Golf: The bad and the zen

Golf is the most frustrating, fun, aggravating, thrilling, ridiculous and sublime game/sport in existence.

It is a game you cannot win. It is a game you cannot perfect. It is a game that drives you crazy and it is a game that drives you right back to the course as soon as you can get there.

What is its appeal? I ask myself nearly every time I leave the course. Maybe it’s the fact that one minute, literally, you hit a shot as well as you can and you stand there admiring how well you performed! The next minute you clunk it 20 yards forward and 180 yards at a right angle, another ball lost to the gods of the forest, or the bottom of a water hazard.

You (or I, but I think most of you too) can get a par on one difficult hole and, on the very next and easiest hole on the course, take a nine (OK, it was an 11 but you didn’t see me miss the ball completely twice in the trees. If a stroke happens in forest, did it really happen??).

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I’m constantly trying to get into the Zen of the game. How to enjoy that (almost) perfect stroke you just made and forget quickly about that clunker you hit just down the fairway; to leave the course thinking only of the good shot you hit, to get that positive ju-ju in your head.

There have been some great golf movies. “Tin Cup” with Kevin Costner was fun and captures well the need to hit that “perfect” shot even if it costs you the U.S. Open (well, in the movie anyway, but Phil MIckleson can probably point to a few such attempt in his early career).

Then there is the “Legend of Bagger Vance” which shows the more magical side of the game, with the “hero,” Matt Damion, calling a penalty on himself, when he could have gotten away with ignoring the rules, and that being the moment that he matured. The game teaches integrity.

And that may be its real appeal. Whether you’re playing a buck a hole with friends or the U.S. Open, when you play golf, you are playing against yourself. The beautiful shot you just hit is you. And so is that clunker. How well you handle the good, and the bad, is what golf is all about.

Like lfe.

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