Transcript

Golf Teaches Us... · Wanzology

Golf Teaches Us… ”Good night America, how are ya? Ah, don't know me, I'm your native son”… Hi, how ya doing? Welcome to another episode of WANZOLOGY!! I am your host, The Wanz, fully immersed in my ‘Yacht Rock’ self! Singing soft rock hits from the early eighties, late seventies!! Hmm!! Summer is, uh, winding down and you may not feel like you've had very much fun. I went to a college reunion of sorts this last weekend, and during this gathering there was a golf tournament. Now I'm not a very good golfer. I mean, I used to golf a lot when I was with my dad when I was a kid, but now being older, I have found that golf is a teacher. Golf is humbling. Golf helps one, find oneself. Let me explain, the game of golf is a mental and physical test over a series of different obstacles, known as holes on the course, each presenting geographical challenges, trees, hills, sand traps. The whole idea is to put the little ball into the cup, which has a flag sticking out of it on a short grass area called green. Now, I don't know whether you've tried to watch golf, I don't recommend that, or whether you've tried to play golf, I do recommend that because it is a truth teller. The game of golf will expose you. It will expose how you think when you feel some sort of way, and that could be a good feeling, a bad feeling, somewhere in between, how you compare your-self to your-self (both of those are two words each). Golf is easy to learn, but it is very difficult to master, and like things that are personally challenging. Just because one time was great doesn't mean that'll carry to the next time and vice versa. If you sucked yesterday, you could be stellar today. Hence, it teaches us more about our inside selves than most things. That being said, this last weekend I was with a whole bunch of college friends, a whole bunch, meaning like 15 or 20 of them, and on the Saturday we got up early and went to the local golf course to play. I had high expectations because I was trying to gear up for this, so I did more than a few buckets at the driving range to work on my swing. Developed a horrible slice, meaning that when I struck the ball, it would curve off to the right. God help me if I needed to hit a ball straight. It almost invariably, no matter what club I was using, invariably I'd be off sliced to the right, and I thought I had worked a lot of that out until the first hole that I played. And I was nervous, because I'm playing with two other people. So I'm getting ready and I'm reminiscing over the past success that I had at the driving range, not three days before. Inhale, exhale, swing, and kind of top the ball 80 yards down the fairway it goes. And I just hung my head in shame. Why? Because I had done so much better. Just days before I did what I thought was the same motions and hit it almost 200 yards in the air! Yeah man!! But not this time. This time I was humbled by the fact that past successes do not guarantee present results. And life is like that too. Just because something didn't work out an hour ago doesn't mean that it won't work out tomorrow or later. As my pops used to say, “Nothin’ beats a try, but a fail.”, and it took me two or three years to figure out what that meant. And what it means to me is that as long as I keep trying, I have not failed. I may have setbacks difficulties, but have not embraced failure. The only time failure takes over is when we give up trying, when we stop looking for a solution, when we don't want to fail anymore, even though failure is the key to learning for humans. There are so many things you got wrong before you learned how to get them right and golf is just another example of this. Like I said, I went to the driving range and I was working on this from how are my hands positioned? Where on the club handle are they positioned? When I start my backswing, which way is my club pointing? How were my wrists, my hips, my knees, my feet? And as I come to the top of the backswing, then what? Do I pause? Do I turn my torso? Do I start pulling my hands down? Do I still keep my arms extended as I swing, make contact and follow through as far as I can follow through and lastly, have my chest be pointed at my target? Now the mechanics aren't that hard. They really aren't, but, but, but, but what seems to be very easy, can be very difficult. What seems to be very, very simple is not that easy. And a lot of this is, I can't see every moment of that short burst of time between coming to the top of my swing, coming down, striking the ball, and following through. I can stop at various places before then, but once that downswing starts, yeah, momentum and you know, physics, PHYSICS!! So what does that have to do with WANZOLOGY’s core mission? The core mission of WANZOLOGY is to help you manage that four inches in between your ears. Maybe take a different perspective on how you've looked at things to possibly get a different view of the same circumstance. This is the root of golf because if you play a full round, it's 18 holes and it varies between three, four, and five swings, otherwise known as strokes and the idea is to complete the course of 18 holes with the lowest amount of swings or strokes. When you're not very good, there are a lot of strokes. When you're sort of good, there are less. When you're getting good, there's even less. And when you're really good, ahe number 72 just sticks in your head. Almost every golf course has a target score. 