There was a time when I could turn shame into success
- Michelle Wood: SWCD
- December 4, 2017
- 1330
To quote the Rolling Stones, “What a drag it is getting old.”
I remember the first time I became acutely aware of the aging process and what its inevitable decline would mean.
Ironically enough, it took place on a golf course, a place stereotypically associated with old guys trying to hang on to some tiny slice of competition, something to remind them of better days.
I’ve never been big on the whole zeitgeist of chasing a little ball around a field using a stick, but then again, like anything else in life, all it takes is a flicker of success to keep you hooked, kind of like fishing, playing poker or dating.
Something kicks in after you experience something unexpected, something inexplicably fine, and all of a sudden, you stop and think, “Huh, maybe this can actually turn out well.” Silly boy.
But I’ve always been able to treat the game of golf as I would a practice exam. On the one hand, it doesn’t count, but on the other, nothing tastes quite as delicious as sinking a putt for a legitimate par. And I use the word “legitimate” with a purpose because I’ve been known to cheat quite often.
When you routinely snap-hook your drives into an adjacent fairway or a copse of dense woods where you’re quite hidden and all by yourself, well, it’s Winter Rules all year round.
The key is to keep it light.
“What’d you have?” the scorecard keeper will ask after you tap in.
“Six or seven,” I’ll say. “Whatever’s fair.”
But golf is not fair. It is a game that rewards luck far more often than it does shot-making, and its vagaries and serendipitous nature combine to create in me a profound sense of, “I’m in. Meet you at the bar in 30.”
That was always fun, just to take a break from puttering around the house and driving to the local muni course, a layout I’d been hacking around since high school. Which is how I happened to find myself on the tee, staring down the throat of a 180-yard par three we’d always called “The Tennis Court Hole.”
There was nothing metaphoric or symbolic about its moniker. It was literal and simple.
As you addressed the ball from the elevated tee box, you could see the postage-stamp-sized green, which lay between a lazy dribble of a brook and a half-dozen or so fenced-in tennis courts.
Choose the wrong club and misjudge the wind, well, it wasn’t all that unusual to have your ball to fly over the brook and the green and land jarringly in the ad court box, where four women were having a set or two, using the latest in tennis tech, those Chris Evert models.
You’d be embarrassed initially, but then you’d face the music and modestly trudge down the hill, smile sheepishly, push open the gate and say something winning like, “Sorry ladies. Mind if I play through?”
Ah, those were the days, a time when I could turn shame into success, all the while knowing that golf was too much work not to have fun with it, that just being out in God’s wide-open spaces on a gorgeous summer afternoon was reason enough to endure the occasional humiliation.
They say that baseball is the ultimate ego-crushing game. Fail seven times out of 10 and you can make the Hall of Fame.
But golf offers another layer of self-abasement. If you hit a weak fly ball to left with two out and runners at second and third, you just trot back to the dugout, grab your glove and head back out to first base or whichever position you’re playing. But if you skull a drive, shank a shot of any description — in short, when you screw up — the game of golf requires you to chase after it like a negligent parent who’s lost track of his two-year-old.
The shame is quite public. But as I’ve said, I’ve been torturing myself with it since my teenage years, and I’m pretty good at making a fool of myself.
And then I got old. I’ve never owned a pair of golf shoes. I’ve always played in sneakers.
This hasn’t been much of a handicap because I mostly play places that are lax on formal rules; however, I once was invited to join a foursome at the hoity-toity Country Club and was forced to wear rentals, which fit about as well as snowshoes.
Happily, I scored a “legitimate” par somewhere out on those beautiful grounds, knocking in an 8-footer that dropped with a satisfying “plop.” I think I shot 112 that day.
Anyway, many years later I was standing on the elevated tee of the Tennis Court Hole, waggling my 5-wood, a club I’d grown comfortable with since receiving it as a Christmas present.
Looking at the box, I thought it might be a telescope, something I’d wanted since I was 10. But now I was 50 and playing a round with a group of friends who’d all gone to high school together, and I knew I was supposed to “see the shot” in my mind. All I could see was my ball careening around the tennis courts, but I tried to block out that vision.
I skied the shot, hit way under it, and up, up, up it went, heading straight for the pin but landing well short, just on the other side of the brook, a place I’d been countless times before. I was offered a ride in the cart, taking the bridge across the water, but I shook my head.
“You guys go ahead,” I said. “I’ll meet you on the green.”
So down the hill I walked. When I got to the edge of the brook, I jumped — the span was 4, maybe 5 feet, a leap I’d made many times — and something felt wrong right away.
Instead of landing firmly, I came up quite short, and my sneaker failed to gain a grip, and I felt myself sliding backward. Had I not been holding a pitching wedge, which I used as a crutch, I’d have lost my balance and drenched my ratty jeans and Stones T-shirt.
That was the moment that time and age finally caught up to me. I’ve been trying to make a game of it ever since.