For those of you who haven't heard, I moved into a new apartment this past weekend. The new place is great, my roommate is a cool guy, and I feel that I am going to really enjoy living there. A couple of perks it has to offer are a nice community, a good gym, and a golf course. But the last item has been my favorite thing by far, and I have used the course almost every day since I moved.
Throughout the past seven or eight years of my life I have become partially obsessed with the game of golf, and for a casual player, I think I'm pretty good. I'm not anywhere near as good as even the worst professionals, and I don't ever expect to be, but I consistently break 90 and flirt with the 70's from time-to-time. I was playing on Sunday afternoon (not as well as I'd have liked) and I started thinking to myself, "Why do I play this game, and how in the world did I get started?" I realized then that my love for the game of golf began when I was 8 years old.
I remember the first day I watched golf...and it just so happened to be one of the most memorable days in golf history. It was the Spring of 2007, a Saturday afternoon, and I was at my best friend's house playing a game we invented called "knee hockey". On every television in the house, there was a golf tournament going on, and as much as I tried not to care, it's really hard to not watch when your best friend's dad keeps yelling, "Damn! this kid is good!" So, we watched a hole to see what was going on. . .
"The kid," was Tiger Woods, and the tournament was the 1997 Masters. Tiger had just driven the ball down the middle of the 2nd fairway and we picked up the action as he hit an incredible shot onto the green to set up an easy birdie. From that moment on, I couldn't stop watching. I was hooked. Tiger went on to win the Masters that year, and beat everyone else by 12 strokes (A Masters Record). I continued to watch every tournament I could that involved Tiger Woods. For some reason, even today, the PGA Tour just doesn't seem interesting to me when Tiger isn't playing. I think this article by Bill Simmons of ESPN describes my Tiger Woods fan condition pretty well.
http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=simmons/110411
I'm not going to get into arguing about Tiger's character off the golf course...I'm just not.
Tiger jump-started my proverbial golf battery, but I didn't actually get a chance to play the game until I moved to Arkansas. I cited in a post, a few weeks back, an argument I had with my best friend, Jim, about who the greatest golfer ever was. Little did I know that Jim would eventually be the outlet to plug me into the game of golf. A few months after I moved to Arkansas, in 2002, Jim got me to join the First Tee Golf Club in Little Rock. It is a great course, and I got to take free lessons. So, since I was homeschooled, I ended up going to as many classes as I possibly could. As my game progressed - very slowly at times - I began to realize why I enjoyed this sport as much as, or even more than the other sports I played.
Golf is a constant battle against an opponent, there are no time-outs, there are no halftimes, and everything that goes through your mind either works for or against you. The battle has nothing to do with the course because the battle is fought completely against yourself. Sure, it takes skill and a lot of practice to understand how to manage a course and make good shots. However, good shots don't happen unless you're completely focused on making good shots. My favorite part of playing golf is knowing that no matter how much I play, I'll never manage to be perfect. I wont always hit good shots, in fact, I hit a lot of bad shots, but I keep playing. I keep playing because being humbled by a bad shot provides me with the opportunity to remain joyful in spite of my circumstance. In that moment, all I can try to do is attempt to recover by forgetting the bad shot and focusing on how good the next one is going to be. Being joyful is something I am not good at. I generally don't get very excited about things. Golf helps me stay focused on being positive. It's the only sport I've ever played that I don't feel pressured to be really good at, and it has become a source of relief instead of a source of stress for me. It's my time to get outside to experience and enjoy God's creation, it trains me to have a better attitude, and it's insanely challenging (I love a good challenge). These are the reasons why I play golf...
-Matt
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