Confessions of a Hacker – Perspective
"The difference between a mountain and a molehill is your perspective." Al Neuharth
It is human nature to work in relativities. The little things in life are rarely great or terrible in their own right; they merely seem that way compared to our previous experiences and/ or those of someone else. Molehills can appear to be mountains at times in your life where no legitimate mountains are in sight.
For instance, I might get frustrated if this article takes longer than usual to load onto the website – my brain omitting the part where (a) it is still loading very quickly when compared to dial-up internet connections of the late 1990s and (b) twenty years ago, no such online possibility even existed. Times change and for better or worse, perspectives often shift with them.
Yet sometimes a major life event, be it your own or that of someone close to you, comes along and abruptly shunts all the minutiae of life back into its proper context – panel beating for the soul, if you will. Something as simple as a frustratingly poor round of golf rightly gets hammered back into its place as a game you play for enjoyment; nothing more, nothing less.
Last Saturday I arrived at the 17th tee (our eighth hole of the day) with my round effectively over, at least from a competitive standpoint. After seven holes, three balls had already found the water, one had disappeared out of bounds and three putts of two feet or shorter had failed to find the cup.
At various times in the past (some distant, others less so), such a display would lead to incandescent rage and self-loathing at waiting all week only to completely waste another Saturday round in a matter of 90 minutes or so. If you think about the entirety of your day-to-day, week-to-week life and where some weekend hacking fits into it, this is clearly an absurd way to react.
Unfortunately, that’s not even the most stupid part of how I’ve thought about golf in the past though. The ‘championship belt’ on that front remains around the waist of the notion that playing partners will somehow think less of me if I play like a complete dog that day. This is despite the fact that playing partners (a) care infinitely more about what type of company you are than the quality of shots you hit, (b) understand that everyone submits a shocker of a round or two from time to time and (c) are still far more focused on their own performance than they are on yours. Perhaps it’s a hangover from nerdy teenage days of never quite fitting in at school but equating being able to break 80 with fitting in socially on the links, thus overplaying the importance of good scoring in the broader scheme of things. Irrespective, the concept bears no resemblance to reality and should be dismissed post haste.
As a club golfer, you essentially have four tasks during a round: (1) abide by the rules and etiquette of the game; (2) keep pace with the group in front of you; (3) be good company to your playing partners; and (4) enjoy yourself. That’s it. Give me three playing partners who shoot 110 but meet those criteria over three who shoot 75 but fail those criteria any day of the week.
Think too about what truly draws you to the game. Scores may well be the best metric of measuring your overall performance/ improvement. But I’ll bet they don’t hold the same place in your heart as crushing a drive down the centre of the fairway, hitting a towering iron shot right at the pin or stroking a 20-foot putt that never looked like missing hold. Those moments, those images embedded in your brain; they are what bring you back to have another go. Emasculating yet addictive games have a funny habit of doing that to you.
Unless you’re an aspiring pro, golf is a game to be played for enjoyment (both your own and that of your playing partners) alone. What you shoot on the day has no correlation with your self-worth or the quality of your life more broadly – indeed, if you can regularly spare the time to crash around the links for a few hours, your life probably has infinitely more pros than cons.
If you can retain such perspective, all the water-seeking tee shots and yipped one-footers in the world fade back into the obscurity in which they belong; you might even bang out enough good shots for the rest of the round to lure you back. If such perspective eludes you, may I suggest a trip to the panel beaters?
Previous ‘Confessions of a Hacker’ columns:
(1) Seeking help, (2) Racking them up, (3) Holding your nerve, (4) Five-foot putts, (5) Letting the Big Dog eat, (6) Slow play, (7) Trust the yardage , (8) Learning from low markers, (9) Learning from high markers, (10) Playing in the sandpit, (11) Shaping your shots, (12) Missing one-foot putts, (13) New sticks
