Finish This Sentence: Golf is ...

“Golf is a game even the masters don’t master.” -- Author John Updike (1932 – 2009)

Golf is …

How many times have you started a sentence with those two words?  Well, depending how I have played on a given day, I have described/defined the game a million different ways.  There are days when I consider it to be the world’s greatest game and then there are the other days when I am convinced that the devil himself invented the game.

Now that I think about it, maybe that is why I enjoy the game so much. (My wife would use a word other than “enjoy” to describe my fondness for the game.  I remember her using the word “addicted” more than a few times.)  Golf provokes emotion.  I am not talking about serious, gut-wrenching emotions that truly affect your life, but emotions that wake you up and remind you that “play” is an essential element of everyday life.  “Playing” golf whether the stakes are $2 or the club championship trophy tests your skills and gets your competitive juices flowing.  That is why there are so many ways to describe what golf is … For example:

• Golf is the game that evolved over humps, hollows, sand craters, ridges, dikes and clumps of heather and gorse. These features made up a game that is a trial of luck and ingenuity.  How dull to have no obstacles to dodge or need no “escape” shots in one’s repertoire. – Australian Peter Thomson (1929 to 2018) won The (British) Open  Championship in 1954, ‘55, ‘56, ’58 & ’65
• Golf is, in part, a game; but only in part.  It is also in part a religion, a fever, a vice, a mirage, a frenzy, a fear, an abscess, a joy, a thrill, a pest, a disease, an uplift, a brooding, a melancholy, a dream of yesterday and a hope of tomorrow.– New York Tribune (1916)
• Golf is the one game I know which becomes more and more difficult the longer one plays it. -- 13-time Major winner Bobby Jones (1902 to 1971) and co-founder of Augusta National GC, which is the home of the Masters Tournament.
• Golf is a game of motion and rhythm, not position and mechanics. – Golf instructor Martin Hall
• Golf is not a game you can rush.  For every stroke you try to force out of her, she is going to extract two in return. -- Dave Hill (1937 to 2011) won 13 PGA Tour tournaments.  His best finish in the Majors was second place in the 1970 U.S. Open
• Golf is a game for one and all – the young, the old, boys, girls, the talented and those not so much. – 1502
• Golf is a lot of walking … broken up by disappointment and bad arithmetic. – Anonymous
• Golf is a puzzle without an answer. – Nine-time Major winner Gary Player (b. 1935)
• Golf is a game of days.  And I can beat anyone on my day. -- 1979 Masters and 1984 U.S. Open champion Fuzzy Zoeller (born 1951)

Play Away!

Allan (Same ol' same ol' -- Current home course handicap remains a 12 on my home course.)