Life Lessons Learned on the Golf Course

The year after we moved to Franklin, my husband signed me up for a women’s nine-hole golf league at Whitnall Park. Although I was a beginner, I was enthusiastic about this opportunity for a “Mom’s Morning Out” and signed up for pre-season lessons at the local YWCA. (For those of you new to the community, it was located on Janesville Road where Hartson’s funeral home now stands.)

It’s been almost forty years since my initial attempt to learn the game, and I haven’t been part of a regular league for many of those intervening years, but I’m still swinging those clubs when time permits. In recent years I’ve been back at Whitnall with a group of women from the Hales Corners Woman’s Club. At one time there were more than 20 golfers on Tuesday mornings; now we’re lucky if we can get two foursomes together for nine holes. (I’ve never wanted to take the time for 18 holes.) 

Anyone who has ever played golf knows there’s lots of time to stand around quietly while another golfer is swinging. In a group like ours, there are even more of those “stand quietly” times than in leagues like my husband’s where they keep handicaps and the guys don’t get overly excited when someone gets a par or birdie. In any of the women’s groups I’ve golfed with over the years, that’s a big deal.

Anyway, during this quiet time on the golf course, I enjoy the natural beauty around me. I also spend a lot of thinking. Sometimes it’s the usual golfer’s inner dialogue: Well, that was a dopey shot. Why did you do that? or Hey! that was pretty good. If I keep it up, I could still get a 7 on this par-three hole. But that gets kind of boring after awhile, so lately I’ve been thinking of “Life Lessons To Be Learned From the Game of Golf.”

This list can keep on growing, but for now, I’ll limit it to four. 

1) Forget perfection. My son Matt is one of the best amateur golfers I know. His handicap is only a point or two over “scratch” and he wins a lot of prizes in competition. But his golfers’ “bible” is a book by Bob Rotella, Golf Is Not a Game of Perfect. Even Tiger Woods knows that. Sometimes, I think, we expect too much from ourselves, our children or others in our lives. My own motto in everything I do is: “Progress, not perfection.”

2) Stay calm. There’s another popular book Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff (and it’s all small stuff) that reminds us not to over-react to any situation. I don’t accept the notion that everything is “small stuff” but if I can practice staying calm and centered in everyday situations, I’ll be better able to handle those major sandtraps of life. I think Bob Rotella and Tiger Woods would both have a lot to say about this topic as well.

3) Be nice. My mother (and millions of other mothers, I’m sure) always reminded me, “If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.” It’s a corollary to that old advice, count to 10 whenever one’s temper flares up.  The women I golf with are usually courteous to one another and don’t punctuate their conversation with profanity, the way so many people do these days. I wish more people would do the same – both on and off the golf course.

4) Enjoy the moment.   Learning to live in the NOW means not agitating over that awful golf shot I just hit or the dumb mistake I made yesterday; it means not worrying about the score card (or, for competitive golfers, who’s going to win the match) and – off the golf course, what’s going to happen tomorrow. Most of us have enough to deal with today and the only way to live today is moment by moment.

I’m going to stop my list right here, but I’ll probably continue it before the golf season ends. (And if anyone reading this has something to add, please let me know.) 

On the golf course at Whitnall yesterday, I remembered the words of a song I wrote for an end-of-the-season luncheon in 1976, the bicentennial year of America's independence. I sang it to the tune, “You’re a Grand Old Flag.”

It’s a grand old game, and it’s really a shame,   When the ball doesn’t go where it should.

Oh you could blame the weather or your aching back, You could blame your iron or your wood.

Oh, it’s a grand old game, but there’s no one to blame, When your score doesn’t look so good.

So should old score cards be forgot? Well, the bad ones, indeed they should. 

        (For this last line I tore up a scorecard and tossed the pieces.)