*Editor’s note: This is a reworked version of a column that ran in the Herald in the spring of 2011.
Attempting to characterize the game of golf isn’t easy.
And trying to describe what playing golf is like to someone who hasn’t been around it is even harder. It’s where the great outdoors meets a math final in your senior year – where the natural and the cerebral meet head-on.
The contrasting combinations that make up playing golf are numerous. It’s about fun and frustration, physical exercise and mental taxation. Doing it well certainly requires elements of knowledge and skill but doing it successfully also involves an absolute necessity of luck.
You can’t “just golf.” While it is possible to simply whack the ball, move to where it ended up and do the same thing again, that’s not really golf.
There’s so much to consider: like wind velocity and direction, variance in topographic features, bright or flat lighting, grass “grain,” break, angle, temperature, moisture and so much more. And the whole time, you have to battle the most difficult opponent anyone could face in any sport or competition: Yourself.
The bottom line is: to avoid being eaten alive by the game, when you play it, you have to – at least temporarily – become a golfer. In essence, that means paying attention to the countless possible influencing factors and not letting your brain get in the way.
I used to be a golfer on an extremely regular basis.
Just to do a little name-dropping, my high school team’s home course was Sahalee Country Club (east of Seattle, where Vijay Singh won the PGA Tournament in 1998). I played Torrey Pines when it was set up for the 2008 U.S. Open (don’t ask – it was brutal). I attended the 2001 PGA Tournament at the Atlanta Athletic Club (won by David Toms, but when Japan’s Shingo Katayama became famous thanks to some amazing and crazy shots he hit and that silly hat he wore) and was in attendance at the 2005 U.S. Open at Pinehurst No. 2 (won by New Zealand’s Michael Campbell thanks to a trifecta of rounds in the 80s posted by front-runners Retief Goosen, Olin Browne and Jason Gore).
I’ve played in nine states (Washington, Oregon, California, Idaho, South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia, Florida and Missouri) and one Canadian province (British Columbia). I’ve played courses designed by Jack Nicklaus, Arnold Palmer and Fred Couples, to name a few. I can’t really remember how many courses I’ve teed it up on, but my best estimate is in the neighborhood of 75.
Basically, I’ve kind of been around the golfing block. Over the past several years, I haven’t played nearly as often as I used to, but I intend to start swinging again soon, now that I’ve had successful hip replacement surgery.
When I do, I’ll be glad to be a frequent flyer at Houston Municipal Golf Course. I played the course numerous times when it was still Oakwood Country Club, and while the ball doesn’t sit up on the fairways the way it does at Torrey, the tee boxes aren’t as manicured as they are at Whistler, B.C., and the sand isn’t as fluffy as it is at Pinehurst’s Tobacco Road, one thing’s for sure: The place has plenty of interesting and challenging golf to offer.
Courses like Houston Municipal may not have all the amenities that the big ones have, but no matter how you slice it (love that pun), the game is still the game.
But I don’t mean to make it sound like the course deserves more pity than respect. The basically links-style track has a unique and definite personality – one that makes it interesting from first tee to final green.
It’s the kind of course where big bombers don’t necessarily have a decided advantage right off the bat. Length never hurts, but the way the place is set up is such that a long drive might just land right where the trouble is, and discretion is often a better idea than sheer power. And thanks to some cleverly grown rough, blasting the ball crooked and then hoping for a decent wedge shot is surely not a good idea on most holes.
Links courses can never be expected to have inviting, super-smooth outer edges, and Houston Municipal is no exception. But if you keep your ball out of the deep stuff and out of the ditches and ponds, you’ll soon find yourself putting on relatively level greens with pretty true rolls. But don’t under-club yourself on your approach; every green is elevated and most are mounted on a turtle back. So if you come up short, you’ll be practicing little, uphill chip shots all day.
And if a north wind is blowing, which it often is, you’re probably going to need to plan your third shot carefully on the par-5s.
Someone once said that a bad day golfing is better than a good day doing a lot of other things.
I don’t know who that was, but it might as well have been anyone who plays a course like Houston Municipal.
