The rule of golf says if your ball hangs over the edge of the hole, you’re allowed “reasonable time” to get to the hole, and then an additional ten seconds to see whether it wants to go in or not.
Reasonable time. A reasonable rule.
So if you had an 8 footer for par on your first hole of the day, that you somehow didn’t hit hard enough, and it tries to fall in but decides that after an hours frost delay it doesn’t quite have the energy yet, you have “reasonable time” to get to it. Reasonable time, to decide how that’s going to make you feel. To decide which of the innumerable thoughts clamouring for your attention is the appropriate response. The first hole of 36 (37); surely not a time to begin the self-berating that often defines a professional golfer’s psyche when they are doing the most important part of their job; playing.
But what would the appropriate response be if someone told you that in 12 hours time that seemingly incomplete roll of your golf ball would be the difference between getting to play a US Open and not?
It’s funny how we create these narratives for ourselves that feel like they mean something. Things like the fact it’s meant to be that you qualify here; the place you qualified for your first major nine years ago, now that you’ve come full circle to believe in yourself more than you ever did then. The cold, unemotional reality is that it means nothing. The world keeps turning whether your golf ball drops or not, whether your heart is a little broken or not, whether Riviera was always the one that felt like your place or not. Reality doesn’t care. It isn’t waiting to welcome you with a cup of coffee and a warm hotel room at the end of a 17 hour day (but that’s what the people that love you are there for).
Reality doesn’t care for your stories or feelings, because everyone has their version of the same thing. Some stories do write themselves, and there is a feel good factor in every person’s path if you take the time to learn it. That will always be the case in this sport because it is so unforgiving; so isolating, so disorientating.. and yet somehow – or maybe because of – so wonderful too.
It makes you give everything time and time again. It isn’t a choice. When you think you’ve given all there is to give, you scrape the bottom of your soul and offer it up it to the world with every 3 footer you can’t feel your hands on, and every drive that screams that both a left and right miss will destroy your day, and every bare-lie chip where a lack of trust could kill the people watching opposite you.
And most of the time, the world will probably treat it with the kind of indifference that takes your breath away. How can something that pulls so much out of you then leave you with so little? But that’s why golf is what it is. It asks you how many times you can keep giving all of yourself. Because when it suddenly stops taking away, it’s as though it has taken all those pieces of yourself that you’ve given and rebuilt it into something better. Something that reflects back at you so brightly you barely recognise it as yourself. As if it just needed a little longer to polish. As if golf and the world is saying “See? You just had to be a little more patient”. As if it was all perfectly reasonable. As if it took no time at all.
