In sport, work, and life, it’s about competition and mastery

As many of you know I have played golf for most of my life. I started out playing with a few old golf clubs on Mondays at the local country club where I caddied at age 10 and 11.

 Sometimes I went out with my father and grandfather or some school friends at a ragged, nine-hole course in my hometown of Lyndhurst, Ohio, in suburban Cleveland. Only lately, I took to wondering why we play golf to begin with.

I have asked a lot of regular and avid golfers that very question: Why do you play golf?

The replies I have gotten mostly seem typically superficial, like golf is a “challenge.” Well, if you want a challenge, go climb Mt. McKinley, or run a 26-mile marathon, or bicycle across the USA, or just lose weight, I muse.

Some speak of the chance to socialize, some enjoy their beer in the morning, and others mention the exercise rewards, while they load their clubs onto a half-ton electric cart and grouse about “cart paths only” rules.

It seems to me that avid recreational golfers have not fully decided exactly why they play and enjoy the game.

Perhaps the most genuine response to my question, “why did you choose to play golf?” came from a 17-year-old high school girl whose parents asked me to work with her on her mental game. She was a good player and a good student who eventually won a scholarship to a Division I college golf program.

One day, as we walked the golf course during a playing lesson, I pressed her for the real reason she picked golf instead of soccer or something else. We walked for a couple of minutes down the fairway before she spoke.

“I decided I wanted to be really, really good at something that was very, very hard,” she replied. Then, pausing thoughtfully, she added, “and I passionately wanted to excel at something that my friends couldn’t do at all.”

It blew me away because I realized that was the first time I got a totally honest, unrehearsed, articulate, open answer to my question. My young student had revealed herself as a competitor. Ultimately success in life is about winning in competition.

In his partly autobiographical book, “It’s Only a Game,” the late former pro golfer Jackie Burke, Jr. wrote, “The day you stop competing is the day you start the long walk to the graveyard.” The essence of golf is competition.

For centuries, all golf was matchplay, with one golfer playing hole-by-hole against another golfer. It wasn’t about shooting a low score or securing as many strokes off your score as possible (i.e. handicap) or producing a birdie-fest for the television viewers.

Besides, back in the day long ago, too much scotch whiskey was being consumed for all that. Even today, on the first tee at the Open Championship (British Open), the twosomes are announced as “game number 22” (or whatever number), in obvious remembrance to a time long past when all golf was matchplay.

Up until 1958 the PGA Championship had always been strictly a match-play event. The 1953 PGA Championship was won by Walter Burkemo at Birmingham Country Club in suburban Detroit, 21 years prior to my becoming a member there.

In modern golf the heavy emphasis is on stroke play, and I think it takes some excitement away from the game. Fortunately, there are the Solheim Cup, The Ryder Cup, the Presidents Cup, the Walker Cup and others, which are team match-play events.

Though we may not immediately recognize it we all compete. True, in our work groups and within our companies and organizations we have to cooperate, which is critical for harmony and division of labor.  But to survive, and to achieve ultimate success (meaning to dominate), we must compete to be better than someone else. Sometimes we battle the golf course as our adversary, or a good friend who we try to beat. In so doing we learn (or should learn) a lot about ourselves.