Golf is, by nature, a selfish sport. You are, in all but a few instances, out on the golf course alone, battling for number one. You will have playing partners, but you play your own golf ball, have your own objectives and experience your own successes and failures.
I like the personal challenge, being in charge of my own destiny. One problem though, as I have learned from years of golfing, is that nobody else cares about your game or your score.
I know my golf is no more important than the next person’s and I think most of my golfing friends and acquaintances are aware of their own relative insignificance.
But these realisations seem to do very little to prevent me, and many of those I know within the game, from talking ad nauseum in an utterly selfish fashion about the matchless successes and terrible misfortunes that we “alone” have celebrated and suffered on the fairways.
There’s a sort of desperation in it. “What about me?”, “Wasn’t I good/bad/unlucky?”
And that was the year I played an amazing round and won!
(Image credit: Kevin Murray)
My colleague Nick Bonfield asked me to think about why this would be. He wonders, is it simply human nature and basic egotism? Or are golfers uniquely self-important?
To answer this question, I must (selfishly and in a self-important fashion) look inwardly. Physician, diagnose thyself!
To start, I think, owing to the fact golf is a solo sport and such a personal battle, it’s inevitable that participants are focused on themselves to a greater extent than those who participate in team sports and activities.
Nobody else can play the shots for us. When it comes to the crunch, we alone can initiate a golf swing to begin the arduous task of shifting a small orb from a tee to a distant cup.
We must adopt a selfish attitude to do this most effectively. The blinkers must come up and we must retreat into our own world to face the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune this game will always send in our direction.
I am guilty of allowing this selfish approach to golf to occasionally spill over into self-importance. I am not alone in letting this happen.
Off the fairways, I have been known…
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