For the Love of the Game
By Doug Roorbach

The temperature was only in the high 30s today, but my heart said it was spring. Pitchers and catchers reported several weeks ago, the NCAA “March Madness” basketball tournament is less than a week away and today my son got out my old set of golf clubs.

He’s a sophomore this year and is trying out for the school golf team. He’s never played before, but that hasn’t dampened his enthusiasm. He’s cleaning and polishing clubs, combining some of my old 3-5-7-9 set of Spaulding’s with a full set from a family friend. He’s been checking out drivers, testing putters and comparing the qualities of leftover Titleist’s and Wilsons that he found deep in one of the bag’s pockets.

I’m having a hard time letting him do it.

He’s 16 years old and towers over me by 4 or five inches, but I still feel the need to protect him and I know the evils that lurk behind the well-manicured greens and lush fairways of a golf course. There’s a heart-breaking monster that lives there, just waiting for an innocent heart like his.
It will tempt him with its chirping birds and sunny afternoons. It will tease him with a luscious drive or well-struck chip. It may even give him a taste of success, allowing a long, twisting putt to snake its way into the cup.

In the end, though, it will break his heart.

A perfect drive will hit a rock in the middle of the fairway and bounce into the woods. A solid five iron will fly perfectly straight for 75 yards and then—for no particular reason and against all the rules of physics—will make a 90-degree turn and scare some old ladies on the next fairway. A perfectly read putt will circle the lip of the cup, dip in, and then spin back out and roll all the way off the green and into a bunker.

“A good walk, spoiled,” is how Mark Twain defined golf. He was too kind. It’s the bogeyman that lurks under the bed of every child, the monsters that live in the closet at night. It’s the painted lady that every mother has warned every son about since the first cave-woman batted her eyelashes at the first cave-man. It’s the three-card Monte man on the street corner.

Still, my son intends to play. He’s thought it through logically, you see. He doesn’t expect much success. In fact, with a whole handful of others trying out for the team, the chances of him getting into a real match are slim. He can still practice every day, though, and play with other team members to see who makes the match list—all at the school’s expense.

That’s why he is putting together that set of clubs tonight, he says.

I’m not buying it. I was born at night, but it wasn’t last night. If all he wanted to do was fool around and play a bit with his friends, he wouldn’t be spending hours scrubbing the rust off old clubs with steel wool and hefting each putter to compare its balance. He’s even talking about new grips for some of the older clubs.

The truth is he thinks he can do it, and he’s probably right. He’s a good athlete and he’s going to get good coaching. It’s very likely that he’ll compete for some of those spots in matches. He may even make one or two, and then he’ll learn what it takes to make a three-footer with the whole team’s outcome riding on it.

Like I said, though, he’s a good athlete, and he’ll likely have his share of success. The game will call to him, like the Sirens called to Odysseus. He’ll hit that pure three-iron up to kick-it-in distance, and miss the put. He’ll smash a drive off the tee, only to see it bounce off the cart path and into the creek that’s only six inches wide. He’ll hit an approach shot so straight that it will hit the flag and drop into the cup—and he’ll know right then that he’s hooked and will keep coming back to this game for the rest of his life.

Don’t do it, son—run, while you can.