No place to hide
We videotaped The Old Dog’s golf swing, and if it’s not a thing of beauty, at least it’s watchable.
“Thank god we didn’t take pictures of you originally,” Staskus said. “I would’ve had to go out and get a drink … Now I’m ready to take videos because I can handle it.”
We were able to laugh about that, because the swing we watched was not so funny, so ridiculous, as when we started back in December.
Of all the swings we taped, more often than not I was too steep at the top, but on a few of them I still managed to get back to the ball and through it with some authority and finish in a balanced position.
It didn’t look so tortured as it must have looked when we began. Oh, still so much work to do. Mid-term? We’re still in freshman acclimation … but early and promising is better than late and hopeless.
Perspective
All of the above was written before The Old Dog took it to the golf course again. It might be better to live in the illusion that you’re getting better than to play an actual round and find out how far you still need to go.
How many ways are there for a swing to go wrong and a scorecard to balloon out of control? I won’t say it wasn’t frustrating.
But look at it this way: I wasn’t reporting to work at a crippled nuclear plant in Japan, doing a dirty and dangerous job that seems little short of suicidal. Those people are heroes, and they didn’t get to play golf.
I’m not living on the street and hungry in Haiti, more than a year after that country’s earthquake.
And I didn’t have to spend my Monday, like my friend Mark Clemens, in major surgery, and wake up to face a daunting recovery.
Golf is a part of life, my life, and we can trot out all those “a bad day of golf beats a good day …” clichés. But golf isn’t life itself.
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