Wisdom learned from Golf (part 2)

Anyone who knows me knows that I think that golf is the greatest game in the world.  In golf you are not trying to hurt fellow competitors; you are not trying to fake them out or deceive them; rather, you are relying upon yourself—your developed skills, your poise and composure, and you are competing on a level playing field so to speak—the course is the same for everyone, and if you get into trouble it was your own fault—you can’t blame your teammates or ‘the conditions.’ You shouldn't even 'blame' yourself.  So you had a 'bad day.'  Wrong; you only had a bad 4-5 hours.   

I have learned from some of the greats in the game, and some of their gems of wisdom I have independently arrived at myself.  I think I have been teachable; I hope you will be as well.  There is a satisfaction in being relevant at my age, both in my Church, and on the golf course.  I believe the following to be relevant:

·        The best players are more mentally gifted than physically gifted.  Success in golf is as much mental discipline and emotional control as is strength, flexibility, and quick reactions.  Good golf is a state of mind; it has to be in your subconscious.  Your mind makes your body do things, not the other way around. 

 

·        Desire, determination, and discipline will get you much farther than size, strength, and stamina (although those qualities are helpful in many physical contests).  If you are negative or pessimistic you fail.

·        Listen to those who know.  A fine golfer in the 1960’s and ‘70’s, Juan (Chi Chi) Rodriquez said: “My grandparents on my father’s side live to 114 and 115.  After I had a heart attack [in 1998] my doctor said, ‘You do what I say and you live.  You do what you want and you die.’ I had smoked at least three packs a day for years.” He did what the doctor said. He quit. He is still alive.

·        Never pay attention to the scoreboard or your own scorecard or the game being played by your opponent.  Just play your own game—the one you prepared for. 

 

·        If you fail on one shot, or one hole, or round, or one tournament don’t give up.  Golfers fail all the time.  You have maybe 70 players  playing in a tournament and so you could say they all fail to some degree except the guy who has the lowest score and wins the tournament.  I say that they all, or most of them, fought the good fight and finished their course.  They stayed for the duration.  There was one victor, but there were 69 other winners. 

·        A former U. S. Open golf champion, Julius Boros, gave this sound perspective after losing his young wife to a cerebral hemorrhage and less than a year later winning the national championship from Ben Hogan: “People worry so much about their games.  You can see them out there on any weekend, fidgeting over every shot as if the U.S. Open depended on it. Wind direction, downhill lie, trapped green—is this the right club, maybe a six-iron would have been better, spread the stance a little wider, recheck the grip. . . endless worry.  Your life doesn’t depend on it.  Not even your living.  No game is worth the agony that some golfers go through, and that includes a few of my fellow pros on the tour.” “Play a round of golf with me and I hope you will relax and enjoy yourself.  That’s what I plan to do.”  (Sports Illustrated, March 25, 1968, 'My easygoing game.')

Now here is my scriptural summation of the whole matter: 

     "It is good and comely [for a man]...to enjoy the good of all his labour that he taketh which God giveth him: for it is his portion.  For he shall not much remember the days of his life; because God answereth him in the joy of his heart." (Ecclesiastes 5: 18, 20)

Lessons Learned on the Golf Course

Interestingly this posting is done at the urging of my wife who is not a golfer and who has seen me play but once in our entire marriage.  However, she always encourages me to play and always asks about my game upon my return.  I have shot my age each year for the past three years, an accomplishment I am personally very proud of, and she asks me every time I come home if I did it again; the answer, the great majority of the time, of course, is ‘no.’  I don’t think she realizes how difficult that is.  But did I have fun?  You bet.

Time on the golf course, however, can give a player insights and teach important lessons that can be extrapolated and brought to other situations in life. Courtesy, planning ahead, dealing with hazards—these are not just part of the golf experience, but of the life experience. 

  

·        Golfers are optimistic.  They have a goal and they invariably think they can achieve it; if they broke 90 or 80 or 70 before, they think they can do it again and do even better ‘this time.’  That’s okay unless their great score came 20 years ago.   Likewise distances.  If they once hit a great 7 iron 170 yards, most golfers think they can do it again even if realistically they hit it only 145 yards.  Smart golfers know their realistic distances and choose their clubs accordingly. 

     

·        Beauty can be appreciated, enjoyed, but can be distracting.  One should enjoy the beauty and enjoyment of being on most golf courses.  But if you want to do well in the game at hand stay focused on your swing mechanics and course strategy once you approach your ball. 

·        Consideration of others.  Not replacing divots, not raking your footprints out of sand traps, not repairing ball marks on greens, loud talking and distracting others, cell phone usage on the course, slow play—these are the things that show major lack of consideration for others.   You are not the only person on the golf course, on the road, in the library, in line at the store, in the theater—you get the drift.

·        Play by the rules—know the rules and use good golf etiquette. 

 

·        Forget the last hole; each hole is a new challenge.  A match is not lost—or won—in the first three or four holes.  Keep the big picture in mind.   Remember Yogi's truism: "It’s not over until it’s over."

·        In competition,  play your own game; don’t worry about the other guy’s game—you can’t do anything about it.  There is even a game or challenge within your own game: your 'long game' may be 'on' but your short game is poor, etc., etc., etc.  You have enough to worry about with your own game.

   

·        Concentrate on the challenge at hand. Plan out your hole before you play it—where you want to go, what you want to stay away from. Play smart.  Don’t take unnecessary chances that have a low percentage chance of success. 

