Exhausted or invigorated: How course makes you feel
This week at the cottage I finished a book I have been picking up and putting down for a couple years.
Ian Brown, one of my favourite Canadian authors, and also a Globe and Mail features writer, wrote this book titled 60 in which he chronicles day-to-day life in his 61st year.
Woven among his insecurities and life regrets as he enters what he refers to as the final couple decades of his life, is this theme of becoming comfortable in his own britches, about having figured a few things out after being on the planet for 60 years.
Knowing what he likes and what he doesn’t.
He writes with honesty about how he is growing less and less confident in his physical abilities as his skin, muscles, joints and prostate seem to be slowly letting him down, yet in matters intellectual, social and psychological, he feels proud of the wisdom he can now share and the degree to which saying things and doing things to please others or to show machismo feels like a waste of time.
After my afternoon nap, which was preceded by a couple chapters of 60, I was reading a link a golf buddy emailed me in which a well respected golf course architect was putting forward his belief that we have it all wrong in the way we rank, judge and even choose to play the courses we do.
He was winning me over, especially as I was seeing a straight line connecting Brown’s book to how so many of us default to a certain golf machismo talking about the courses we play, admire, travel to and belong to.
It made me look inwards and ask myself how I really feel about what makes a golf course truly enjoyable to play, and was I also guilty of what the author of 60 describes as spending so much of our lives trying to impress others, judging things as we think others want us to judge them, and simply dying to just fit in.
The course architect believed that the golf community hypes courses that host certain championships, courses that are amped up to massive yardages, unwalkable, unreachable, unaffordable, at the expense of truly being honest about what kind of courses make us happy and make golf enjoyable.
No doubt you have sometimes walked off the 18th green thinking, “wow, that last five hours kicked the crap out of me” instead of “can I play it again this afternoon or tomorrow?”
Have you ever said you loved a so-called great course when in fact you thought it was average at best, and that given the chance you probably would choose not to go back?
Have we lost sight of what really makes a golf course enjoyable?
Do you really enjoy courses that force you to ride and spend more time on asphalt than grass?
Do you get invigorated by playing mammoth sized greens with roller-coaster undulations, surrounded by cookie cutter like bunkers that might be Instgram friendly but not real life friendly?
If you start with the premise that you are not on track to play the sport to earn a living, and that at its core, golf is meant to add joy to your life and to ultimately be measured by how much it makes you want to come back again for more, have you ever thought about those qualities in a course that really do make you smile.
A wise business leader I know once told me that when it comes to people (employees), there were two kinds.
The ones that energize a room, a situation, a conversation, and the other ones that suck the life out of every room they are in and every discussion they join.
Given the choice, if my beloved author Ian Brown were to weigh in, and if he were a golfer, he would likely say that time and experience have taught him to play more courses that you truly enjoy, that energize you and make you love golf even more, and play fewer courses that exhaust you, make you feel like you’ve had enough of the game.
Our game will grow, and make bigger contributions to sport and life, if it is more widely enjoyed. And the only one who can measure enjoyment is you. No Golf Digest ranking. No stuffy membership roster. No exorbitant green fee. No catchy slogan.