Golf - Getting Started
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Adapted from "Golf And Walking", by Arnold Haultain They call it a waste of time, and argue that it costs a lot of money, that it comes between relationships, that it interferes with family life, that, for those who are concerned about such things, that it dries the skin. Probably the most common indictment is that golfers are crazy! Yet, perhaps to each of such charges, the lover of the game of golf can enter a plea. It repays the golfer's investment of time and money with interest in the form of health and happiness. If it keeps men, and women, away from work and home, at least it keeps them out in the open air, and dispels, for a time, at least, the cares and worries of the office or the kitchen. If the outside play tans, or wind burns, well, it tans, and a tanned face needs no paint, and is, more than the painted ones, beautiful to look upon. Almost ANY accusation against golf can be countered with reasonable argument. Still, there does exist one indictment against which it is not in the power of golf, or the golfer, to enter a plea of innocence. It killed "taking a walk". "Take a walk!" exclaimed a fellow-golfer to me the other day. "I have not taken a walk since I began to play golf." Now, there are the misguided and misinformed, who still believe that the game of golf consists of a pleasant walk in the country, diversified, embellished, and made more pleasurable by the pauses made for the purpose of impelling little round balls into little round holes. Notwithstanding the realities, it is believed by many that mind and eye are occupied chiefly with the beauties of Mother Nature, and that the impulsion of the insignificant sphere into the insignificant void is, as it were, but a sop to Cerberus, or a cock sacrificed to the Æsculapius of this sporting age. "How greatly," said to me once a fair and innocent stranger to a golf course, "...how greatly this beautiful landscape must enhance the pleasure of your game!" O sancta simplicitas! Far be it from me to explain that as a rule the "normal" golfer, whatever that may be, only drinks in the beauties of that landscape when the game was over, and he was, perchance, occupied in performing a similar operation upon the contents of a highball glass at his elbow as he reclined in an arm-chair on the clubhouse veranda. And yet, the golf course is always beautiful, and each and every one of us who plays upon their velvet bosom, know and appreciate to the full their beauty; but not, I must say in all honesty, at the moment of "addressing the ball." No; golf is golf... a game or contest, while a walk is quite another thing.
The one, I fear, may have killed the other.
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