Ken Moum writes:
Golf without making holing the ball and making a score of any kind becomes somewhat pointless, but it's not at all hard to play at golf, hit the shots, and make hole scores without the final, total score being of interest or import.It was something I learned once spending a couple weeks at Cruden Bay and playing golf with mostly the same lads every day. I noticed they never once picked up scorecards. I always wondered about that. One time one of the Cruden lads had a very good round. After the round I saw him filling out his scorecard. I asked, and he said it was his best round ever at Cruden Bay and he wanted a record.
I learend there was always a big difference between memorizing score and writing it down after your round, and what they did at Cruden. For them score was totally out of their head. It never even occurred to any of them to even think about score. But after the round, they could easily recall every shot that happened, and from there, only if there was a good reason, know what they shot. To me this was really golf I had never known I always dreamed of. It made golf not about score, but totally about the experience.
It took me ten years, but now I can go out and play golf. I never think for a minute about my score but if asked after the round I can tell you what happened for every shot. If I ever need to I can fill out a scorecard. But it took me years to separate myself totally from score. Try to go to the golf course and not think about score. But these lads never thought about score while they played. They never really understood what we as Americans were doing. They always assumed we just had very poor memories and needed an aid to help us.
One thing that was strange was by the time I got to were score wan meaningless, I could much better remember the rounds the rare times I had need to. When keeping score, I think many Americans use the scorecard as a way to put that hole behind them. Rather than playing a round of golf, we are playing 18 separate holes. While we often think of match play as 18 separate matches, reality is in America it is often medal that is treated as 18 matches and match play is seen as a round of golf. It's much tougher to recall 18 events that one.
Whew, that was long winded. That's what you get post-medication.
In the end, Kerasote concluded that if he walked out of his cabin in the mountains and shot an elk to eat through the winter, he did less harm to the environment than Pacelle and his posse eating vegetables raised in California and trucked across country to New York.Yep, I understand that, and still I can't kill the spider. I have no idea how long spiders live, but I'm guessing I'll leave it to the guy who comes and cleans my windows to eventually do something about my spider.
Cheers,
Dan King
Excessive golfing dwarfs the intellect. Nor is this to be wondered at when we consider that the more fatuously vacant the mind is, the better for play. It has been observed that absolute idiots play the steadiest.
--Sir Walter Simpson