On Golf…

I guess it’s all the noise about Tiger Woods, but I can’t seem to escape golf this week.  I don’t understand golf.  I have tried over the years, but it just doesn’t make sense to me.  In fact there are three facets of golf I just will never understand:

1.  What is the point of golf?

2.  Why do people play golf?

3.  Most especially, why do people sit around watching other people playing golf on TV?

I have spent many years trying to figure this out and have had no luck whatsoever.

My father tried to get me to take up golf.  Growing up, we belonged to Tuscarora Country Club.  My father joined about the time my teenage years began.  For some reason, he thought it would be good for us.  Yeah, right.  He should have learned that lesson after the family camping fiasco.  I briefly dated a young lady there who tried to interest me in golf.  That, too, was a disaster on many levels.  No, I just don’t get it.

Based on what I saw there as a teenager, people would strap a cooler of beer on the back of an electric cart, throw a bag of sticks in the back of it and spend the day riding around outdoors-never my favorite place- getting progressively drunker and more obnoxious while beating a little white ball with a stick.  Mind you, I have nothing against drinking- in fact that was the only attractive part of the equation- but I prefer to have cocktails with witty conversation indoors- where it is air conditioned and they have nice comfy chairs.  These folks would eventually all end up back at the Tap Room at Tuscarora anyway, so why not just cut the golf step and go straight to the Tap Room?  I never understood.  Instead, I spent a couple of summers lying by the pool or playing tennis before I gave up the entire Country Club thing out of boredom.

But people seem so passionate about golf.  I can’t believe it when I travel and see people getting their golf clubs at baggage claim.  These are not easy things to drag around nor are they cheap to take along in today’s world.  The airlines charge them for taking them along.  Can’t you rent them or something?  This just seems a bit much to me…

And I’m convinced the fact that I don’t understand Phoenix is tied up with my lack of understanding golf.  The two seem to go together.  Lot’s of golf clubs come off the planes there!  And please help me understand why anyone wants to be outdoors playing golf when it’s 115 degrees?  I’m Southern.  We were taught that when it gets too hot, one retires to the veranda with a cocktail– one does not go traipsing off over the fields chasing a little white ball with a stick.  Well, at least not until numerous cocktails have been enjoyed…then who knows?