How to Win at Golf
Without Actually Playing Well
Jon WinokurPantheon | May 2000
$21.00 | 0-375-40729-4
Pantheon
Books@Random
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. . . Without Actually Playing Well
Golf is a cruel game. It is so exacting that even its masters never master it, so intricate that most golfers never achieve consistency. One's command of the swing is so precarious that imperceptible changes in pulse, blood pressure, or body chemistry can ruin everything. You play badly and you don't know why; you play well and you don't know why or, worse, you think you know why (the golf gods reserve special humiliation for those who think they've discovered the Secret). You strive and struggle, and just when you've made a little progress, golf humbles you yet again.
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All golfers, from leading money-winners to Sunday hackers, measure success not by positive accomplishment, but in limiting mistakes: "Don't press, don't dip, don't peek, don't lunge, don't quit, don't sway, don't hook, don't slice, don't shank, etc., etc., etc." Even the scoring system is negative: The object is to achieve the absence of something, i.e., strokes. (In a "B.C." comic strip, a cave woman about to tee off with a crude golf club says to her male companion, "Let me get this straight, the less I hit the ball the better I am doing." "That's right," he replies. "Then why do it at all?" she asks. In the last frame, night has fallen, and the man is still standing there, repeating to himself: "Why . . . do it . . . at . . . all? . . .")
Sad to say, golf excellence is a horizon that recedes as you approach it. The odds are, you'll never reach the point where you're satisfied with your game, and in the unlikely event you do, you'll soon want to play better. And there will lie the seeds of your discontent, because golf isn't cumulative. You don't ratchet yourself upward to ever greater proficiency, you play well one day and poorly the next. You hit one or two or eight or twelve decent shots a round, and many more awful ones.
No, you simply can't play well consistently.
But you can win consistently. You cannot master the game, but you can dominate your opponents. Not by outplaying them, by outthinking them.
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