Fair Play

When Robert Tyre Jones Jr. was asked about the chronic ailment that almost certainly cut his illustrious competitive career short, he had this to say:

“Golf is the closest game to the game we call life. You get bad breaks from good shots; you get good breaks from bad shots – but you have to play the ball as it lies”

The fairway-divots-are-ground-under-repair crowd be damned, Baby Bobby J nailed it. While golf wasn’t my first encounter with the notion that life is going to hand me enough lemons that all the sugar in the world wouldn’t turn them into lemonade, it has certainly helped me learn to accept the sourness with some semblance of grace.

I suspect the optimistic faith we have in an ever-teetering cosmic scale doling out debits & credits is a pillar of The Human Experience: The Early Years. As life begins to serve up body blows and the occasional haymaker (for me, around the time I took a close look at my first paystub and learned about taxes), we start to consider that maybe “karmic justice” is just something we mutter to ourselves when a 5-some won’t let us play through.

Being diagnosed with a brain tumor at 21 was the genesis of a long and tumultuous relationship with the American Healthcare System…spoiler alert: good deeds won’t pay your medical bills.

The physical challenges, wasting countless hours battling with insurance companies, and spending tens of thousands of dollars all because of something I didn’t ask for and could do nothing to prevent would be considered a tough break by most standards. It was especially tough to navigate in between studying for a business calculus final and applying for summer internships.

The twisted beauty of fairness – or lack thereof – is that it has a nasty two-way miss. I accidently walked into an interview for an internship that led to a cushy corporate job, that then led to a career shift with nearly unlimited growth potential. I serendipitously met the most beautiful and intelligent woman two weeks after she “temporarily” moved to Portland (it’s been five years; we’re married so I don’t think she’s going anywhere). We’re planning the next project for the house we happened to buy six months before the pandemic pricing boom. My life is sick, though it’s not without its challenges. The rub of the green.

I will have good days, I will have bad days. The only constant is the challenges and opportunities are going to keep coming. Golf has a funny way of constantly asking us, “so what are you going to do about it?” Striped a drive that clips the last leaf of the limb hanging over the edge of the fairway, sending it OB? Here’s another ball, try again. Pull hook an approach shot into the curb of the cart path near that green, sending it sky high only to drop neatly 25 feet from the hole? The scorecard doesn’t have pictures… time to make a putt.

There is so little in life that we can control. External forces beyond our influence and understanding leave us scratching our heads, asking “how in the hell do I get this on the green from here?!” In golf, as it is with life, it’s how we choose to respond that will dictate the position we are in when the next good or bad bounce comes our way.

The next time I’m up against a tree root after missing a three-foot putt on the previous hole to win my personal major, I’ll try to remember to forgive quickly and “play the ball as it lies.”