Half-joking? Not even joking. Because seriously, game – what are you like? I’m not sure if this hobby-come-habit-come-all-consuming-addiction, this weekly Quixotic pursuit of 36 points as marker for achievement, fulfilment and enjoyment is healthy for either of us.
Is there not another way?
Of course there is. Indeed there’s a few.
Played a corporate Ambrose the other day, for Gotcha4Life, the mental fitness mob, and it was really very good fun. You didn’t care about your bad shots, for surely one of the three other knuckleheads could hit the ball onto the green.
And if not, who cares when you’re two tinnies deep before 10am on a Friday morning while raising money for a cause?
Answer: nobody, Bubba.
It’s like that old trope that the only other people who care that you scored poorly are your enemies, who are happy.
Fred Couples’ level of relaxation was elite. PHOTO: Getty Images
And thus I hit the ball really quite well. And putted like a demon. And there were no mental demons.
And it was, in the main, because I didn’t care about the score.
As Dr Bob Rotella would tell you, Well, duh! You idiot! Have you not read my seminal work Golf Is Not A Game of Perfect? And I would reply, Hey Bob! Shut your face, Egg-head.
Because that is not it. For I have read it all.
I know the story of Fred Couples coming down the 72nd hole and leading some tournament, and banana-slicing his three-wood over the grandstand.
I know that rather than go all Colin Montgomerie channelling Mrs Doubtfire with her pants on fire, our Freddy just, well, he laughed. Laughed as if to say, Oh my Gahd, that’s really, really bad. That’s so bad it’s funny.
Then he loped off after it, found it, got some sort of line-of-sight free-drop malarkey, wafted the ball onto the green, made two putts, and won the golf tournament.
Colin Montgomerie was an abject lesson in caring too much. PHOTO: Getty Images
And all because he didn’t care if he hit a bad shot. He knew there’d be a good one coming.
He didn’t suddenly become horrendously bad at golf. What Fred Couples did was trust the ability of Fred Couples. And he didn’t care about – or at least gave the impression that he cared about – his score.
Golf Australia magazine‘s Architecture Editor, Mike Clayton, reckons Australians are “obsessed” with competition golf, particularly stableford competition.
He doesn’t know why golfers don’t go out for five holes here, 11 holes there. Just go out and whack the ball around for an hour or two for no other reason than fun.
Clayton in his professional playing days was as hard-bitten as any of the grasping tourists scrapping to make a quid while flying around Europe with their mates.
This would not have made him laugh then as it does today.
Today, indeed, Clayton has a sort of barefoot Svengali thing going on, like an old hippy, wandering about, envisioning shots from 15th green to 13th tee that he’ll store in a sub-pantheon of his mental library called “Holes That Aren’t Holes”.
One day, head-first into a typhoon at Barnbougle Dunes, Clayton hit 4-iron to three feet on the 112-metre par-3 7th hole, the famous tiny dancer called “Tom’s Little Devil”.
Then he walked up and picked the ball up. Just like that. Just picked it up. Didn’t putt. Didn’t score. Didn’t care about recording a ‘birdie’.
Was content to just enjoy the good feeling of his pure long-iron into the fan.
It’s like anarchy or something. Nihilism. Societal breakdown. The End of Times.
Or maybe it’s a step towards mental fitness.
“We can actually help you with that,” our club’s PGA teaching pro replied to my half-joking quip.
And he wasn’t joking.
Seems there is another way.
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