Mark Twain did not originate the famous quote “Golf is a good walk spoiled.” Who did is apparently still up in the air. Nevertheless, the sport can still serve as an excuse for wearing funny pants.
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I recall reading an article in which Alistair Cooke wrote about meeting an old Scotsman, who told him, “If it’s nae the wind and it’s nae the rain, it’s nae the golf.”(1) The British, Cooke wrote in another article, expect that they must overcome difficulty in their pursuit of a good score:
Most Britons, of whatever skill, have been brought up to regard a links course as the ideal playground, on which the standard hazards of the game are the wind, bumpy, treeless fairways, deep bunkers and knee‐high rough.(2)
I am reminded of Robert Frost’s defense of rhymed poetry: writing poetry without rhyme is like “playing tennis without a net.” If there is to be a sense of accomplishment, there must have been a obstacle to be overcome. Do you get a feeling of worth taking candy from a baby?
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It doesn’t take great mental acuity to be a somewhat good golfer. You just need to have a handle on rudimentary arithmetic. You need to count to 18 for the number of holes you will play, to distinguish between, say, the number 7 on an iron and the number 9 on another, and, most important, to be able to count up to about 100, the number of strokes if you’re not having a good day.
Now, we all know that Jack Nicklaus was a quantum leap better than being a “somewhat good golfer.” Hall of Famer, in fact. But that doesn’t mean that he has surpassed the Sunday golfers in arithmetical proficiency. Commenting the other day on the death toll from COVID-19, he asserted, “I don’t think the deaths are a correct number.”(3)
Unless Nicklaus carries a diploma in epidemiology (that I am not aware of) around in his golf bag next to his putter, I must question whether his arithmetical skill allows him to reach the number 200,000.
Why a news source would bother quoting a golfer on the pandemic is beyond me. What I do know is that if he added his golf score card with the same disregard for facts, he would be disqualified from any tournament.
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(1) I recall reading that in The New York Times Magazine, but, alas, a search of the paper came up with naught. There are other sites that do mention that saying as proverbial amongst the Scots.
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