Many shots are spoiled at the last instant by efforts to add a few more yards.
Bobby JonesRead
One reason golf is such an exasperating game is that a thing we learned is so easily forgotten, and we find ourselves struggling year after year with faults we had discovered and corrected time and again.
Interpretation
Golf is frustrating because lessons learned can easily slip away, causing recurring mistakes.
This quote by Bobby Jones highlights the cyclical nature of learning and improvement in golf, emphasizing how easily one can forget valuable lessons and continue to struggle with the same mistakes year after year. It reflects the broader theme of persistence in self-improvement and the challenges of mastering any skill, where each setback can feel exasperating despite previous achievements.
In practice
During a golf tournament, to acknowledge the challenges players face in mastering their skills.
Many shots are spoiled at the last instant by efforts to add a few more yards.
There isn't a hole out there [Augusta] that can't be birdied if you just think. But there isn't one that can't be double-bogeyed if you stop thinking.
The real way to enjoy playing golf is to take pleasure not in the score, but in the execution of strokes.
As I see it, the thing that hurt my putting most when it was bad, was thinking too much about how I was making the stroke and not enough about getting the ball in the hole.
The 'enemy' in golf is tension.
Golf is a game that is played on a five-inch course
Swimming is normal for me. I'm relaxed. I'm comfortable, and I know my surroundings. It's my home.
Golf challenges you mentally at any age, and when you become my age, it's a challenge physically to try to make your game work as well as it ever did. That's close to impossible, but that doesn't keep you from trying to hit the ball where you used to hit it and make the putts you used to make all the time.
"Hit it with the back of your left hand" was the first swing thought I ever heard, brusquely bu not unlovingly put to me by the aunt-in-law who had moments before placed a golf club in my virgin grip. I was twenty-five, and had spent my youth in a cloisterd precinct of teh middle class where golf was a rumoured something, like champagne breakfasts and divorce, that the rich did.
Golf is deceptively simple and endlessly complicated; it satisfies the soul and frustrates the intellect. It is at the same time rewarding and maddening - and it is without a doubt the greatest game mankind has ever invented.
We, as a wrestling community, better remember it is more than one individual that makes a winner.
Someone who has juggled the ball in the air during a game, after which four defenders of the opponent get the time to run back, that's the player people think is great. I say he has to go to a circus.
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