I played golf this last Wednesday. Real golf. As in the sport where you sit in a cart (or walk if you're a professional apparently) and drive around to a spot where you wack a 1.68 inch (4.27 cm) ball some odd hundred yards (occasionally fewer than 100 yards) using a stick with a flat blunted end (a club, if you will), towards a 4.25 inch (10.795 cm) hole in the ground marked by a flag on a pole standing no less than 7 ft (2.1336 m) tall. I did this 18 times Wednesday along with two other gentlemen on my team/squad/posse. This whole event, from the first hole to the last, took me about five hours to complete. And believe it or not, I had fun.
But the mechanics of golf, as an active participant are kind of odd. At least from the perspective of someone who plays video games, but has not played a golf video game made after either 1999, or 2014, depending on your definition of what constitutes a legitimate golfing game. In the golf video games that I have experience with, there are only a handful of mechanics such as the direction of the ball, the choice of club, strength of the swing, and sometimes, taking into account the direction that the wind is blowing in.
In real golf, there is so much more to take into account, like am I going to bring the club down low enough to hit the ball (as opposed to not high enough and either topping it, or missing completely), or too low and either hit the ground and nothing else, or take a chunk of dirt and grass along with the ball as it travels a dozen yards instead of the 175 to the green. And that is just hitting the ball. Nearly every time I swung the club, I would hope to Hades that my ball would go in the direction I wanted it to.
Okay, quick interjecting. I started playing golf when I was about 13, 25 years ago. I took lessons at the golf course the next town over when I was 13, as well as at the country club my Grandparents were/are members of, and even as recently as 14 years ago I took a series of lessons to help improve my swing. Now, I am not a great golfer and usually only played a couple of times a year from about Jr. High through maybe 2005, so maybe 13 years or so. I should also note, because it is going to make sense in a moment, I can only hit with irons. I have tried a number of times to use various woods and even my Grandfather gave me a driving iron which I did use on occasion, but I could never get the hang of how odd woods felt.
So, I brought up only using irons because, at least in the golf games that I have played, if you select a driver to use on your tee shot, your player is proficient in using that club. Granted your particular character might have different stats than another character, but that high strength and being able to hit a ball farther than another character might be offset by the fact they tend to slice the ball when they hit it really hard. I am of course only mentioning this to make a point, and that is, in real life, playing golf is hard.
Case in point. This is the 3rd hole on the course, courtesy of Google Maps. You tee off from the tee box there in the lower right hand corner in the shade for the trees, hit your ball over the roughly 100 ft. wide pond and onto the green in the upper left. From the tee to the center of the green was 90 yards with the green slightly sloping back towards the pond. I decided that my 8 iron would give me the best shot at some loft, while not hitting the ball too far. Now in a video game, you could nearly guarantee that you would not hit the ball in the water with enough power. You might hit the ball past the green, but depending on the game it might not go out of bounds. In real life, as I was standing there in front of the ball that I just put down on the tee (I had pulled a crud ball out of my bag in case I did hit it in the water), and my mind went to how much easier this would be in a video game. Here, I was hoping that my choice of the 8 iron, combined with my clearly subjective choice in the amount of strength I needed and how much I ended up using would get my ball on the green and not embarrass myself in front of the two people that I had just met a few hours earlier. Oh, did I also mention that there was no flag on this hole, because there were three holes punched in the green, so you had to hope that if you hit the green, that you were at least somewhat close to one of the three holes? In the end, I hit the ball about as well as could be expected without getting a hole in one. It was decided that my shot put our threesome closest to the hole so we all went with my shot and ended up getting a birdie on this 3 par; we were playing a shotgun scramble style of play.
By the end of the day, I realized that after not having played 18 holes of golf in close to a decade, that I still was not too bad considering my absence from the game for so long, although I did play a short 12 hole pitch-and-putt last year, but I was also playing with my boss, and we were drinking, so it was significantly less serious and a lot less pressure than Wednesday's game. But thinking about all of the mechanics that go into playing golf really messes with your brain, kind of if you think about all of the necessary movements required to even just walk.
Now who is up for a round of QWOP Golf!?
~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian
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