the rule_ of golf

 the rule_ of golf (singular!)                                                            

I just wrote (here) about the addiction to what one jackass called “an aspirational game.” This jackass, not Bobby Jones’ cousin Jackass Jones, meant by “aspirational” that you should be rich if you wanted to play. But not many addicts are rich; they can’t afford to be.

In the same brief post, I wrote about golfers that cheat. Not many cheat as much, or so I’ve heard, as the jackass that called the game “aspirational”; but he became rich himself partly from thinking cheating is fair in any case. But all golfers, rich and poor, cheat, because it can’t be helped: The Rules of Golf like the Book of Order of the Presbyterian Church are meant to be massaged, manipulated, misread and misapplied. The Rules of Golf, I wrote “is more persnickety and meaner than Leviticus, impossible to follow if you’ve been drinking. And who would play sober?”

But the the rules of golf (lower case) do not need to be persnickety; they don't need to be complicated by exceptions, outs-of-bounds, lateral hazards, sprinkler heads, cart paths, spike marks on the green, seagulls that fly away with the ball you hit from 165 yards to 6 inches from the pin. Golf really needs only one rule.* Almost anyone can remember one rule and every “exception” is covered by this one.

The one rule of golf
          Play the ball where you find it. If you can’t find it or can’t play it, go back
          to the spot of the previous stroke and play another ball. Every time you swing
          at your ball counts one stroke.

I ran this by 16 golfers I know. None liked it; on the other hand, none could find anything about it not to like. There was one “complication” advanced by 3 of the 16 (none lawyers, one a truck driver, and the other two preachers): equipment. Simply solved:

     The one rule of golf equipment

               Everyone will play with equipment manu-
               factured to the specifications of that available
               to Ben Hogan when he won the Masters, U.S.
               Open, and The Open Championship in 1953.

If no one has struck the ball more purely than Hogan, a common claim and one I believe, there is no need for equipment “better” than that he used.

* * * * *

Next time: the application of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy to playing golf and to living in a country with a presidential candidate that cheats at it (though he must know better because he has “a very good brain”). Or not.

03.17.16

_______________

* For that matter, the Presbyterian Church needs only one rule (also easily remembered and with every exception covered): “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your mind and with all your strength, and your neighbor as yourself.”