MEET
MY GRANDSON, THE GOLF PUNDIT
I
am seriously thinking of getting divorced. Not from the usual miscreant you might suspect in these
cases but from my grandson.
That’ll be the grandson in whom I am well pleased and my just reward for
not killing his mother while she was growing up. He’s growing up fast and has arrived at that peculiar age of
cute-on-smart that is pertinent to children of a certain age. I’m not sure he understands the wealth
of his wise owl statements but they sound great and cannot be defeated by any
adult logic I know of.
Take,
for instance, his recent foray with the man in the red suit and white
fuzz. We made a special trip to
his local town to post his Christmas list to the only resident I know is daft
enough to live Up The Pole all year round and still manages a hefty “Ho, ho,
ho”. He duly posted his
handwritten letter in the North Pole pillar-box and walked deliberately away
from the child-mobbed Father Christmas sitting beside the mail spot. Curious, I asked him why – to which he
replied: “He’s only pretend. Only
the real one works on Christmas Eve”.
And then, to slam the truth slap-bang home he adds: “Those pretend ones
should be locked up in Colchester Police Station”. I’m still flabbergasted and I can’t compute the requisite
answer to that one - or even begin to refute it. He’s four.
Back to the impending
divorce. It all began innocently
enough - with his imaginative announcement that there was a dragon in my back
garden. I roll with these
iconoclastic statements. They are
commonplace to this young boy with an imagination as active as a box of frogs
on speed. And I’m glad I do: we’ve
had the best of discussions about the meaning of life, the moon, how your legs
get all used up when you run, and the role of the back seat driver. On this latter matter, he has no end of
advice to offer. He might be only
four but he has the hallmark of achieving doctorate status on this particular
subject by the time he is six. I
see fireworks ahead should he visit these observations on any future life
partner. Steer clear!
Divorce,
then, from angel grandson seems a bit drastic and would never have been on the
cards if it wasn’t for the fact that he strayed confidently onto a subject he’d
kept well clear of for all of his little life to date. That subject was golf.
Let’s
be clear about something here: golf is a crazy game. It is possibly – barring any claims to the contrary from
secretive Inner Mongolia – the only game on the planet that does not elicit an
adrenaline response. That is not
to say the game can be played while semi-comatose but it is a game where the
trajectory of the ball is away from the player and therefore evokes no fight or
flight response. The only time
this neurotransmitter needs to kick into protective response mode is when some “Where’s
Wally” golfer fails to shout “Fore” as he hits a long but wayward shot. And into this crazy game I found myself
projected. I went voluntarily so I
have nobody else to blame. It is
also one of the rare pursuits in my life that I take somewhat seriously –
mainly because I’m useless at it and my spirit of competition is forever
thwarted. I struggle to make the
time for it and practice sessions and lessons are as rare as hens’ teeth. Add to that the conflagrations and
hostilities of a British winter and my delicate skin…the shades and nuances of
a rule book that was designed by a masochist and by-passes my brain… and a
dress code that any decent dinosaur would not be seen dead in… well, it all adds
up to make me a pretty sensitive soul should anybody venture an opinion that is
not heaping praises on my devotion, dedication and wherewithal in the face of
an intransigent game.
And
that’s where grandson came unstuck.
Faced with his imaginary backyard dragon, I proffered, by way of a
nanna-in-shining-armour defence, my trusty steed golf bag replete with clubs. These were my weapons of mass
destruction. I promised grandson a
glorious victory over this dissident dragon in the shape of my swing on those
clubs. That’s when he guffawed. Not in a four year old gaggle of
giggles but a raucous snort in the satirical manner of Vintage Golfer (“From
Pants Golfer To Vintage Golfer: a tribute” http://foleysmith555.blogspot.co.uk/2015/04/from-pants-golfer-to-vintage-golfer.html) when he first saw my swing.
Gorgeous
grandson was not happy with just a gregarious guffaw. He then launched into demonstration mode. Swagger pants, barely out of trainer
pants, pulled off a swing that was a composite of shot putter Geoff Capes on a
shockingly bad swing atop a fanciful fouette from a pirouetting Darcey Bussell overlaid
by a kangaroo hop. This, it seems,
was his reproduction of my swing.
He had seen it once only when I took him for a golf lesson.
That
caught everyone’s attention. Oh
yes, did I mention it was Christmas and friends and family were assembled. He was playing to the gallery and when that
gallery demanded an “Encore”, he was milking it. What was most galling was his ability to reproduce this
awful example of a swing with an exacting consistently that persistently evades
me.
I
felt the increasing blood rush to my cheeks and the need to defend my honour. I have borne the cost of this expensive
game, I have tried to keep out of every golfers way by taking to the fairways
when there is least demand lest I upset the longstanding members who “own” the
course by some unknown divine right, I continue to run the gauntlet of a
love-hate relationship with this beautifully beguiling and engaging game while
embarrassing the life out of myself as I shank and whiff my merry way through
any permutation of holes, I have had to divest myself of all self-respect in an
effort to overcome the urge to run like a hart to the hills and take up bowling
instead, and all the while knowing that competent golfers everywhere have
little or no patience with beginners but have plenty to say on the pace of
play. I was definitely feeling the
grandson burn.
And
as I opened my mouth to vent my feelings and defend my honour, my grey cells
did a complete U-turn. It was the
word “absurd” that neon flashed across my brain and aligned itself with the
words of Tertullian, an early Christian theologian, writing in the second
century who said: Credo quia absurdum (I believe because it is absurd). And who can deny my swing is absurd –
not I. But look at Bubba Watson,
KJ Choi, Tommy Gainey, Jim Furyk, Eamonn Darcy, JM Singh or Doug Sanders: these
Sultans of Swing keep themselves out of dire straits with their absurd
executions. That swing thing might
not look pretty in their professional hands but it sure gets them playing down
the whimsicals of Whistling Straits and suchlike. There was yet hope on the horizon of my golfing world and I
silenced my lips and clothed them instead in an absurd smile.
Back to gregarious
grandson and his crowd-pleasing antics.
How can I contemplate a divorce move when he has the most winsome of
ways about him? How can I resist a
little boy who clasps my face gently in his cupped hands and looks me in the
eyes and says, “I love you, Nanna”?
What of a whacky, wayward swing, grumpy old guys and gals in absurdly
out-of-fashion clothes with a penchant for “bigging” themselves up out on the
course because that’s the only place they can experience speed, or impatient
players – born with a club in their hand - who have long forgotten how difficult
it is for a latecomer to the game to play, when I have at my disposal the
essence of life itself: a little boy who knows what love is? Methinks, if golf
is meant to truly represent life, then it has a lot to learn.
And should you want to
know what my swing looks like, look no further than fellow Irishman, Eamonn Darcy,
in the video clip above. He and I could
be golf swing twins.
