yang. It’s the anticipation ahead of your round contrasted with the self-loathing and despair and angst and disillusionment with the very inventors of the damned game after it.
It’s love and light versus an actual hatred of the game itself.
It was my round of golf on Saturday.
As ever, I walked into the club feeling good. I hit 30 balls in the nets. I rolled 30 putts on the practice green. I stepped up onto the first tee and shook hands with my amiable playing partners, Mick and Mick.
Then I took a big slug of Powerade, stepped up to the ball and sliced the little white bastard right out of bounds.
Leo DeCaprio and the first tee feels. PHOTO: Getty Images
It might’ve been almost okay had I caught it pure – sometimes you can enjoy a golf shot if you stripe it out of the middle. Who cares where that’s gone? How good did it feel?
This bastard, though, came out of the heel – weak, slicing, effete. Bad.
My third off the tee was driven hard and low and left onto an adjacent fairway. “You over-compensated,” offered Mick One, who plays off 15. Along with the upwards of 800 other things Mick One doesn’t know about the golf swing, he clearly doesn’t know I have no control over the ball’s flight-path.
I mean, I hit the same shot, at the same target, with the same swing. Felt like it, anyway. And, yes, I know the ball doesn’t lie. But nor does it say where it’s going ahead of time, either. I aim, I pull trigger – it’s not up to me from there.
From out on 18 I hit a drawing hybrid that ended on a swale left. I had 135 metres up hill to a back pin with the ball well below my feet. Of course I aimed left for the fade. Of course the ball stayed left and even drew some, ending up pin-high. I have no answer for why. Perhaps there is no answer. No good one, anyway.
And yet, yin vied with yang and my wedge on was a beautiful thing, sticking to four feet. Felt good. Looked good. Was good. That I then missed the putt low-side meant a triple-bogey and wipe to start the day, the same score amassed by Mick One and Mick Two, neither of whom had reached the putting surface.
“That was good team-work,” Mick One said, and I thought, This could be a long day.
None other than six-time DP World Tour champion, Tyrell Hatton, before golf consumed his soul. PHOTO: Getty Images
There followed equal parts good, bad, ugly, sublime, ridiculous, even weird. It was a round conceived as if by pin-ball wizard. It was Gandalf thrusting his hips into the KISS machine from 1979, and tilting it, and reaching into the heavens and drawing down great bolts of lightning, if you will, and I do.
I bogied two, I bogied three. On the fourth tee I sent another ProV1 slicing into a pond. Then I airmailed the green, putted to the fringe, and needed a downhill curling bomb to salute for a single stableford point … which missed.
And then I thought, well, three points in four holes. I can’t win. Why not just play golf?
So I did. And, of course, things came good.
There was bogey on the strong fifth into the wind. There was par on six, bogey on seven, par on eight, par on nine. When I parred the 210m, uphill, index-one par-three on 10, I thought, and I couldn’t help it, I was like Dan Ackroyd in Ghostbusters thinking of the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man:
Well, how good am I going, only three shots down in the stableford system of scoring. So generous is my handicap I have a shot on every hole on the back nine. I was once off six. I have parred this nine before. And I am going to have 27 points.
Clearly, this is not the mindset advised in the seminal work of Dr Robert Rotella, Golf Is Not A Game of Perfect. Indeed it’s a thought process one might find in the book You’re Shit At Golf and Should Give Up You Idiot by no-one yet but, maybe, one day, me.
Thing is I know it’s not advantageous to think of a score before you’ve hit a shot. The two things do not complement one another. Indeed they are antithetical. You don’t score well by thinking of the score you want. You can’t think it into existence. It’s a round of golf, not a cult run by Anthony Robbins.
Fine movie character, terrible swing thought. PHOTO: Getty Images
You score well by thinking about playing golf shots to the best of your ability. And even then only as you’re near the ball. Everywhere else you should wander around thinking of nice things, like picking winners at Flemington, the Balter in the pro shop, the Canberra Raiders winning the premiership in 2032
And yet, there I was, mind going the way of Gozer the Gozerian taking the form of the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man and destroying a church in New York City.
Destroyed, too, was my round of golf.
I left two in the sand on 11 for triple. I went out of bounds on 13 for double. I three-putted 15, doubled 16, doubled 18. When I signed off for 28 points, I half-joked with our pro shop’s PGA pro – whose name, of course, is Mick – that I don’t need golf swing tuition but rather psychiatry services verging on full blown lobotomy.
“We can help with that, too,” Mick said cheerfully and I thought, couldn’t hurt.
And signed up to play again.
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