Won't Get Fooled Again

I’d never thought of golf as an exceptionally difficult sport. It never seemed difficult. You saw those pro golfers on the telly, just one easy swing and WHACKKK, right on the green for a birdie.  Football could be considered difficult, what with all the constant running and the gorgeous flicks and piledriver shoots and flying two-footed lunges. Even tennis, or squash, or table-tennis; hitting a moving ball is always gonna be a bit of a challenge. Or any other sport, with anything moving it. But never golf. How difficult could it really be to hit a stationary ball at a stationary target from a stationary position?

Well, approximately a fortnight into it, that target still eludes me and many of my countless golf shots. It’s almost as if there’s some Force at play here (some incredibly dawdling Jedi maybe?). So now it’s dawned on me that golf has a learning curve far, far steeper than any trajectory I’ve managed to achieve so far. Ask my caddy, he covers more distance fetching the balls back than Michael Carrick probably covers in a whole match (no offence really, I’ve reconciled my differences with Carrick for the time being).

Anyway, here’s what I expected  would happen at the golf course:( of course I’d seen some videos. This is all they did.)

Place the ball, hold the club, take aim, WHACKKK.

Except the whackk was never heard in the first few tries. It was more like a dull thud, and I’d have been happy with that if the ball had gone anywhere remotely far. (In fact, the first time, I could just stretch my golf club arm and get the ball back. So encouraging!) Wow, so youtube was having an #epic failure here. I decided this was probably a good time to find someone good at this to help me..umm.. refine  my technique. After meeting with a whole bunch of seasoned golfers, shameless flukes and hopeless wannabes, and getting confusing, often conflicting advice from each, I can honestly inform you that there are three kinds of people you’ll meet at the golf course  (I’m the fourth kind; the noobs . There weren’t many.)

  1.   The Really Helpful Kind – Don’t get fooled by the name, it’s only that they appear to help in a way that would seem really helpful to an outsider. There are mostly relatively new to the game themselves, so they look to you as their apprentices (which is not a good thing), or they are really old and have nothing to do the whole day except talk to a stranger at the golf course the whole day.

What they basically do is fill your ears with a tome-worth of golf instructions. The bad thing here is that everyone has their own tome, so what you really have is a huge mash-up of pretty useless golf jargon. At the end of the day, they’ll always leave with a shameless “You know, that is how it worked for me, you gotta find your own way.” Like hell I will.

  2.  The Constant Critic Kind – Stay away from them! They’re the supercilious snobs who’re in constant awe of their marvellous skills. So when you line up to demonstrate your self-righteous techniques, there’s always a bucketload of “No, that’s not right”, “Nah, that isn’t the way”, “What? This doesn’t go here”, “That’s very wrong” and some more shit coming your way (and the occasional snigger, of course). Then you ask them to shine the Holy Light upon you and before you’ve even said that, they’ve stuck the ball with a mere twist of …well…it all goes so fast you can’t really see what exactly happened (fate?) So while you’re still flummoxed by that, they take another ball and whackkk. Then another. This goes on until they forget all about you, and you’re just one of those delinquents who stands and stares at people.

  

  3.  The My-way-or-the-Highway Kind – One of those will in all probability find you on their own, make you watch the way they do it, then slowly reduce their fps so your tired eyes can keep pace with all the motion going on.  All this is normally accompanied with phrases like “This way”, “I  do this”, “You should do this”, “it’s done this way”…you get my flow. Then they want you to repeat all this. First in words, just to make sure you’re not baselessly retarded, then the real way. And just as you’re about to swing, they’ll roughly pull your arm back and start forcing you around like a rag doll to the position they want to see you in. This is very awkward, and occasionally very embarrassing. After a lot of fiddling and tickling and poking around, they give a half-appreciative nod. And you swing…and the ball…there’s no need to get your hopes high, the ball goes where it gotta go. The reaction? “That’s strange….stick to it, you’ll be fine, you just need more practice..”.  And you’re left smiling sheepishly at your gross incompetence but with the faint hope that it’ll be fine.

And all this doesn’t even compare to the hopelessness when your too-cheeky-for-his-own-good in- 7th-grade caddy comes back with a significantly lighter bag of balls than you started with(he says it’s my fault, I hit them all over the place) and starts explaining things to you. Wow, the sheer hopelessness. But you gotta hang on, cuz with an evil grin you know he’ll be the one running mad chasing balls.  

Phew, after all this(times the number of days in a fortnight)…i’m really glad of the progress I’ve made (yes, I have made progress. Shut your pessimistic mind.)  I can hit them hard and long now, and get that sweet “whack” most of the times. Too bad the direction’s still off, but the joy of helping a young kid fight obesity in this evil world? Priceless.