Golf is puzzling
Working diligently on a 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle is a challenge many of us enjoy. With a puzzle haphazardly spread across a tabletop, we twist and turn each interlocking piece, using a trial-and-error strategy until it properly snaps into place. Whether it’s finding the home for a pale blue cutout in a partly cloudy sky or the correct landing spot for a dark gray, double-tabbed piece in a detailed cityscape, patience and persistence are the keys to perfectly solving a jigsaw puzzle.
My father-in-law loved to work on crosswords, notably tackling the very difficult New York Times Sunday edition puzzle using an indelible ballpoint pen! It might have taken him most of the week to go through the complex list of Across and Down clues, but his stick-to-itiveness always paid off with a perfectly completed themed grid, proudly beating his self-imposed deadline before the release of the following Sunday’s formidable challenge.
Sudoku numerical puzzles are a lot of fun, ranging in difficulty from easy, medium, hard and expert to multi-Doku Sudoku, with its intricate interlocking grids and common cells. Word games like Wordle and Connections are enjoyable mind-teasers, with their seemingly endless combinations of letters and ostensibly unrelated clues. Regardless of complexity, however, there’s comfort in knowing that each numerical and word puzzle has one perfectly completed, achievable solution.
Although the sport of golf has many wonderful qualities to offer, perfection, unfortunately, is not one of them. Holes-in-one can be followed by quadruple bogeys, and a perfectly struck approach shot can quickly be negated by a missed short putt. A personal-best front nine offers no guarantees for a well-played back nine. As sports psychologist Dr. Bob Rotella forewarned, “Golf is not a Game of Perfect.”
No matter how well we play, instead of celebrating our successes, we play the mental game of what-ifs. Following our very best rounds, we’re left to wonder, “What if I hit the ball one yard farther and missed the bunker? What if I didn’t have that horrible lie? What if I didn’t lose that ball?”
Whether our scores are in the hundreds or the 70s, we are always left with the remorseful feeling that we could have done better.
Golf is like a jigsaw puzzle with a missing piece, like a crossword puzzle with no clues provided, like a Sudoku puzzle needing algebraic equations or a word game printed in a foreign language we don’t understand. The childhood Humpty Dumpty rhyme may have been our first indication that not all puzzles can be perfectly completed.
Golf is truly an unsolvable puzzle, with no absolute solution or definitive answer. Every round is a story without a perfect ending. It can be extremely difficult, immensely challenging and, at times, self-defeating, yet we golfers have an unstoppable passion for the game. Perhaps our intriguing, fatal attraction to all things golf is, in itself, the most puzzling part of all!
Rich Bernstein is a resident of Sun City - Hilton Head. Rich has been experiencing the joy, challenges and frustrations of golf since his selection as the 6th player on his 5-player high school golf team.