72. Think about it, 72 strokes. That's 36 on the first 9, 36 on the second nine. Remember, each hole is a different length and a different what they call ‘par’, which would be the amount of swings it should take a person to go from the tee where you start that hole to putting the ball in the cup, which is on the green. Sounds tremendously simple, right? It is so not. It is so not!! Because once you start that downswing, God only knows where the ball's gonna go. For me, like I said earlier, I have this slice. Once it gets in the air, the ball peels off to the right. I have a hard time getting the ball to go straight, and if I get it to go straight, then it becomes a matter of do I strike the ball with the club in the right place, the right way. The more you take all this stuff apart, the mechanics, the objectives of golf, the harder it gets and the harder it gets, the more you think about it, and the more you think about it, the harder it gets. It's a vicious circle is yes, YES!! My score was not very low. In fact, after about three holes I gave up thinking that I was gonna improve rather than survive, right? After three holes, I could see that improvement wasn't really the goal. Surviving and not losing the golf ball. Those were my goals. Just make it all the way through without losing a golf ball. I was one for two. I didn't lose one golf ball, I lost like six of 'em!! And a couple of them I could see the ball after I hit it, and it was actually going straight in the air, all up in the air, and I would get in my electric golf cart, speed off at 10 miles an hour, follow the line that I thought I hit the ball on and I could never find the fricking ball. It was very annoying. One success, I never hit a ball into the water. Almost all golf courses have a water hazard or two, and I didn't lose a golf ball in the water, so I had that going for me. Nine holes, take a break, play another nine holes and add up how many strokes it took. Now remember. Every golf course has what they call ‘even par’. You swung as many times as you should to get the best score. The best score to be even with par for 18 holes is 72. My score after 18 holes was 135! One hundred and thirty-five!! I don't claim that to be any great thing, that's just what happened. There were some really good shots and there were some horrible, horrible shots. There were swings and misses. There were swings where the club went into the ground before it got the ball. There are other swings that topped the ball and it just peeled off the ground a little bit and bounced like 20 or 30 yards forward. When you are the only one striking the ball. You are the only one holding the club. You are the only one trying to figure out how far you are away from the green and therefore the cup, the consistency factor for golf is huge. Trying to swing exactly the same way no matter what club you're using. It's not easy. Now, at the beginning I said golf is a great teacher, and the reason that I say that is just like golf, every single day and every hour within that day, you are navigating your life. Now, some events in your life are better than others. Some are worse than others, but overall, at the end of the day, you can look back on your day and figure out the good parts from the bad parts, why they were good, how you got in a position for them to be good, hold onto those and repeat 'em the next day. Golf deals with a series of holes. 18 of them. People deal with hours that break down into minutes that break down into seconds. At any given one of those three, we are to perform whatever duty or task we're on to the best of our ability, and that's it. The best of your ability. Now in life, the best of your ability, you could have something that equals out to a golf score of 135, when the target score is 72. But what I found out during this round of golf is that with every swing, before and after, there is a lesson in how a person conducts their life when they're not playing golf. If the ball doesn't go where you want it to go, how do you feel about that? You're not jumping up and down in joy like you just won the lotto because your ball went off into the bushes and you can't find it. And even if it takes 10 strokes, you tap the ball and it goes into the cup onto the next hole, just like onto the next day or hour in a day, or minute in an hour. If you've never played golf before, I highly recommend you find a driving range relatively close to you, and go take one lesson. Just one. Just one. You'll never be the same after you're done. You may not fall in love with the game of golf, but you will appreciate how powerful your mind is. Even if the other person, the instructor, is telling you the right things to do and you hear it and interpret it, you make all kinds of connections with your body, you may completely miss the ball for some reason. And so you have to do it again, and then again, and then again, and then again. Remember, the purpose is to complete the golf course with the lowest amount of swings. Living is just navigating the course of a day with the minimal amount of mistakes. They're very similar, both an ‘inside’ job. Try it. I dare you. I dare you. Just go to a driving range and take one lesson because when you're done, you'll go back to your vehicle and you'll sit and you'll go, “Jesus!”, and either you'll really hate it or you'll want to do it again because you know you can do it better. Just like life, if you wake up and recall what you did yesterday, you should want to do better. Even if yesterday was great! You should always want to do better. We as a species need to learn how to do better, and I think the game of golf is a great, great teacher for that. Thanks so much for listening. I will “catch you on the flip side”, as my dad used to say. See you when I see you. Be good. Peace.