Random Thoughts-63
August 24, 2009

Do you lead a stress free life? Are your decisions always right? Do your physical actions always follow your brain thought patterns? Yes? Really?! Then you mustn’t be a golfer!
As if our lives weren’t stressful enough, what with bills to pay, children to move, (again and again), on-going home improvements, job stress, car repairs, yard work, laundry, cooking, cleaning... the list is endless; this year, Deb and I decided to put in a lot more of our free time on the golf course.
Yes, in an effort to give us some relief from the struggles of everyday life, escaping to the golf course was supposed to be our stress reliever. I guess it is to a point. If you just want to admire the scenery on the course and the camaraderie of the club house deck, then that’s the place to be.
If, however, you want to play the game properly and put that stupid ball in the cup with the fewest swings of your club, you might want to look up what “stress relief” really means.
Usually, doing something over and over should improve the end result of a repeated action. Usually. I’ve repeated my golf swing, and many various versions of it, oh, I would say a few thousand times. Many, many thousands of times and I’m not sure if “improved” would be one of the adjectives that I would use when describing the end result of one of my many, many golf swings.
Oh sure, you know, every now and then, and this is true for every golfer, Tiger included, you hit that one sweet perfect ball that goes exactly where you aim and gets there in a hurry. For Tiger, it’s lots of times, for me, not so much. Just enough to think you’re getting better so you go back out to see if you can do it again!
Then again, you know what they say, “a bad day of golf is better than a good day at work.”
There are many very positive things about golf. Done right, it will improve your concentration. Done wrong, you get to use words that aren’t usually allowed in public. You get lots of fresh air, a little exercise and on those rare occasions when the sun and moon and stars are lined up just right, you can put a game together that makes you really think you can golf!
“Golf and sex are about the only things you can enjoy without being good at.”-Jimmy Demaret.