Keep your head down and spread your legs a bit more..

Golf and sex are about the only things you can enjoy without being good at. And no matter how bad you are, it is always possible to get worse.

Mark Twain is one of my most-respected writers and most of the respect he gets from me is because of his famous quote ‘Golf is a good walk spoiled’. With due respect, he has a lot of other reasons to be respected. But ever since I heard that, I respect my walks a lot more, which incidentally have never been on a Golf course. See how much of respect I have used in this paragraph. I told you, I am a respectable fellow.

Golf is a game where you put a very small ball into an even smaller hole. Research shows that the average age of a golf player is 51 years (my research; but remember, my blog). I guess that explains why golf is such a thrilling game keeping you at the edge of your seat always. Any more excitement and the percentage of elders in the population will drastically reduce.

What is it with senior management and Golf? Golf is 20 percent talent and 80 percent management. Again my research suggests that the favourite game of 94% of senior management is Golf. There are so many better games and you are pardoned if you thought that the law of averages should suggest that those games might also be popular among the senior management. But alas, that is not the case. By the way, do you know the ideal score for a senior management golfer? It is 90. If he is better than that, he is neglecting his company. And if he is worse, he is neglecting his Golf.

Talking about golf and senior management reminds me of this joke:
The game of choice for junior employees is basketball.
The game of choice for frontline employees is football.
The game of choice for middle management is tennis.
The game of choice for CEOs and executives is golf.
Conclusion: Higher up the corporate ladder you are, smaller your balls are.

But I am still not sure if one takes up Golf after becoming senior management or if one takes up Golf to become senior management. If the sample of one of my senior colleague, who recently moved up to senior management, is only considered, it would suggest the former.

A senior colleague of mine explained his liking for Golf as thus, “You are not only playing with other players, but with yourself too. There are natural complexities also that you encounter which makes the game very interesting.” I found that explanation puzzling since it was no different in other sports too. My confusion was resolved when I learned later that Golf is the only sport he plays.

I asked a friend of mine, who is learning the game, how his game was shaping up. His reply was, “It has improved a lot. I am hitting fewer trees now.” A senior executive of our company has all the gadgets to play golf better; he now just needs to learn to play the game. Golf sure is a mysterious game that raises so many conundrums. He makes me wonder ‘do you buy the gadgets to improve the game or do you improve your game and then make use of the gadgets?’

Another colleague in senior management died for the cause, sorry, died on the course. But we weren’t surprised; he was so fanatic about the game. He got a hole in one before he even learned the game. There is another fanatic follower of the game in our senior management, who beats everybody so miserably that if he collected a dollar for every win, he would have been richer than Bill Gates by now.

I have not taken to the game due to its obvious lack of excitement over an eighteen-hole marathon walk of close to four hours. The other problem is that it takes you so far away from the clubhouse unlike other games. H G Wells once remarked that the uglier a man's legs are, the better he plays golf. By that logic, I should actually be a great golf player. Cricket builds character, soccer reveals it and golf exposes it; and that is another reason I keep away from up the game. My only handicap in Golf is the grass, woods and irons - I don’t know about them!

How can any write-up on golf not mention Tiger Woods? If fifty years ago, 100 white men chasing one black man across a field was called the Ku Klux Klan. Today it's called the PGA Tour.

If golf is all about putting things into holes, caroms, anyone?