My 9-hole Pilgrimage

Now I have been mostly writing about the lighter side of golf in the past columns, but let me take a right turn here and talk about something different.  My day job is an IT Project Manager, and as jobs go, it's quite stressful. And unfortunately it's not the kind of job where you stop thinking about it the moment you leave the office at 6pm (or 7 or 8 or whatever time you can tear yourself away).  So after a particularly strenous week, some of my mates dragged me out for a quick 9 holes on a Sunday morning.   We played at the Jurong Country Club's executive course, which actually are two rounds of 5 holes, so you get an extra hole free. Normally these sessions are great for married golfers like us to sneak off and get a quick golf fix and be home before the kids/spouse wakes up, but on that day, golf was the last thing on my mind as I met the guys on the first tee.

After my mates teed off, I stepped up to the first tee with my 3 wood. I was thinking of my project timeline as I placed the clubhead behind the ball, and honestly cannot tell you what I was thinking on my backswing, but I was pleasantly surprised to see that my ball cleared the big tree in front of the red tees and streaked towards the middle of the fairway.  Normally something like this would be my cue to high five everybody and declare my everlasting love for the club of the day (for the record, it was a Maruman Shuttle 3 wood), but on that day, I just too preoccupied  and drudged to my ball for my next shot. The gang that day played to our usual standard which means bogey is a great result, and by the third hole I've gotten back to worrying about my project. It was unusual, but as I remembered later, I was playing much better than usual, but I think I was too preoccupied with myself to notice.  My tee shot from the third hole, a 167m par 3, landed in a bunker by the green.  Again normally this would have resulted in a four-letter word or two, but as I remembered it I just grabbed my sand wedge. One of my playing companions was relatively new to the game, so he said "Oh I want to see how this is done" and he watched me as I prepared to take the bunker shot.

Now, the bunker shot was, and still is, my weakest part of the game. I've watched videos, had coaching, read many tips, but the result is always a hit-and-miss affair.   But since my friend was watching, I just said "Oh, first you take a wedge, dig in your heels a bit, then take a steep swing and aim for a spot an inch behind the ball, the sand should pop it right up", just like what I remembered from the books. I then proceeded to do exactly that, and the ball flew up from the bunker and landed softly 20 cm from the hole.  My friend was whooping and hollering by this time while I just stood there muttering "Oh my God!!!", not daring to believe what just happened. The shot replayed again and again in my head.  And then something strange happened. That was the point when my project's timelines, deliverable schedule and resourcing problems got forcibly evicted from my head.  I then realized that I've been playing pretty decent golf, from the first tee shot that I hit earlier.  I spent the rest of the round and the rest of the day with a smile on my face, and even when I came back to work on Monday, the break given to my brain actually resulted in my being able to come up with some creative solutions so some knotty problems in my project.

So what's the moral of the story here?  In golf and in life, we too often get too caught up in the details of what we are doing, and we too often doesn't give our brains a break from concentrating on a problem, that we trip all over ourselves.  I was playing golf so well that day because I was not thinking of my swing mechanics.  And I did so well on my project on Monday because I gave my brain a break because all day Sunday, the first tee shot and the great bunker shot was replaying endlessly in my mind. Folks, the secret is simply to relax and enjoy yourself.  The next time you are out there on the golf course, just take a deep breath and just enjoy the moment, of being out in the open with your friends playing the sport that you love, and stop worrying if you are cocking your wrist too early in your backswing or whatever ... Just relax and take hat the game gives you, and like Deepak Chopra once said, once you get out of your own way, that's when you will let the game come to you.