When people watch golf on TV, they usually only notice the part where a bunch of overweight, middle-aged men stand around watching a white ball roll toward a hole in the ground. The ball goes in, and there are congratulatory back slaps all around.
What seems to be a lazy, easy-to-play sport is actually the hardest sport I've ever played.
My misconceptions of golf as an easy sport withered right before my eyes when, on the first day of my freshman year tryouts for the school team, I swung at a ball and completely missed. I tried again. And again. And again. Every time, the thin club’s face would just skim by the surface of the ball.
Finally, I managed to touch only the corner, sending the tiny sphere running across the ground. I was beaten by the ball.
To improve, I decided to start one-on-one lessons.
Apparently, there's a whole science to hitting the ball. Each club has a different angle and different amount of "roughness" on its face. The way you hold the club has to hit both the ball and the ground simultaneously, never in front, which is called "chunking" and won't get the ball very far, or only hitting the ball on the edge of its surface, which is called "slicing.”
The ball may go straight up into the air, causing humiliation and awkward laughs all around. Just a few centimeters can be the difference between a perfect drive and a ground-shot.
While golf isn’t associated with the typical athletic qualities necessary to succeed in many other sports, such as speed or strength, the calculation, precision and practice involved are integral parts of the game — just as they are for sports like basketball and soccer. This requires a lot of patience, a huge reason many people don’t succeed in golf — they lose their cool.
The muscles are always repeating one particular motion, which is why some would say the sport isn’t physically rigorous. What these critics fail to account for is that that motion is repeated at least six or seven times during one hole, making your torso and arms sore after swinging so much.
Once you master a shot with a coach guiding you on the practice driving range, you realize other parts of the game are a whole different ball game. On every turn there's a divot, a downward slope or tall grass, or a sand trap into which your ball will fall. Huge trees will attract your ball like a magnet, and the lake in the middle of the course is not for decoration; if your ball goes in, it will most certainly sink.
Golfers are often accused of being lazy and strolling between shots. We do stroll, but with a 30-pound bag on our backs under the sweltering 100-degree sun or in freezing rain. Not to mention you actually have to climb the terrain to get to wherever your ball landed, because, as a student, you’re very rarely allowed to use golf carts. The result is not only a bunch of thorns stuck in your clothes or a bad case of poison ivy, but an incredible workout of your muscles, similar to that achieved during hiking.
If you can survive a day of golf without any injury and exhaustion, I will congratulate you and allow you to say the words, "Golf isn't that hard. It’s not a sport."
Until then, I don't want to hear it.