I don’t have any friends that are good enough to golf with me. There are good reasons for this. You know you’re golf-challenged when:
You’re out with your friends and after teeing off for the 3rd time, you hear, “God you suck.” You turn around and one of your friends says to you, “Did I say that out loud?”
The first time I played golf I was about 16. When the day was over the older brother of one of my friends picked us up. He asked us what we had shot. When I told him a 169, he looked at me unsympathetically and said, “Steve, you wasted your money.”
One time I was invited/forced to play in a charity golf outing where they paired a Golf Pro with everyone’s foursome. Our pro was giving all kinds of helpful advice to everyone in our group…but me. When I asked him what advice he had for me, he just looked at me in a confused and perplexed way and said, “With you, we’d have to start from scratch on every aspect of your game…just keep doing what you’re doing for today.”
When you’re in sales it’s kind of taken for granted that you play golf and you’re pretty good at it. There are exceptions to every rule. When people ask me, “But don’t you like it? I have a pat answer, “If I want aggravation, I’ll commute into the city on New Jersey Transit.” Don’t get me wrong, I love the concept of golf: Fresh Air, Sunshine, Exercise, Camaraderie…but all of that goes down the toilet as soon as you have to swing at the little white ball and pray that it goes somewhere reasonable…which 9 times out of 10 it does not. Maybe if a golf ball was the size of a melon that would be helpful.
I had a traumatic golf experience early on. I was just starting out in sales and my company was a sponsor in the Ken Venturi Guiding Eyes Golf Classic. I was able to get two high level VPs from my customer (neither of which I had ever ever met before) to agree to go. I’m not sure what I was thinking because I was almost exclusively a miniature golf player. It’s about a week before the tournament and I’m taking a subway downtown with a co-worker Don who was pairing our company’s executives with sales reps and customers. Our head VP was guy named Bob Tway senior. His son was Bob Tway Jr. who at the time was the number 2 ranked golfer in the world. Bob was from Atlanta and I didn’t know him at all. Don is having problems finding a group to put Bob into. He asks me who I have going. When I tell him, he says, “Well that settles it, Bob’s golfing with you.” This was the first time I questioned my hearing. (Next, picture Ralph Kramdon studdering in the Honeymooners’ “Chef of the Future” episode). Don tries to calm me down and tells me that as long as I don’t do anything “Off the Wall”, I’ll be just fine. (Now I’m thinking to myself, “Don, could you be a little more specific around your definition of “Off the Wall?” You’re talking to a guy that went to see the movie Animal House “in the theatre” no less than 8 times.)
So, for the next seven days I found a way to play golf each and every day. The last day before the tournament, I decide to get a “lesson”, to tune myself up. I’m feeling pretty good about myself, and figure with one of two pointers I could be a contender. The golf pro is a jerk and has no patience (to be fair, even if he had an ocean of patience it wouldn’t have helped). He decides he’s going to change EVERYTHING about my golf game (Huh?). When I leave, I’m a complete mess.
It’s the day of the tournament. I arrive at a very elite golf course (which I have no business being at), and look around. There are a number of blind golfers who are putting on impressive clinics. I think to myself that maybe I should have brought a cane and some dark sunglasses and I could fake my way through the day…but then I remember: I have to golf with customers and the VP of my Division whose son is the number 2 golfer in the world. Could the crap I’m in be any deeper? I start to rationalize: If I’m going to ruin my career better that I do it quickly and crash & burn in one day.
At the last minute, they decide to make the tournament a best ball scramble and my life has been saved. So now after I hit, I no longer have to play my own ball. What’s even better, they also had caddies chasing down everyone’s lost balls. I leveraged them extensively and by the end of the day, I could hear the caddies cursing in the distance when I’d step up to tee off.
We finish our 18 holes, I’m completely worn out and just want to get back to the clubhouse for the after golf festivities. We end our day on the 14th hole about as far away from the clubhouse as you can get. The three guys I’m playing with come up with a brilliant idea, “What do you say we play our own balls back to the club house.” (At this point I’d rather be lit on fire than play any more golf. I’m crushed; I had done a YoMan’s job for the last 5 or 6 hours in the extreme heat. I had held it together, didn’t embarrass myself too much, and at this point my mind was fixated on just sitting someplace with my hand firmly grasped around a large, cold adult beverage.) Naturally I chime in and say, “Yeah that sounds great.”
We get to the first green and it’s surrounded by sand traps…lots of sand traps. I get stuck in one and wedge out of it into another, and then back again. This repetition goes on for a while. There are no words that can adequately describe the frustration searing through my being at this point. I’m waiting for a golf cart to pull up that has men in white uniforms and a straightjacket to take me away.
With that, Bob Tway looks at me and says, “Steve, you can Surrender now if you like.” I accept and become the designated driver for the rest of the day.
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