Golf Is Fun At An 18 Handicap

      I have a confession to make.  I am an eighteen handicapper.  I have the potential for a better game but that is just where I am. There is one fact that a lot of people in the golf industry seem to overlook in their quest to get me to improve my game.  I have a lot of fun playing golf and when I do play I am very comfortable at an eighteen handicap. This is for certain, I haven't been placed on the Las Vegas Odds Board as the golfer to next win a major and I will never be better than say a fifteen handicap but that is my decision.  For me, the dream of being a scratch golfer has evaporated long ago.  Here is the bottom line in all this. I love the game of golf and I have a lot of fun playing it.
     I totally understand the generally accepted notion that I should want to improve my game.  If you look at my history of scores, I do improve but not for the reasons you would think. I get better the more I play.  When I play more golf than the once every three months that I am doing now, my scores go down.  My "feel" comes back in my short game and that is where I shave strokes off my game. What can I say, its just that simple for me. My index goes down.
     I have seen comments on the fact that most golfers never get better than an eighteen handicap.  As an average golfer who happens to be an eighteen handicap golfer I have a something to say about all this.  First, golf is a game.  It is not life, although to some golfers golf is life. This has got to be put into perspective. Most of us have other important things in life such as families and that wonderful thing called work.  We after all have to devote time to family and pay the bills. This kind of gets into the way of our time devoted to the game we all love. Life doesn't stop and the priorities of life come first. Golf is a game and should be put in its proper place.
     We sometime focus too much on our scores. There is more to golf than a handicap number or a score.  Par is not a number that is going to get you into or keep you out of heaven--whatever your heaven may be.  So, many of us think that our golf scores are part of our identity and forget why we play golf in the first place. There is more to it than just counting the number of strokes it takes to get that little ball in the hole. A score becomes an obsession and we miss the real reason we are playing golf. Concentrating on a score kind of gets in the way of the real reason we play the game and that is for the enjoyment and fun of it.
     How many of us actually stop and look at what golf really is in all of its parts.  Yes, actually playing the game by striking the ball in order to get it into the hole is a very important part of the game, but golf is more than just playing the game. If you play golf by yourself, that is very important and you probably are well tuned into just playing the game.  However, most of us don't play alone. We play with other golfers and we are together for several hours playing and enjoying the game together. We talk about the things in life and swap bad stories.  We tell bad jokes and generally have a good time together, whether we know each other or not.  Some of my best times in golf have been when I hooked up with three other golfers whom I didn't know.  I have shared in the past how I met for the first time two friends from Alberta, Canada at the top of the Palm Springs Tram and wound up playing a round of golf with them.  We had an outlandishly great time, eh.
     Yes, golf is an individual sport.  We don't play it as a team.  That's not to say that we play the game alone.  There is always the group that we play with and the rounds in the clubhouse after the round. There are the stories we can tell and all the exaggerations that come with those stories.  It is more than just a game and score is just a part of that game. I am having a lot of fun at an eighteen handicap. Go out and play some golf.  Have fun, no matter how you play or what your score is.

Says it all.