{{ubiquityData.prevArticle.description}}
{{ubiquityData.nextArticle.description}}
Of all the ways professional golfers can dazzle us, perhaps the most impressive is what they do with a pencil in their hand.
They have to sign for a score every tournament round, good or bad.
All you have to do is play a club tournament or some other event to realize how much the game can change when you’re truly keeping score. The pros don’t get to sweep the ball up with the back of their putters when it’s 2 feet from the hole. They don’t get to say, “Just drop it out here,” when they’ve hit it in a bad spot.
It’s the same thing when the rest of us are playing a proper competition. Every swing counts, no matter how many swings are required.
Which brings me to the 10 I made on the second hole of a recent club event. The day started nicely, an easy par at the first, and then I spent the next few minutes giving an on-course demonstration of how to stack one dumb mistake on top of another.
No one wants to hear a stroke-by-stroke recap of anything you did on the golf course; not all babies are cute; and, cauliflower mashed potatoes are not anywhere close to being as good as the real thing.
We’ll not get into the details of the 10 except to say there were no penalty strokes involved. Among the truisms of life are: No one wants to hear a stroke-by-stroke recap of anything you did on the golf course; not all babies are cute; and, cauliflower mashed potatoes are not anywhere close to being as good as the real thing.
The good news is my 10 wasn’t the highest score anyone made across the two days. There was another 10 and even a 12, made by someone who missed about six 4-footers in a row in rapid succession on the same green. Without asking this person, my guess is he didn’t feel any better after playing pickleball with all of those putts but maybe he did.
In talking to a friend once about a round of golf I’d played one day, he asked if I putted everything out. Not everything, I said. Then you didn’t play golf, he said.
He has a point but let’s not put too sharp a point on this pencil. We’ll leave that to the professionals.
Ron Green Jr.