Hazards on the golf course

While vacationing at a resort, I was pleasantly surprised to see a well-maintained golf course. My wife and I decided to explore the course, with me playing and she, having deprived herself of this pleasurable pursuit, deciding to walk alongside. I took my stance for a shot under her watchful gaze. A swish of a swinging club resulted in an awry shot and an agonising cry in quick succession, but my companion missed the tragic picture and quipped cynically, ‘I thought you would be adept at the sport by now.’ ‘It happens sometimes,’ I said, sullenly, helpless against the verbal onslaught.

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Fortunately, the second shot sailed nicely to land comfortably on the green, a few feet from the hole, on a par-three. ‘There!’ I said triumphantly, instinctively glancing at her with a look of a cocker searching for its master’s appreciation upon performing a doggie trick. She merely grunted in response, which I, through years of experience, understood to be an expression of appreciation in the matrimonial lexicon. I proceeded with the game and stroked my putter gently towards the hole, only to miss it, and as my face twisted in anguish, she said sarcastically, ‘Anybody could have putted that,’ and with an outstretched hand demanded the putter.

Smarting under the pain of insult, I complied, half-resignedly, and somewhat as a challenge to her to succeed where I had failed. She tapped the ball, which obediently followed the assigned path. The cluttering sound of a ball sinking in the hole was no music to my ears, and I looked flabbergasted, while she stood with her chin firmly in the air. Overcoming distressing situations is the hallmark of a true golfer. I moved on to the next hole amid her constant derision of the game as befitting only lazy persons who drink barrels of beer and stomp around the course with bulging tummies on the pretext of exercise but faithfully return to the ‘19th hole’ each day to vengefully consume beer to beat the blues of the day’s game.

To distract her from this sermonising, I drew her attention to the blessed fairways and the greenery around, aware of her penchant for gardening. The diversionary tactic worked, and we both ambled along, with me extolling the virtues of the game and she of the landscape. The underlying friction dissipated. Congeniality took over and we turned soul mates once more, till she delivered a thunderbolt of a question: ‘Who are golf widows?’ My shoulders drooped somewhat at the weight of the question which potentially threatened to imperil my golfing. However, determined to protect the golfer’s turf, I replied nonchalantly, ‘Oh! That brood is just another hazard of a golf course, and like any other has to be negotiated deftly, but being unbeatable, my advice, as the adage goes, is if you can’t beat them, join them.’