Playing Golf

As the 4.5 of you who read this blog know, my only real relaxation comes from playing golf. I would even call it my hobby (besides from writing in this blog). I don't really have a lot of free time, but I do spend as much of it as I can playing golf. I'm not big into cars, or needlepoint, or painting, or shopping or other hobbies. I'm not much for sitting and watching sports either. Why watch some other people play well when I can be out playing terribly? I had a friend once who loved to salsa dance and spent all of her free time doing that. She would watch videos on it and talk about it often. It seemed to give her great pleasure. That was her thing and many other people have their "thing" but golf is mine. 

I'll be the first to admit that it's not an athletic endeavor. Some claim that it is, but I don't see it. It's especially non-athletic for those who ride in a cart. They say that if you walk and push or carry your clubs, you'll go about 4 miles. That's not bad exercise for some but I run more than that most mornings and I lift weights 3 times a week too, so it means nothing to me. I would never claim that playing golf gave me a workout like if I were riding a bike or swimming.  Still, I like it because it is outdoors and has many different colors of green to see. I wrote a short story about golf once. Look on this website on the page which has "Random Things", and you will see it.

What I will say is that it can take a lot of time to play. If one plays 18 holes with others, it might take as much as 5 hours to play. Lots of time is spent looking for lost balls in the bushes and trees because we are amateurs and we hit plenty of bad shots. You also have to wait for others to play ahead of you so there is a lot of waiting. Most people I know say that they simply don't have that much time to give up. The truth is that I don't either. 

I have come up with strategies which make the time spent for me about an hour on the course. At most, I'm playing for 90 minutes. Not much longer than playing a few good games when bowling. One thing I do is only play 9 holes instead of 18. That alone will cut the time in half. The problem is that golf courses don't care if you play 9 holes, but they aren't going to discount it any. They want to suck as much money out of you as they can. What they'll do is say that the rate to play 18 holes is 40 bucks (I just made that number up). If you go in and say that you only want to play 9 holes, they'll say great but still charge you 40 bucks. Now, that they love to do. You pay for it all but don't stay. What they will do is have something called a "sunset" rate which is much cheaper. They'll know that the sun might set at 7:30pm so they'll say that if you play after something like 5:30pm, you only need to pay 15 bucks. With something less than 2 hours of sunlight left, you're probably not getting 9 holes done and you're definitely not getting 18. I like to get out there for that sunset rate and play by myself. With only me, I can get done fairly quickly. No chatting up friends. No beers from the cart person. Just me hitting a silly little ball and getting home way before dark.

I also like to just go out to the driving range and hit balls and practice. It's relaxing to me to just swing the club. I'm not really thinking about anything in particular and it does help to clear up my mind. Does it help when I'm on the course? It used to but stopped when I moved to New Orleans. As you might recall, I moved to New Orleans in January of 2021. I was living there working for Tulane University. As any of you who know me have heard me say, I did not like living in New Orleans. It was a city with failing infrastructure and no real appetite to fix stuff. One of the things that I missed was having public golf courses with practice driving ranges. When I lived in OKC, a city I really didn't like either, I could at least say that they provided things for the people who lived there. That city had 4.5 public courses and all of them had driving ranges. In New Orleans, they only had one public course but to its credit, it did have a driving range.

My problem was that this public course with the driving range in New Orleans was on the other side of the city. If I wanted to drive my car over there, I could expect to spend at least 40 minutes in traffic. That was nuts since I was only hoping to hit balls for 15 minutes. In OKC and before that in Birmingham, I could be on the range in 10 minutes. Thus, I'd run over and spend time practicing 3 or 4 times a week after work. I know you're saying to yourself, why not stay there for one hour once a week as opposed to 15 minutes 4 times a week? There is a big difference in that since you're trying to engrain swing patterns and muscle memory, more shorter sessions are better than one longer one. As a result of moving to New Orleans my game fell apart. In fact, the guys I occasionally played with thought that I was a stone liar when I told them that I used to shoot scores in the mid-80s (fair) as opposed to the low 100s (terrible) which they normally saw. I just never got the swing to work again once I moved there.

So why do I play? I like to be outside. It's an outdoor sport so the fresh air is refreshing to me. I like that it is not very physical. I run (hate it) and lift weight (hate it) 6 days a week. I want to do something that is less taxing on the body. I do like that it's not that expensive. People naturally assume that golf is very expensive but not if you do it right. I'd say that it's about the same as bowling, if you owned your own shoes and ball. People say that it's for white people and I'm a black guy. Not true. I'd see courses where everyone playing was black. It just depended on the side of town. After all, it's just some cut grass with a hole in it. That can be on any piece of worthless land. Heck, put it on top of an old land fill. Not like houses are going there anyway.

 I also like that I can do it alone. My favorite sport to play is basketball, however, you need a bunch of people to coordinate a time and place to play and then if there are too many guys, you have to sit out and wait. If there are not enough folks, you're all playing some half-court thing. Ugh. With golf, if I get an itch to run out and spend 25 minutes, I don't need to coordinate with anyone. I just hop up and go. 

So that's my thing and I'm sticking with it.