ADAGES, ADVICE, GOLF, THE MEANING OF LIFE, AND BAGPIPES

Top picture: Jimmy Demaret, Byron Nelson, Bobby Jones, Ben Hogan
Bottom picture: Bobby Jones, Dick Meyer

It is said English is a hard language to learn but I’ve never had any problems with it.  I’ve been wittering along in it for all the years of my life.  I can’t remember a time without words.  It’s not that I can’t be silent.  I can.  I can be notoriously silent externally but, even when a host of my colleagues and friends are commenting to their hearts’ content about my dearth of noise and words – a rarely-visited place for me - I still have a live stream going on in my head.  Me-on-me conversations: I love those convos because I can say what I like.

The days of my youth were filled with adages and proverbs.  Round every corner was a new one to behold.  And I learnt them diligently in the vain and certain hope that they would show me the path to enlightenment or, at the very least, to signpost me in the right direction.  A sort of life insurance against making mistakes and falling down pits, I gleaned their wisdom. 

After sixty years of courting this wisdom, I can safely report it hasn’t worked.  When I most need proverbial inspiration, my memory bank crashes and by the time I’ve re-loaded, it is all too late, or I recall a saying but it’s the wrong one in the wrong place and most certainly at the wrong time.  For my daily dose of verbiage and wordage, think ‘foot, mouth, open and insert’ as standard and you’ll have me clocked in a nano second.

“You can’t teach an old dog new tricks” the saying goes but I am always willing to fly in the face of convention and, given my late but great interest in learning this maddening game of golf, I decided to garner its lore in a last ditch effort to cushion the later years of my life from the effects of those pitfalls.

And golf and golfers are no exception.  Finding myself in this brave new world and within a genre of expression that states, “like golf, life is an intricate game so play it well”, I set about acquiring its ancient store.

Ask Joe Ordinary who’s the number one golfer (sorry Jason, Jordan and Rory) and the answer is Tiger – the young man who inspired and changed the face of golf forever and took out a few water hydrants along the way.

“The greatest thing about tomorrow is I will be better than I am today.  And that’s how I look at my life.  I will be a better golfer, I will be a better person, I will be a better father, I will be a better husband, I will be a better friend.  That’s the beauty of tomorrow”, said Tiger.  Well, I have news for you, Tiger.  You met the wrong Foley - it wasn’t swing coach Seán you needed, it was Kathleen.  That’ll be my mother, the late, great Kathleen Foley.  She had no truck with that “tomorrow” stuff.  If you’re going to do it, get your procrastinating socks off and get it done today.  Despite your Foley-fabby golf swing, you’ve taken a swing too many in the out of bounds and perhaps you’re not the best hook to hang my expectations on. Take a leaf out of her book, Tiger, and get yourself sorted today.

Next on my list was the trim shape of The Hawk’s five foot, eight inch, one hundred and thirty pound frame – nobody could accuse him of being a dadbod - when he said “As you walk down the fairway of life, you must smell the roses, for you only get to play one round”.  Enlightenment at last, thanks to Mr Ben Hogan of the famous fundamental “Five Lessons” and star of “The Myths Everyone Knows, The Man No One Knew”.  I was whooping along with this statement, happy as a pig in muck, secure in the knowledge that your mate, Byron Nelson, said that you wanted the standards you left for the game to speak more eloquently than your words.  Just as well then, since you were a man of few words.  But here’s a thorny question: why did you spend so much time on the practice range if the fairway was the place to smell the roses?  You might counter this with a practice makes perfect riposte but we only ever get a ‘grab it by the short and curlies and run with it’ sort of chance in life.  And you really shot the wisdom of that fine statement in the foot when you declared that you preferred to be on the range.  That’s a statement I am now letting fade to insignificance.  Reader, I don’t mean to diss the great man of golf, who pioneered the modern swing in its transition from hickory to steel handled clubs, but actions speak louder than words in my books and smelling the roses on the perennial practice range is about as much use as a chocolate teapot.

Having found no relief in the Gallic silences of one, V Dubuisson, I was beginning to roll with the Raymond Floyd gem that "they call it golf because all the other four letter words were taken" and was in the process of swopping "golf" for "life" in that statement when I happened on a quote by an old favourite of mine, PG Wodehouse. I'm a lifelong fan of all the jolly japes and exaggerated realisms of his every book.

PG “Laughter The Best Medicine” Wodehouse epitomised the life message when he wrote, "Golf... is the infallible test.  The man who can go into a patch of rough alone, with the knowledge that only God is watching him, and play the ball where it lies, is the man who will serve you faithfully and well."

It's good, it's profound in the round, but I have to disagree.

PG, let me give you some tips here: the time of Honest John is over.  In the I-spy-Orwellian-Big-Brother-Watching age that we live in, nobody has to be honest.  We have the overhead cam, the street cam, the phone cam, the robot cam, the fly-on-the-wall cam and the Stay-at-Home-Joe armchair marshal.  Who needs honesty? Even the confessional and Father O'Field are no longer in demand for absolution.  Transparency is the new buzzword for honesty but, don't be confused, it is not the same thing.  You only need to be transparent once you've been found out in a lie.  So cheat away, get caught, bleat "Mae culpa", and then be transparent.  That is the way of the world.

And then there was Bobby Jones.  "No one will ever have golf under his thumb.  No round ever will be so good it could not have been better.  Perhaps this is why golf is the greatest of games.  You are not playing a human adversary; you are playing a game.  You are playing old man par.

I’m getting the hang of this, Bobby J.  If I supplant “golf” with “life” in the above statement, there’s a fair way chance I might survive this greatest game of all - life - with a smile on my face.  To summarise, never expect to nail life down, know with hindsight you could have done better and all you're asking is to equal the expectations for the course when it’s your time to sign off.  Yup, I can live with that one! But then I have also got to live with the mysteries of the Voynich manuscript - and no-one has found a suitable vehicle of translation for that one either.

Mind you, I am mindful of this astounding fact: The people who gave us golf and called it a game are the same people who gave us bagpipes and called it music.  I would have been quite content to laugh it off as pertinent to the quirky type of DNA prevailing north of Hadrian’s Wall, and nothing to do with me, except that my Ireland days delving in archaeology highlighted the 7th century Irish ‘Senchus fir n-Alban’ (‘Tradition of the Men of Scotland’) and tells the story of Fergus Mór MacEirc, King of the Scots from Antrim in North-East Ireland who moved his kit and kin in settlement to Argyll and Kintyre, thereby giving his tribe’s name to the whole of Scotland. 

It would seem I’m related.  The mind boggles.  And I am no wiser.