Golf’s appeal?

Yesterday r. e. wolf gave me his view on the game of golf:

“Hit the little ball.
Go find the little ball.
Hit it again.
Keep finding, keep hitting.
Eventually knock it into a little hole in the ground. Then what?

“Hit it some more.
Chase it some more.”

Well... yeah.

But first you have to HIT it. That can be challenging—at least, for some of us. I mean, swinging at the ball is easy, but hitting it can be another story entirely.

Even the pros whiff it occasionally. Well, okay, VERY occasionally. But they do!

And then, as r. e. says, you have to go FIND the little ball. Now THAT can be REALLY challenging!

But enough of the negative, let’s talk about the positive aspects of the game. When you DO hit the ball, and hit it well, it just SOARS up and up, rising above all the trees (and some birds), and then falls lightly down to roll across the grass. Hopefully in the general direction you had in mind when you swung at it.

Carol is fond of saying that she was hooked on golf from the first time she made solid contact with the ball and watched it take off and fly. THAT was FUN!

Now I, on the other hand, am still waiting for that experience, personally. But it sure LOOKS like fun, when I see others do it. So I’m sure it WILL be fun if when I ever do it.

But you know; a lot of people bad-mouth golf as a dumb game that consists of chasing a little white ball around. From that perspective, let’s look at some other sports.

How about bowling? You toss this big, heavy ball and let it roll down a hardwood lane towards a bunch of wooden pins. You either hit them or you don’t. The ball comes back, and you roll it again. Big whoop!

Tennis? You swat a ball with a racket. If it clears the net, somebody swats it back. Then you swat it at them, and so on. Again, big whoop!

Basketball? You run back and forth between two “goals” and try to throw the ball into one of them while keeping the other team from throwing the same ball into the other one. If either team succeeds, they toss the ball to the other team and let THEM try. BOOOORR-ing.

And the list, as they say, goes on and on.

At least in golf you can walk around outdoors in the fresh air. You can listen to the birds sing, watch the deer and the antelope play, and listen for “discouraging words” that come floating on the breeze from other golfers (and turn the air blue).

Some will never understand the enjoyment others can get from experiences like that.

But then, I’ll never understand how people like r. e. wolf can create works of art like he does.