Club Fever

I love golf. I'm ****ty seven years old and I've been playing for two months. By playing I mean going to a golf driving range and hitting bucket after bucket of balls out onto a big green field. This green field doesn't have holes, or bunkers, or any of the standard features of a golf course. But it has enabled me to cobble together a wracked and pitiful swing of some kind.

This is important because without a swing, you can't play golf. Without a swing you're just hitting golf balls randomly. I've been through phases of only being able to hit the ball in a kind of kiss-curl of a slice shot (it goes to the right), or an apologetic hook to the left. No good.

So I've adjusted my grip. Then I've squared my shoulders. I've even taken to sticking my arse out so that I'm over the ball in a good way. I've moved fingers, knees and chin to achieve a swing. Sometimes I forget the twenty seven individual adjustments I have to make in that second of action. The club comes down and I fall apart like one of those little wooden toys held together by elastic bands, you know the type.

So recently, after adding rhythm to my grip, stance, swing and perfectly-still-head, I've decided that at least a thousand balls hit out onto some indiscriminate piece of grass has qualified me to go on a golf course. I played my first round this morning.

Turning up like the new kid at school, and yes, my bag was new and not at all mud-stained, creased or heavily modified. I didn't know where to go, or what to do. Meandering onto the course I was advised by the course marshall to go straight to the third tee, as the first and second tees were occupied by slow players.

There I stood, looking down a piece of countryside shaped especially for this weird golf game. Golf is basically all those day-wasting games you played as a kid on some waste ground, trying to get a piece of concrete to bounce off the top of some abandoned refrigerator, a senseless piece of physical manipulation which somehow completely occupied you until it was done. Then you'd go home for tea.

Golf is that game times fifty. You will never satisfy yourself that you've mastered it, and so all your life becomes afternoons spent in a game that really has no point, except to gather in some nubbin of playfulness in the midst of an adult life with no leeway for mindlessness.

There I am, on the third tee. I'm imagining that my first shot will be one of those shots where, with no effort at all, shoulders, knees, chin, head, arms, wrists, feet, breath and hands all combine WITHOUT CONSCIOUS THOUGHT into the unmistakable pure pop of a ball being snatched by that piece of metal to be launched into the sky.

In most games you play against some other players, or some target held aloft. You compete to achieve some measurement in time, or length or accuracy. Not with golf. With golf you are competing against the entire idea of time and space. You turn a second into an arc of trajectory which can never be replicated or contained. In golf you attempt to send an object into an orbit of your desire, an orbit which suspends all other thought, concern or care. The moment of hitting the golf ball is pure existence given a discernible presence. It's golf.

So my first shot at the third tee. My first shot ever on a golf course. It went ten feet. The toupee of turf that my club ripped up in this process, that went three feet. Even adding them up together I only made thirteen feet. And a big muddy turf fly.

But nevermind. Later on in the round I chipped a ball up some sixty yards and it politely drummed it's way onto the green. As it rolled towards the hole, across the velveteen super-lawn, I felt like I had given birth to this ball and was watching it take it's first tentative steps.

I need to get a grip. Ha ha.