The best thing I’ve seen in golf is a blog called Where’s Your Game? The author, Michael Bamberger, has an unusual background. He was the golfer who was going to be the PGA Tour’s first-ever teenager to play on one of the big tour. But he never made it. Now he’s a dad and a blogger who reports on how his kids are doing.
He does not seem to be very interested in golf as a game. His golf blogging seems almost an afterthought, inasmuch as the only reason for writing about golf is to get practice at writing about it. One doesn’t get paid to write about golf, but one might get paid to play it. Bamberger is working on that. He plays almost every day with his kids, and he writes about it, often in great detail: “Today we played nine holes with my kids and their friends — eight girls and Travis.”
I sometimes think golf itself has become too professionalized for its own good. Many of the people playing it now were drawn into the game by its reputation for being a simple game for all ages, played by amateurs. And some of them still believe that; these people are probably not typical of the sport at all. But
I’m a golf blogger. I am not a golfer. I don’t know how to play golf. I’ve never played it myself. But I’ve been blogging about the game for a few years, and since that was the only thing I ever really knew about it, this is all my blog has had to say about it.
People come to my blog from three directions: from their own experiences, from people they meet on the course, and from my writing. The questions they ask are pretty much the same: Where’s your game? What should I do next? What are the best clubs? How much should I spend?
This is what my blog has had to say about those questions, with a few extra words in brackets:
(What’s your handicap?) It’s hard to find out what your handicap is. Golfers use a bunch of different methods; the most commonly-used one is called the “commission system.” The idea is that you take your score at a course you know well, and subtract that number from par. That gives you your handicap index, which is supposed to tell you what kind of player you are.
The problem with this system is that it isn’t very good at telling how quickly or slowly
The blog’s tag line is: “I’m not a golfer. I’m just a guy who happens to love golf.” But the blogger is an accomplished professional who has played in 18 European Tour events and caddied for many of them.
He takes walks on the course, which he calls “my favorite way to think.” He also talks about things like the pros’ training regimens and how he uses his own training regimens at home.
He sometimes talks about golfing gear, but mainly it’s a blog about golf. The blog post that got him noticed was titled “The Very Best Advice Ever Given to a Young Player,” which included some advice he’d been told by his father and other adults in the game.
The point seems to be not just that he’s been playing golf all his life and knows something about it, but that being old enough to have been taught golf is no guarantee you know what you’re talking about.
The advice blog is so popular because it’s about something people want to do. It’s not just a way of making money, it’s something people are interested in doing themselves. The number of people who have golf equipment and know how to play may be quite small, but the number of people who want to learn about golf is much larger—and that’s the audience for a golf blog.
A few years ago I was in a little town in the southwest of Spain. It was the first time I had ever been there, and I was staying with a friend of his who lived there. While we were having lunch at a roadside bar, I asked him about the local reputation for golf. He told me that, although he didn’t play much himself, everyone did, and that it was quite good for a town of 12,000 people and not very big.
But my friend also said that he knew about a guy who lived in one of the nearby villages. This village had only 600 or so inhabitants. He said that this guy played golf from dawn to dusk every day, but that he wasn’t very good, and that he thought this guy had never been anywhere near a golf course before he met him at their local pub. The guy’s name was David Letterman.*
I don’t know if you’ve heard of him. But if you have, you probably like him too.*
Maybe it was just because he’s an American who talks funny (I don’t know), but all these years later I’m still impressed by how consistent and disciplined his behaviour seems to be: the whole world has become his stage and he can go on playing golf all
The modern game of golf is a lot like the ancient game of go. The rules are simple, and they are so well-understood that there’s hardly any room to maneuver. In the early go period, it was possible to win by playing a single move. But over time, new strategies were developed to counter them.
Golf has always been about more than the score: it’s about the experience of competition in an environment that is very precise in its limitations.
Golf is a game of tactics: knowing how to shape your game in order to control your opponent and take advantage of his weaknesses. And it’s a game where you have to do a lot of thinking in advance, because you have very little room for improvisation.
Golf is a game, and golfers are sports fans. Golf is expensive, but there are a lot of different ways to spend your money. The best way to spend your money on golf is probably not to play golf.
Golf is a sport for people who like exercise, and for people who like entertainment. To find out if you might like golf, it’s not enough to look at how much you put in each week on gas. You may want to look at how much you put in each week on food that comes from the supermarket. You might also be looking at how you spend your leisure time: what books you read or movies you watch or music you listen to; how much time do you spend working?