What makes golf, the most difficult game on earth, appealing to all ages

Golf is maddening, addictive, irritating, healthy and also fun...for all ages

Despite golf being the most difficult game on earth, why do more people, of all ages, play this ball game rather than any other in the world?  It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma (Churchill), but perhaps there is a key …. It is maddening, frustrating, challenging, wasteful of time, could encourage difficulty in counting, a maker and breaker of relationships, completely international in scope, not a couch potato game (like cricket) as one can play it until one is doddery (and beyond), makes one remember God and his (her) counterpart Satan, a true leveller and, in short, it is fun! 

It is played in every kind of weather (except when there is lightning as one is basically holding a lightning rod in one’s hand, and during floods when the course is inundated) — pouring rain, blowing wind, brain frying heat, dehydrating and numbing humidity, freezing cold and all the variations within. 

It is played in every kind of location and terrain — deserts, hills and mountains, over lakes and ponds and oceans, on plains, in and around gorse bushes, snake infested forests, alligator infected everglades, leopard and rhinoceros and hippopotamus and the occasional python abounding, slopes this way and that, undulations that way and this, and everything in between. 

They say it’s character building (or deconstructing) on the one hand and soul destroying on the other; they say it is a life style sport  but then it brings out the worst in sartorial styles; they say it brings out the best in sportsmanship but then it also engenders gamesmanship; they say it encourages gambling but then what does not in this competitive world. 

One would have thought that it is impossible to distil all those seemingly contradictory elements into one understandable thesis.  However, there was one such person who did it but regrettably left our midst in 1975.  PG Wodehouse (PGW) captured the human condition arising out of the game of golf which of course affects all of one’s life, brilliantly in a number of manuscripts that bear reading and re-reading.  

Imagine what he could have written, in his inimitable way, about how technology has altered this game, how immense fitness and coached talent enable 350 yards drives and how excessive political correctness has neutered the natural ebullience of both amateur and professional hackers into platitudinous dribble. He should be regarded as a social scientist with a humorous turn of phrase. He would certainly have been able to creatively eulogise the failure of the billions spent on technology to produce a putter which can sink all putts and a driver that will always split the fairways. This failure, he would surely say, has saved the game of golf from utter tedium. 

Now, what of the professional golfer who has made and plays for millions of dollars in prize money?  Not for him are the joys of the unexpected slice or hook or shank or four putts and the consequential ribbing by his co-players. No, he has to bear the ignominy stoically, keep a stiff back if not the upper lip, cry within but not outside and blame everything on luck (or on the hapless caddy).

It is correctly said that golf is basically played six inches between the ears (the mind). It is telling that all Wodehouse golfers had vacuum in that space whether playing golf or otherwise.  But professional golfers use their brains  to calculate wind speed and direction, determine the slope of the lie, imagine and allow hazards between him and the target, decide the effect of a high or low shot, examine the undulations on the greens, judge risk and reward, and then, at the exact moment of executing the shot, to enter the “zone” of no thought between the ears!  

This is necessary because the mind is host to about 50,000 thoughts a day and any one of them can distort the magnificent architecture of a heaven sent swing.  Each of the 206 bones, the 600 – 800 muscles and the 1300+ tendons have to  work in perfect synchronisation to execute a golf shot which is essentially a violent movement from a stand still position through to the conclusion of the stroke.  

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