Over the past few years, I’ve mentioned a few times that I played golf for my high school team. Some of you may have taken that information to mean I am a good golfer…or even a decent one. Well, I’m here to set the record straight.
Yes, I did play on my high school golf team my junior and senior years – but I was by no means a good golfer. For a 9-hole round (which most of our tournaments were), our top 3 players would typically shoot between 36 (par) and 43. I, on the other hand, would typically shoot between 46 and 53.
There were about ten of us on the team and the top 5 would start. Of those five starters, only the top 3 scores would count (which typically came from our best 3 players). Meanwhile, I would start about half the time, but only once in the two seasons did my score ever “count.” And that was because one of our top 3 got disqualified and I was the next-best score (with a 48 for 9-holes). My name was in the box score in the paper the next day as one of the top 3 for the tournament (and I’m glad they didn’t print my actual score)!
So now that it’s clear I’m just an average golfer, playing on my high school team still did teach me a few things: I had to learn all the rules (which is a daunting task). I learned to pace-out the distance to the nearest marker so I knew how far I was to the pin (heck, just learning to always know your distance before your shot was a plus for me)! And I guess I learned how to play under pressure too.
But perhaps most importantly, I learned how to play this game with respect. Respect for the course; your fellow players; and the game itself.
I guess the respect lesson really dawned on me during one tournament in particular. We were playing our heated rivals and I was paired up with the best player on our team. We were putting-out on a hole where there was a lengthy walk to the next tee. I had finished the hole and was waiting on the fringe with the flag stick, while my teammate had about a 1-footer left for par. Our two competitors decided to start their walk to the next hole so they didn’t see what happened next: The best player on our team missed a 1-foot putt.
I would like to tell you he did the right thing, but he didn’t. He was a rather pompous kid and promptly said, “You didn’t see that.” and proceeded to write down par on his card. Sadly, I didn’t do the right thing either. Instead of turning him in, I kept my mouth shut.
Though we won that day by a decent margin, I remember realizing for the first time that golf is truly a game of honor. Sure, you could, if you so inclined, cheat almost anywhere on the course – be it using the old toe iron or foot wedge, or pretending you sunk a putt when you really didn’t. But where is the honor in that?
I think the most important lesson I learned playing high school golf was to just accept the golfer you are and enjoy your round. Don’t try and sugar coat your game; don’t try to make your score appear better than it actually is; don’t try to BS your way through 18-holes. Just play and have fun.
It was this ethos that eventually led me to co-found GolfStinks and took me to where I am today (at least mentally) with the game. Learning that lesson back in high school as a teenager has given me the gift of not taking my game too seriously as an adult. And as a result, I don’t BS people out on the course and I certainly don’t BS myself…I stink at golf, yet I still love it.
I played High School golf 40-yrs. ago for a school that didn’t even know they had a golf team. The coach and asst coach basically drove us to the course, dropped us off at the first tee and headed off to the 10th tee to play free round. In 3-yrs I never got any instruction or coaching…just a bus-driver. Needless to say we were terrible…though I did get a couple varsity letters…LOL.
Our secret weapon was our home course. There were very few courses in our county, and the rules were that each school had to have it’s own “home course”. Most of the courses in our area were private-membership courses with a few high-end daily-fee courses…and already “claimed” by other schools with more established golf programs and kids whose parents were members at their home courses. ( This was long before Tiger and plentiful golf scholarships for college. ) Since we had no budget from the school board, we played on a course that would let us play for free…but it was a 45-minute to an hour’s drive from our school so we barely got on the tee by the required 430p Conference deadline.
This was a course that a real estate development company had carved out of the piney woods for a master-planned gated community…but they went broke after bulldozing-out the fairways and putting in the streets. None of the houses to line the course were built so it was a dense thicket of Black Pine scrub and thickets right at the edge of the rough, and they didn’t have the money to sod the fairways as-planned so they just planted grass on the sand and clay base…and local “found” sand in the traps.
Most of the schools we played had home courses at privately-maintained clubs with lush irrigated fairways, graduated rough and perfect greens for chipping to. We had hard-pan grass and used the Texas-Wedge from 50-70 yards out. You could putt through our sand-traps onto the greens from the opposite side of the hazard. And the ball would roll and roll like on a Scottish links. What you couldn’t do was take a divot and play the ball high. To this day I still instinctively clip the ball off the deck rather than hit-down. If you hit down fat, you’d dig right into the clay…and risk a sprained-wrist, like hitting off a paved cart-path.
Several teams that played on private courses maintained to Aronomink or Baltusrol standards complained bitterly to the Conference…hehheh. Sometimes there’s an advantage playing on a goat-track.
…Now 40-yrs later the homes have been built and it looks like any residential-developer’s course with house-lined fairways and few trees…and lush sodded fairways and expensive membership fees.