New Cleats Do Not Make You a Better Golfer

I started late in life learning the ever-frustrating game of golf. Some kids learn it very early and by high school are performing in leagues and mastering the most basic skills of the game. I was not one of them. In my early forties I picked up a golf club and set the course for me versus the game. It took me almost ten years to let go of the frustrating anger. It’s not that I wanted to be as good as everyone else, it was that I just wanted to show up for the game, participate in the game. That is hard to do when you are no longer with your foursome but rather two fairways left (or right) of them. You are no longer playing golf, you are, in fact, a distraction to everyone on the course.

Can you hit a car with a golf ball? Why, yes I can.

Can you hit a house with a golf ball? Yes I can.

Can you hit a tree, a goose, a duck, a bridge, a train?

Yes,Yes,Yes,Yes,andYES!

Can you hit a human with a golf ball? Let me count the ways.

My wife, Carrie, loves the game. She wishes we spent more time playing it. Now that I am retired, I think I would consider giving it another go. But I must admit that years of poor playing, and frustration has taken its toll on me.

Once or twice, I was adamant about improving my game. I bought custom clubs. They helped a bit. I found some other really cool clubs for tricky parts of the course. That helped a bit too. I read books. I studied online videos. I took lessons and lessons and lessons. In my mind, that was the worse. Every instructor wanted to reset my game, teaching me the tenth new way to hold a club.

Don’t even get me started on course hazards. If there was water, I was in it. At one point I played in a league at the same course. The ninth hole had a creek twenty feet off the tee. I would approach this every week. My mind was worrying about the water. And there I would put my ball in an explosion of frustrated golf fury. Once I teed off twelve balls into the water laughing harder and harder on each swing. I could not clear a ten-foot-wide creek. I put $50 of golf balls in it that day. Thereafter, I would throw a ball in the creek and tee off on the other side. I think you are beginning to see how this game tortured me.

Slowly, year after year, I learned to let the frustration go. I knew it was what was holding me back. I just needed to train myself to get rid of the mind game, the over thinking of what could go wrong. Why was everyone else smiling and laughing? I must have missed something along the way. Then one day I stumbled on a new possibility. What if it were my golf shoes? Everyone had such nice shoes. My shoes hurt my feet. I spent some time looking them over. I noticed a few things. One, they were cheap and two, the cleats were replaceable. I had not noticed that before. What if that was all it was? I needed new cleats, and I needed them fast.

The following Thursday I showed up for the league with my wife. She was smiling and happy. Maybe my new cleats could make me smile and be happy too. It was autumn and this course had hundreds of tall mature trees. The new hazard this time of the year was falling leaves. You could lose your ball under a blanket of colorful leaves and never find it. My foursome, like usual, was way ahead of me already on the green putting when I was still looking for a lost golf ball. I had a new sense of confidence today though; I was sporting new cleats. Yes, my game was a little better and I found a smile on one or two of the holes. I had not even lost a ball in the water yet. Maybe I had finally found the answer.

I was on the fifth hole, a par five, long and straight, leaves everywhere. I was by myself and hoping to catch up to my group who had already replaced the flag and looked back down the fairway to see where I had wandered off to now. I suddenly looked down at my golf shoes. I had clown feet. My new cleats had speared hundreds of leaves, covering a whole two feet around the shoes. I turned behind me to see I had cleared the fairway all the way to where I now stood. I was mortified. Maybe one day I will become a good golfer, maybe.