Spoiling A Beautiful Walk

Filed in archive Golf Wanderings on May 25, 2007

Birdie? Or Triple Bogey? Who cares.

I was laying face down this morning on my chiropractor's table talking golf with him.

He's been a golfer for many years although, by his own admission, he doesn't practice much.

We were discussing various aspects of the game and he commented that he doesn't take it seriously any longer.

In fact, he said, he rarely keeps score unless he's playing with some serious golfers.

It struck me how much amateur players handicap themselves by their slavish attachment to numbers on a card.

As my bone-cracker astutely stated, "the game is 95 percent mental". Indeed, there are times when that is very true.

And how better to mess up the mental side of a game than by keeping score?

Let me play devil's advocate for a moment. Why do we bother to keep score?

I can hear many saying, "well, how else do you know how well you're doing or if you're improving?"

And, I being the devil's advocate, reply, "by how well your ball flies or your putt rolls or how close your chip comes to the cup".

Why does a number have to be the arbiter of how well you play a hole? The number is the reward, of course, for a job well done.

But, golf being a mental game, a bad number therefore means a job poorly done. And that's when self-recrimination sets in. "What kind of idiot would hit a shot like that? Why can't you learn to keep your head down? How many times do you have to make the same stupid mistake before you get it?"

I am guilty, guilty, guilty. On all counts and more. I take the game way too seriously when I play so that my highs are tempered by "yeah, but it could have been closer" and my lows are, well, pretty low.

When I play with my wife, now, neither of us keeps score. And, guess what? We have a good time!

My chiro put it aptly. "You'll remember all the pars you made or the birdies and even the bogeys" without keeping score.

Scoring is necessary for amateur tournaments. It's necessary for the pros so a winner can be determined. It's necessary to calculate handicaps (another number) but it's not necessary for enjoying the exhilaration of smoking a drive or the deep satisfaction of catching your 7 iron flush and watching it sail up and straight to your target.

We are bound up in statistics. And we give the numbers more importance than they deserve.

A scorecard is nothing but statistics. And Mark Twain called statistics the worst form of lies there are.

The beauty of golf is not found on the scorecard but in the perfect moments that are created when body and mind work in harmony and the ball goes as far and as precisely as you intended it.