They say that golf has too much walking to be a good game, and just enough of a game to spoil a good walk. I suppose They (whoever They are) may be right, but only in the same way that an illiterate person staring at a library would be right in saying it’s a mammoth waste of paper and space, which is to say that They don’t know enough to know that They are wrong.
I used to hate playing golf. Sometimes, when I forget what it’s for, I still do.
There is an ever-present complaint about most athletic endeavors: from the outside, nothing makes sense. The critiques of the outsiders are not totally without merit, either—baseball is boring, and football is barbaric, and hockey is absolutely ridiculous. 1
But, to boldly paraphrase Teilhard de Chardin, nothing is ridiculous if you know how to see. I find that the pageantry and ceremony surrounding sporting events, especially when money is involved, serve as a colossal distraction from the beauty of the game itself. Strip away all the bells and whistles, and you discover the truly magical elements of sport. Church league basketball played in dusty gyms is more interesting to me than the NBA Finals. A family tossing a football around in the backyard is more momentous than Notre Dame-USC. The British Open is not nearly as wondrous as an afternoon of quad golf.
I do not know who invented quad golf, but I have spent nearly a decade as a student of the game. Best played on a college campus with ample green space, the necessary equipment for quad golf is a single golf club and a tennis ball. Holes are improvised one-at-a-time, usually with a great deal of debate, at once earnest and tongue-in-cheek, about whether that fire hydrant or this rock or the light pole over there presents the best target.
Keeping score is illegal in quad golf, but nobody really enforces this rule. Contestants often spend the first hole or two meticulously counting their strokes, and I have even been known on one occasion to dare to write scores down, but before long the spirit of the game takes over, and it becomes evident to all parties that there are more important aspects of the game than keeping tally of the number of times you swing the club.
Country-club golfers are confined to groups of four, in the interest of keeping the pace of play—as though all these grown men swatting a plastic ball around the yard were in a hurry to be somewhere else after they are finished. There are no such concerns with quad golf, which allows for the size of the group to ebb and flow. I once was party to a round of quad golf played with a crowd nearing a dozen; as you may expect, this was an especially boisterous and joy-filled afternoon.
First-time quad golfers often experience a rush of rebellious elation, I suppose due to the strange sensation of waiting on the tee box for a family of five and their dog to clear out of the fairway. This is similar to the surge of panicked guilt when a swiftly struck tennis ball rolls gently past an old lady and her doddering husband, certain that they will be deeply offended. Yet they never are; in fact, it is always the unassuming spectators who seem to enjoy quad golf the most. Many will offer words of encouragement, and every now and then a middle-aged dad will offer a strategic tip or two, because that’s what middle-aged dads do.
An afternoon of quad golf yields an unexpected symphony: the peculiar thwop of a golf club hitting a tennis ball and the insatiable giggling and the mock sincerity with which contestants debate the best strategy for avoiding that pesky copse of trees and the merry whistling (there’s always someone inexplicably whistling during a round of quad golf). In the words of the brilliant Brian Doyle, everything’s music, so long as you hear it right.
Quad golf, despite its frivolity, is in fact a reacquaintance with the beauty of golf. People who know things will tell you that golf isn’t a competition between players. The thing I have always gotten wrong about golf is that it isn’t a competition with the course, either. When it’s done well, golf is a cooperation with the course, an exercise in paying attention to the forces of nature—the slope of terrain, the arrangement of trees, the wind whispering through branches—and discovering what the course wants you to do, hidden in plain view.2
The secret of golf, which I think is the secret of sport, and maybe also of human life, is that the key to flourishing is to take yourself less seriously and play. Chasing a tennis ball around the yard is, of course, best done with rampant and unbridled childlike joy, and is therefore very good training for “real life,” which is in the end not all that different from quad golf. The essentials are the same: improvise well, refuse to keep score, never be in a hurry, welcome many companions, and listen to the music.
1 Full grown people attach knife blades to their shoes, slide around on ice and swing sticks to try to knock a rubber disc into a cage. And yeah, you could make such reductive claims about anything, but to me, hockey seems particularly silly.↩
2 Actually being able to do what the course tells you is another thing entirely, but it’s easier than you would expect if you’re paying attention.
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