Barry's Blog

Mark Twain once quipped, "Golf is a good walk spoiled." The legendary Sam Snead once chided Hall of Famer Ted Williams, "In golf, you have to play your foul balls!"

As the media frenzy descends on Augusta National Golf Club for this year's 72nd Masters, the question on many people's mind is whether Tiger Woods, who is the even-money favorite to win, can begin the "Woods Grand Slam Express" in Augusta, where he has won 4 times in 13 appearances. While Woods has taken pains to point out that golfers lose far more often than they win (despite his well-documented belief that he can win every time he tees it up), Woods' 64 victories in 234 tournaments over 12-plus seasons on the PGA Tour (good for a winning percentage of 27%) is hard to argue with. As Larry Dorman writes in today's New York Times, at the same time in his career, Jack Nicklaus' total was 40 in 234, including two British Open victories the PGA Tour did not yet count as official wins.

It should be high drama to witness how this golf spectacle unfolds in Augusta over the weekend. As the PGA Tour commercials say, "These guys are good!!" For the rest of us "amateurs" who play the game, it still holds an allure that is hard to put into words. Here are a few statistics about the game, compiled by Shelly Banjo of The Wall Street Journal, that you may find interesting:

• There are about 28.7 million golfers in the U.S., and they play at 16,000 golf facilities, of which 11,500 are public and 4,500 are private.

•  Females make up 51% of the U.S. population, but only 25% of golfers.

• Half of the golfers in the U.S. play fewer than 10 rounds annually.

• Why do golfers shout "Fore!" when they hit an errant shot? The word fore is Scottish in origin, and is a shortened version of the word before or afore. The old Scottish warning, essentially meaning "look out ahead," probably originated in military circles, where artillery men used the call as a warning to troops in forward positions. Golfers as early as the 18th century adopted this military warning cry for use on the golf course. 

• The first U.S. Open Championship was won by Horace Rawlins in 1895, at what was then the Newport Golf Club in Rhode Island. As the winner, Mr. Rawlins received $150, a gold champion's medal, and custody of the sterling silver championship cup for one year.

• There are more golf courses in Florida alone than there are in Alabama, Kentucky, Mississippi, Tennessee and Wyoming combined.

• About 13 million individual irons were sold in the U.S. last year. The metal used to make the iron heads weighed 3,575 tons, or about 16 times the weight of the Statue of Liberty.

• Over the past 10 years, 13 billion golf balls were sold world-wide. Those golf balls, lying end to end, could go around the earth nine times! Alternatively, the weight of these balls totals about 280,000 tons, equal to about six Titanic-size ocean liners.
  

In golf, as in other leisure pursuits, we learn a lot about ourselves, and who we really are. Novelist Walker Percy believed you could learn more about a man from playing a round of golf with him than could be learned from spending a year of sessions on a psychiatrist's couch. Jay Tolson, in his excellent biography of Percy, Pilgrim in the Ruins, Tolson observes: "The triumph of golf in the South is itself a curious fact of cultural history. It is, as anyone who has ever played it knows, a penitential game, as much a trial of character and bearing as of skill...Fittingly, golf was invented by a Scotsman, for only a Calvinist could have found pleasure in a pursuit that required so much restraint for so delayed a reward."

If golf teaches us anything, it mercilessly shows us our shortcomings in life. While we may try to fool ourselves into thinking we are doing quite well, golf is not nearly so kind and forgiving. Could anyone more accurately describe the brutal honesty of the game than the novelist John Updike?

"Most of us don't really know how well we're doing, in real life, and imagine we're doing not so bad. The world conspires to flatter us; only golf trusts us with a cruelly honest report on our performance. Only on the golf course is the feedback instantaneous and unrelenting...In the sound of the hit and the flight of the ball it tells us unflinchingly how we are doing, and we are rarely doing well."   -From "Moral Exercise," in Golf Dreams

For FinishingWell,

Barry Morrow