A birdie in hand, an eagle in the bush: the many mysteries of golf

The ever effervescent P.G. Wodehouse once said that golf, like measles, should be caught young as it builds character. For it takes a strong character to hit the ball on to the wrong fairway and yell 'FORE!' instead of 'F--K'!

Unfortunately, I missed the bus on that one and discovered the game quite late in life, which goes some way in explaining my many failings. I have been playing golf for the last fifteen years now, give or take a year or two when I ran out of balls.

The word 'playing', however, should not be taken literally but as a figure of speech, denoting intention rather than accomplishment. As in: going shopping without actually buying anything, or going fishing without catching any fish, or going electioneering without winning any seats, or, as as in the case of Joe Biden, speaking without saying anything.

So has it been for me. According to my life-caddy Neerja, who accompanies me to the golf course to ensure that I don't do any bodily harm to myself with my wild swings, I spend roughly 10 per cent of the time on the fairway, the rest of the time being spent in the bushes looking for — you got it — my balls.

I'm a human compass: it doesn't matter in which direction I aim to drive the ball — it always goes north, usually causing some minor damage. Once I almost decapitated two tourists  at the Naldehra course in Shimla, and I've clobbered my good friend Yatish Sood so many times that he now goes off to his lovely retreat in Kangra whenever I'm slotted for a game.

The flag on the greens is lowered to half-mast whenever I'm playing. The informal economy of the Naldehra Golf Club, which is surrounded by dense forests, ravines and gullies, is largely dependent on me: I usually lose ten balls every time I stride on to the fairways, these are retrieved by the caddies at night, and sold back to me the next day at heavily inflated prices. I am proud to have created the circular economy which economists have been striving for for so long!

I have a handicap of 18, but that's only because that's the maximum of the scale; without any capping I would go off the scale, like the soprano Maria Callas when she has dined well. Which brings me seamlessly to what I've actually been meaning to write about — the peculiarities of this ancient game.

Golf was apparently invented in Scotland in the 16th century, purely by accident: a Scotsman was hitting small round stones with a stick one day and one of them went into a rabbit hole and killed the rabbit. The wife was so impressed with the free meat for dinner that she encouraged her husband to whack stones the whole day; it also got him out of her hair, and wives all over the world have been grateful to this far-sighted lady ever since.

Because now golf has spread globally, it is played in 206 countries, more than the number of countries in the United Nations: the remaining ones are too small to fit in a golf course. Contrary to popular belief, it is golf and not Scotch whiskey which is Scotland's biggest export. It was called golf because the Scots had used up all the other four-letter words to describe the English.

As is to be expected, golf is just as peculiar as the country of its origin, where men wear skirts (you can get 'kilt' if you laugh about it), dragons are unapologetically named after women, and the sausages are square shaped; Scotland is also the only country which is happy about global warming and rising sea levels: you see, they can sit on their cairns or sgurrs (mountains) and watch the English drown.

The Mecca of golf is St Andrews; Neerja had visited it once to watch the burly Scots playing there in their kilts. She told me she saw more balls in one hour than one can count in a day in a rugby locker room full of jocks. She brought me a St Andrews golf cap; I've never worn it, it's too precious. 

There are other strange aspects of this game. Golf and sex are about the only things you can enjoy without being good at them. If you hit the ball to the left it's a hook, to the right it's a slice, and if by some chance you hit it straight, it's a miracle.

It's the only game I know of where the chappie with the lowest score is the winner. The lower your handicap, the better player you are. The more books you read about golf, the worse your game becomes.

A hole-in-one is rarer than a triple century in cricket, and far more expensive because then you have to pay for the drinks. Shots are named after birds, the larger the bird, the better the shot. Birdie (one under par), eagle (two under), albatross (three under), condor (four under). I've never heard of anybody hitting a condor, because that would mean hitting a hole-in-one on a five-par stretch, an impossibility.

But miracles do happen, you know — who thought, for example, that the BJP would win the Haryana elections? Or that the Ayodhya judgment was written by God, not judges?

If you're thoroughly confused by now, dear reader, you will realise why I hit more cows and fire engines than birdies. But I'm not giving up — didn't someone say that the greatest oak was once a little nut which held its ground?

Avay Shukla is a retired IAS officer and the author of Disappearing Democracy: Dismantling of a Nation and other works. He blogs at avayshukla.blogspot.com