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The optimist versus the pessimist
Ben is an optimist -- the worst quality in any golfer -- but he has to be, otherwise he would have given up golf years ago. As it is, he optimistically gives it up once a month.
Fortunately, I am a pessimist, and made of sterner stuff. I never look back. I know that if I were to count up all the balls I've lost, all the bad rounds I've played, all the good rounds I've dreamt of, but never played -- if I brooded over any of that, I would throw myself into the water at the sixth hole. But the murky depths there may in fact be so shallow that I would merely be crippled for life. I know I would not be sufficiently crippled to be able to stop playing golf. So, after each game I simply forget about all my bad shots, and remember an occasional good one, a shot which I think of as my normal style. Ben says I forget about many of my bad shots even as I play them. But, as a deviously inaccurate scorer himself, he would say that, wouldn't he?
The thing to do about golf is to remember only the rare good things: The joy of only half-managing to stifle a sneeze as your opponent putts. The joy of watching your opponent turn on his partner and say, 'Don't keep saying sorry. It puts me off.' The joy of saying, 'Oh, bad luck!' as his ball hits a rake, bounces away from the bunker, only to plop into the water. The joy of watching him walk confidently up to play the only visible white sphere on the green sward, and discover that it is a mushroom.
I treasure also some rare moments from our novice days when Ben and I were even worse golfers than we are today. There he is: a chubby, clean-shaven youth, a wild grenadilla creeper draped around his shoulders as he peers out of the Natal coast jungle. Wham. Thonk. Snicker, snacker, like the jabberwock he goes, attempting to beat his ball to death in the bush instead of judiciously and mercifully declaring it unplayable.
'How many's that?' I enquire.
He hesitates, then says, 'I've played four shots.'
I've heard many more noises than that emanating from the forest, but no matter. In anticipation I have already deducted two shots from my own score.
Now the grenadillas about his shoulders are moving like pendulums, in time to his rhythmic swing at the ball, knee-deep in the undergrowth. Thwack. Nothing emerges. Thwack. Nothing happens. 'Bloody hell!' he shouts and starts to accelerate into a swishing motion, backwards and forwards. On the downward swing the ball, miraculously, pops fifteen centimetres perpendicularly into the air. On the angry backward swish his club connects and sends the ball flying a hundred metres in reverse to the tee he has just so unsuccessfully left.
Ben's caddie, though fascinated by the performance, has decided to watch from a safe position under a tree some distance ahead. In a fury, Ben finally hits the ball cleanly and it travels like a bullet, never rising more than a metre from the ground. It heads unerringly at the tree where his caddie is sitting. The caddie rises warily, then, realising he'll never make it in time, flings himself prone in the mud. The ball hits the tree-trunk centimetres above his head, and flies back into the jungle. Oh, what a breath-taking sight.
'My hole, I think,' I say gently.
Ben snorts, and then starts to swear. Oh, what a wonderful sound.
These are some of the good moments of golf. Whenever I mention them -- and I do so in mid-game at propitious times -- Ben is inclined to invent some strange tale, such as his description of my trusty eight-iron once slipping from my lifeless fingers and soaring, in a handsome arc, into the water.
'You're the only golfer I know who can make the club fly further than the ball,' he is fond of saying. But I remember no such thing.
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