PLAY
As a young boy I did a lot of sport.
Most of it was at a boarding school, which I went to aged 7. We were drilled pretty thoroughly in the main English sports - rugby football and especially cricket.
I clearly remember it out on a cold dewy pitch at 7 o’clock on a summer’s morning before breakfast, having a leather ball hit towards us at high speed by the headmaster, Paddy Molloy.
Matches were thrilling but if you weren’t picked for the team, your week was ruined. If you were, it was intense and dramatic. Parents and schoolboys came to watch and everything hung on it, even your status in the school.
I took the same approach to golf which was the headmaster’s favourite sport and eventually became mine. I was sent to America by a sponsor to see if I could make the professional grade . I had to hit at least 600 practice shots a day, so much so, that each evening I would have to sit in a very hot bath because my body hurt so much.
So it was only in mid-life that I began to realise that some of this play was not actually play at all, but just hard work. One of the metrics that has long disappeared from my scales was the easily overlooked metric of joy.
One day I decided to get a load of golf balls out on the back lawn and hit them as hard as I could over the fence, over the field and intentionally towards the river - landing them in it and losing them was my goal. It was a moment of great liberation and it broke the spell. I even put an advert in the local rag inviting people to come and learn a new way to play golf at, what I called, The Wild Golf Academy. One lady came and it was fun hearing her shout ‘Yeeeehaaaa’ as she hit each shot. That was my only instruction to get her going.
So I play golf now, not very regularly and not very well, but my God I enjoy it so much! When you no longer care where the ball goes, your body actually swings much more fluidly without all the inner tensions and you end up hitting some occasional blinders. I also love the rapport between friends which as you can imagine is essentially leg-pulling. We keep the score, but trying to better it is very low down the agenda. I feel like ‘playing’ has been restored to my life at last, if I ever really knew it before.
