One of the activities that I’ve been able to participate in more since we moved to West Virginia is golf. The courses aren’t crowded and the cost is reasonable. Four or five of us play on a pretty regular basis when the weather cooperates. The nice thing about our group is that for the most part, we’ve all decided that it’s okay to play golf just for fun!
Someone once said that golf was called golf because all the other four letter words were taken. I guess our group leans more toward defining golf as, Getting Old & Living Fine…
With the exception of our group, most golfers I know seem to take the game too seriously. Golf is the hardest sport to consistently play at the highest level. It can also be the easiest sport to play if your goal is to enjoy yourself and have fun.
First of all, like anything else, you need to have realistic expectations about your abilities. We usually use the scorecard as a map to the next hole — we rarely keep score. When we hit a ball out of bounds or in the woods, we generally don’t bother looking for it, we just amble down the fairway and drop another ball where we figure a good shot would have landed.
I even made up a score card that we use sometimes — it gives everyone a few “freebies” along the way, like having a few mulligans… Of course my score card is much more imaginative. One of the rules we play by and rigorously enforce is to meet any serious or competitive behavior with the ridicule it deserves.
Since the weather is really too cold for golf, we’re currently playing Winter Golf. During good weather, after our round of golf, we always stop for a beer or two and solve a few world issues. Since it’s so cold now, every week we play Winter Golf — we just skip the hitting the ball part and get right to the beer and world issues. So golf can truly be played year round, even here is West Virginia.
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