There are few things in
life that rattle my calm or shake my cage too much but the game of golf has
managed to supply a couple of words that send me into a flat fried frenzy and
make me see life through a red mist.
It’s a subject I lived in blissful unawareness of for all of my years
until I took up with the beautiful game and, even when it first fell upon my
hemisphere, I paid only a light but respectful cap-tipping nod to it. However, I have come to hate it, more
so because it is a matter that has never been resolved, quite possibly never
will, has been flogged to death a million times, resuscitated, and resurrected
like the proverbial phoenix to womble its way eternally through every platform
of social media that has ever been conceived and is yet to come. I can’t prove it but it probably exists
in a parallel universe where it is designated as a weapon of torture and it seems
to travel in a perpetual circle like particles in the Large Hadron Collider.
For me then, the two
words of mass destruction are Slow Play.
The first thing you need
to know is that it’s out there. It
always has been. It’s primordial
and existed in the Big Bang Soup before it crawled out and took on a life of
its own. The day golf was invented
was the day slow play began.
Nobody ever began a sport for the first time ever and played it like
they were in the Olympic heights of perfection so it doesn’t matter where you
look, starting out is always at a slow pace. Golf is no exception.
In all sport, some will learn faster than others and that is a matter of
talent or time or money or opportunity or even a smacking of luck, which in
turn leads to differentiation and, ultimately, competition. Since competition is all about skill,
dexterity and speed of execution, some will be faster and fitter than others. It’s a given. Get over it.
The second thing you
need to know is that it’s here to stay – it doesn’t matter if you were not
around in the garden of golf’s Eden.
If you play golf, once upon a time in la-la-land, you too were a
beginner and the important bit is you were slow. So as long as there is golf, there will always be beginners
and there will always be slow play.
It’s another given. Make
room for it on your playing schedule whatever your level. In everyday parlance, I think we call
it forbearance. Get on with it.
The third thing you need
to handle is the need to grow the game.
I am going to make a cracking assumption here. You want the game to be inclusive, right? That means all-embracing: gender,
non-gender, transgender, straight, gay, lesbian, old, young, middle-aged,
colour, non-colour, fit and not-so-able bodied. The list is by no means complete but you are getting the
gist. We encompass “people-kind” –
I’ve coined a new word - with all their imperfections: a warts-and-all
embrace. If you’re really
going to grow the game this means slow play
is the take-off point and there is
no avoiding it. Give over and get
it together.
The fourth thing you
need to ponder on is image. I’m
not talking about how cool you look in your Calvin Kleins or how ace you are at
the machinations of the golf swing.
Think telly. Think what we
see beamed in to our homes and heads with regularity: the pro golfers who take time over their shots - and they
are many. Yes, some sit in the
doldrums of a putt long enough for me to spring-clean the house, mow the lawns,
feed the neighbour’s cat and paint the guest bedroom, but I never moan. I see it like this – what’s sauce for
the goose is sauce for the gander and that apt adage adds it up neatly in the
astute “action speaks louder than words” axiom. Whatever our handicap, we forever live in hope of improving
our game and we will happily garner all that we glean from the television for use
in our game. We will never reverse
the slow play trend unless it is regulated and broadcast into the public domain
and brain. Get my drift here.
The fifth and final
thing you need to know is this: if I gathered up all the slow play solutions
that have been postulated, turned them into wallpaper and bequeathed the
resulting rolls to Queen Elizabeth 2, she could happily wallpaper over
Buckingham Palace, Windsor Castle, the Palace of Holyroodhouse and Hillsborough
Castle. And if she wants a day off
from her official residences, she can cut and paste her way through her private
residences at Sandringham House, Balmoral Castle, Craigowan Lodge or Deinadamph
Lodge and still have a scroll down yardage of roll left over. The message is… erm – the solutions are
not working. If they were, we
would surely not be bantering the topic round like those quarks, anti-quarks
and gluons of Hadron’s perpetual circuit.
Get a fix on it.
Do I have a solution to
this? Of course I do. I wasn’t born yesterday or the day
before and it’s taken years to cultivate this level of laissez faire. My solution, God help us, for
slow play is this: take an 18 hole golf course, split it in two lots of nine,
divide the handicappers into two categories with fast players going round their
nine holes faster than the speed of sound for as many times as they like while
the slowbies and newbies and high handicappers haltingly grind round the other
nine at their own preamble and speed.
Every few months, swop the nines over to maintain interest. Mark the speedos from the slow-gos with
different coloured tabards and if one class of golfers should cross the great
divide onto the wrong nine, let the turf war commence. Forget the Ryder Cup - handbags,
golbags and man bags at dawn duels and we could all fight for the new accolade
of the Sandbaggers Cup. Get out
there and try that for size.
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