 

·        Think before every shot; don’t just swing away.  Visualize your shot. Engage a mental rehearsal of your key swing points before you take your swing.  Focus on a specific target and then block out all other thoughts once you begin your swing.

·        Know your capabilities—your realistic club distances—your weaknesses.   Play to your strengths. Often he who makes the fewest mistakes wins. 

     Finally, the biggest lesson of all: Control.  You've got to control your body, your mind, and your emotions. If golf can help a person learn that, everyone should play the game.    

 Have fun.  It’s a game—a social game.  Most golfers would hate to play with Tiger Woods after they had played with him once so they could brag about it.  He would be no fun at all to be with on the course on a regular basis.  Make it fun for the other guy too.

Can You Come Out To Play?

I suppose that there are few people over the age of three who don’t remember hearing that question asked of them, or if not, they themselves, asking, ‘Mom, can I go play now?’ 

Play is a natural concomitant of growing up.  It is important as a way of visualizing oneself as having ‘adult’ abilities or competencies—of growing up to be like Mom or Dad or some hero and participating in the world around us. It is a means of developing power and control of our environment and hopefully ourselves.  It is, at its best, re-creation or initial creation and discovery. 

As we get older we can play sports or a musical instrument and derive very positive benefits from the participation.  This kind of play, satisfying and fun play,  quality play, should be and usually is challenging, growth-promoting, and not damaging to oneself or others. Done wisely it can be contributive to a healthy life. 

But in playing or participating in some activities, one can get dirty or injured or lose something of great value. We can play in the mud and get grimy; we can play in the grass and get grass stains on our knees. We can play the slot machines or play the odds in various gambling endeavors such as cards or horseracing or the financial markets and lose our financial security, our honesty, our integrity. We can ‘play around’ in our youth and in young adulthood and lose innocence, freedom and self-respect.

And thus we can lose our future. 

Life is not a game.  And if we are wise we will not ‘play around’ with something as important as our eternal future.

But life teaches me that many or most people have played around to some degree inappropriately.  All of us have become unclean, morally speaking.  To regain peace, self-respect, and acceptability to our Maker we need to become clean again. 

It is possible; there is a way to redeem our future.  It is a religious way that has the authority and power to effect the needed change. 

If you are still reading, I invite you to consider my proposition. 

I concede that there are many under religious guise who assert that their solution in providing hope for the hopeless, strength for the weak, an anchor for the drifting, a cleansing of the filth is the ‘right one.’ Yes, there are some standard approaches we alone can do, religious and secular, that are needful and do some good.  But in the final analysis they do no more good than running water and using hand soap on a seriously infected wound.  The cleansing must go at least as deep as the wound and be more powerful than the infecting agent. 

The only moral surgeon who can do that is our Savior, Jesus Christ.  That is why we call Him our Savior.  He uses His ‘medical’ team to assist Him—His Church and its qualified and approved priesthood-directed helpers and approved methods—principles and doctrines, ordinances, and covenants—in short, the fullness of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.  If a church has these ingredients and the Savior and Redeemer Jesus Christ is the chief cornerstone and the immortality and eternal life of man its objective, and if a man or woman submits to God's requirements and comes unto Him he or she can be cleansed and saved and find peace in this life and Eternal Life in the life to come.  What ‘game’ can be better than that?

I bear my formal witness and conviction to you that The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is that Church.  If you are not a believer I invite your sincere investigation.  If you are a believer and have slipped you can return and repent. I have staked my life on this conviction and testimony.  I know this to be true. 

Who Are We—Really?

I am intrigued by the fact that the greatest man in history, Jesus of Nazareth, asked some of His closest disciples, “Whom do men say that I, the Son of man am?”  In answer they put forth a number of names.  Then He asked, “But whom say ye that I am?”  One, Simon Peter, summoned up courage and answered, I think, for most of the other disciples, saying, “Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God.”  Jesus acknowledged to Simon Peter that he got it right. (Matt. 16:13-18)

 

Now what is fascinating is this: How did Simon get it right? How did he really know?  Jesus said that it was “revealed” unto him by God, “my Father which is in heaven.”  How?  Maybe by asking God in sincere prayer and not by judging by appearances—where He was from (“Can anything good come from Galilee?”) or what He was wearing, or what he did ‘for a living,’ etc.  How we know is by being worthy of receiving personal revelation and then asking for it and then getting it. 

    

Hearing others’ opinions on who, notwithstanding His name, others said He was, and notwithstanding Peter’s own close personal association with the Man, Jesus, it took revelation to confirm the divine identity of Jesus for Peter. 

Maybe it is the same with us. We’ve been given a name by our parents.  Over time we have established a public identity and a private identity that may or may not be a true evaluation of who we have become convinced we are.  But neither of the two—the public identity or the personal identity may be accurate.  Either perception may be distorted by deception or by other means. It is for many people.  It also can be cleared up by revelation. 

If we come to know that we have a divine identity, a blood and spirit relationship to God, and we are much more than a ‘butcher, a baker, a candlestick maker,’ or whatever, we will begin to act more in concert with who we really are.  We will take off the mask, will quit the posturing, will begin to act with more humility and will find ourselves coming to be more at peace with ourselves and with our fellow man. 

 

Playacting can be exhausting, expensive, and wasteful.  People gravitate toward the genuine man or woman.  And the genuine man or woman, boy or girl, knows that he/she is a child of God and will begin to live up to it.  There is a nobility in divinity and of knowing we are of noble birth. We will measure all our actions by this true identity and will be much less likely to do wrong or go wrong.

The sooner we find out who we really are, and whose we really are, the better for us and those who know us.