The humble golf course I call home has a membership that is collectively somewhat long in the tooth.
To put it into perspective, my club’s WhatsApp group doubles as an obituary column, while in the clubhouse, the talk is never about the latest equipment, unless it concerns advances in battery technology to power a golf cart.
The rollback of the golf ball does not affect us, because we already need three shots to reach the stroke one and it is certainly not unusual for the ages in one of our fourballs to add up to 300 or more; the winner is the one who can remember his score.
I played with a chap recently who, in his day, had been a decent player off a six handicap. Now he hovers between 18 and 21 and while his short game remains sharp, he just can’t hit the ball far any more. He said, ‘I walk up to my ball, it’s a perfect yardage for a 7-iron, so I take out a six. And leave it short.’
Another antiquated fellow, a member of my book club, recently went back to the course where he learned the game. ‘I flushed one off the 1st tee,’ he said, ‘and engaged my partners in boisterous chat on the way to my ball. There it was, sitting proudly in the middle of the fairway. Then I looked up and realised it was 30m short of the bunker I used to fly.’
Golf has many ways of bringing you down to earth, but the point of the game is that the fundamentals remain, no matter what age you are.
I knew a grizzled old pro who had a drill he used with callow assistant pros. He would take them to the range, hand them a rusty 5-iron with a hickory shaft and say, ‘Show me what you got.’ Needless to say, the youngsters couldn’t get the ball in the air, fixated as they were with the inappropriateness of the club for the task intended. The grizzled old pro would then take the antique and nail shot after shot down the middle with a lazy draw. Then he would turn to the callow assistant pro and say, ‘It’s not about the equipment.’
That is an axiom that becomes more and more apposite the older you get. You are past the stage in life where you actually believe that a new set of irons will cure your slice and a new driver will give you 20m more off the tee. You realise that it is indeed, not about the equipment.
When you reach this stage of life, your lost ball becomes irrelevant, because you find a ball that is not yours, and now you’ve now got the same number you started out with. What’s more, the scarred Top Flite you hit in there has been replaced by a Pro V1 with two pink dots on it. That means that the person who lost it was a proper player. Maybe something in his swing will rub off on yours.
Maybe not, but where there’s life, there’s hope, and hope, as I’m sure you know, was the very last thing remaining in Pandora’s box.
– This column first appeared in the February 2024 issue of Compleat Golfer magazine.
