You Versus The Golf Course

Bobby Jones, one of the greatest golfers of all time, once said “Competitive golf is played mainly on a five-and-a-half-inch course… the space between your ears.”  Truer words were never spoken.  Unfortunately, this fact creates many problems for golfers.

Many people think that golf, like any other sport, is played against fellow competitors.  While it may sound like a lot of hocus pocus at first to say that golf is played against the golf course, this statement can be proven.  In almost every other sport, a competitor plays against and reacts to his fellow competitor.  In football when one team has the ball, the other team plays defense and attempts to get the ball back.  In golf it’s better if you don’t react to your fellow competitor at all.  This does not mean that the “opposing team” from the football analogy is absent, but rather that the opposing team is the golf course itself.  It is the only thing in golf to which you must react.

When a player, especially one who has played other sports, has a bad shot and ends up behind a tree, his first reaction is to lay blame somewhere.  But the player can’t lay blame on his playing partner because he didn’t do anything and so the most popular conclusion is that the player himself did something wrong.  While this conclusion may be somewhat true, if the tree had not been there, the player’s ball would be in good shape.  The player, however, who gets hung up on the things he did wrong on his previous shot would make a very bad quarterback.  He would write himself off and tell himself that he could not make the first down because he had thrown the errant pass that had caused the third down and because the other team tackled too quickly.  This would be ludicrous, but this is exactly what a golfer does when he complains about his lie or his previous shot.

The golfer must realize that the golf course is his opponent, and if he wishes to be successful, he must meet the challenges the course deals just as a quarterback would meet the defensive formations of the opposing team.