Storyline: Here’s testimony to the wonder of golf from a person who didn’t grow up with the game.
Francis de Sales, during his tenure as a human being on Planet Earth during the 15th and 16th centuries, once said: “A judicious silence is always better than truth spoken without charity.”
If there’s ever anything that best depicts the mundane silence that’s offered in golf, then what best but the aforementioned lines suit? Be it ‘tis personnel dressed up as officers in charge (of the tee and the birdie), armoured themselves with crochets offering warmth and affection from the ever swinging wind, or the plainest trees that at times dance in tandem to the patient moving of the caddies … golf has everything.
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I’m writing this with love to an honourable sport that’s bathed and celebrated on Champaign,and I’m putting my thoughts in the tongue, which I haven’t sucked in with my mother’s milk, English. As ladies and gentlemen (I mean, the personnel involved in the sport) with their tees in the hand, accompanied by caddies, walk slowly but surely if only to make it to the hole or to a birdie even; and we the fans, gloom and glance with our eyes with patient cusps of purpose and committed plates of honesty, to see their unseen practices codify into the sweetest fruits of success.
For a boy like me, who grew up in a sport that demands an adrenaline to javelin 156 gm of leather either to york or to deceive the batsman with a swing that would uproot the furniture (wickets), Cricket meant everything. It meant the rising sun and the declining dusk. Golf, for me, was only a decent segregation of four letters in the mighty English alphabet that would make a word. The reason I started writing this is nothing but to admire a sport where flesh and limb are celebrated as heroes if not as deities for a selected few, aficionados.
I could have dipped my pen in the desire of devotedness to produce an art in letters that would best erase any dearth in hockey literature, but frankly, I didn’t–for I feared I would miss the gentle breeze of camaraderie that golf as a sport offers to the species – Homo sapiens. I am not good at mathematics, nor am I good at physics, which would help one in counting the birdies or shots at par to perfection, but, believe you me, I am into my thirties and I haven’t seen a golf course yet. That said, golf as a sport remains special to me, thanks to the advancement of technology in the form of YouTube, Internet, Electronic literature on the sport and last, but not the least, a Television set (Well, I do not use the abbreviation TV, because for a biology student like me, it means Truncal Vagotomy), offered me many an assistance to put my ever rising adversity to shreds and throw light on positivity and towards prosperity in return. Hence, I respect the sport at the level I respect my parents.
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I feared, too, that all the lessons I have learned by watching golf might account for nothing before my carcass, in times ahead, be laid to rest beneath the ground for one final time, and panicked that all those lessons would disappear with me. The most important lessons this sport has ever taught me are “Life’s harder than I thought,” and that’s pretty reasonable to deal with; “Count on the blessings of tumult pain and adversity” (missing a close hole or bunking a shot); and, lastly, “No matter how slow you start, you will succeed should patience, honesty and faith accompany you.” Am I not, then indebted to this art? Am I not then a victim to the solitude and solace the earthly silence offers with spells of human roar approbating a decent shot?
Watching players like Phil Mickleson, Rory McElroy, and Tiger Woods did not allow me to worry about the ill-lit reality I was living in. After spending a few hours to kill my time by engrossing myself in the sport, I even forgot that pain does occupy a substantial place in my life. I grew up bolder if not stronger; wiser if not wealthier; and started to appreciate the amiable amicability life forged me thereupon. If I was tortoising myself in my quest for happiness before golf happened to me, I found rabbitting myself since getting an acquaintance with the sport. It has taken a long time for a dilettante of Cricket and Literature, like me, to fathom the modest depths of this sport. I feel, too, that life would have been more gracious had it happened to me anytime sooner.
Denis Waitley once said: “Happiness cannot be travelled to, owned, earned, or worn. It is the spiritual experience of living every moment with love and grace and gratitude.” Indeed, watching or playing golf (or for that matter any sport) is nothing short of a pureed destiny. I, as a mortal, may never be good enough nor will ever have the knack and guile that’s needed in the sport. But I have, in me, a dire desire to appreciate the beauty of art. Well, in short, I am dendrophilous, too. Will that qualify me, ladies and gentlemen, to be a cognoscente?
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If you think am panegyrizing with my minimal knowledge that doesn’t deserve any amount of applause on a stage of yours, am sorry, you are mistaken. Like you all I do indulge myself in celebrating the scent, flair, and fragrance of victory that would forge upon the personnel after many an unknown tear of sacrifice. With a pen that has an avowed intent in its voice (nib), I admit, your sport is indeed an ace up the sleeves comforting our forlorn reality. I may now be a naïve weasel for I falter in getting along well with either a caddie or a birdie in golf’s tapestry. But, I, with astute confidence say will not be the lame duck anymore. I will be one amongst you for I staunchly believe golf will help me in connecting to a beautiful world, I never knew.
Jacques Barzun once said “Civilization is all that remains after you have forgot all that you specifically set out to remember.” I do suppose, ladies and gentlemen, that the literate in our sport would make it an acculturate envy with a legacy unmatched, untouched. Personally, though, I am close to being a successful individual. If there’s anything that I have learnt in my short tenure in research it’s that patience and mental peace will take us to faraway lands and would bring us victories that will be sweeter than any forms of the available sugars and sweeteners.
I understand life will give me walking papers in a short span of time and that you would find me juggling frogs in the laboratory. But I will always remember this sport for being a humble gift of camaraderie and you, dear aficionados, will in the near future give me an esprit de corps.
Lastly, thank you dear Golf for edulcorating my emptiness that furrowed my insecure brow and for never allowing me to settle in the state of hapless ebriection.
Love and Respects,
Ravi Teja Mandapaka.
