When I was young I was not a very good golfer. I’ve since taken my share of lessons, practiced faithfully, joined a Club, played hundreds of rounds; now I’m no longer young.

I first played golf with my friends when I was about 14 years old. Three or four of us would hit plastic golf balls around our houses and sometimes get a ride to hit a bucket of balls at a golf range. We also went to Putt-Putt miniature golf quite a lot. Eventually, we made it to a real golf course, which was quite the endeavor. The closest public courses were the Bethpage Park State Golf courses in Farmingdale, NY. There are 5 courses there (creatively named Black, Blue, Green, Red and Yellow), but the Black course was so ridiculously hard that few golfers would venture into the blackness. In fact, ‘The Black’ remains the only public course to host the US Open (twice!). While I was growing up the only way to get a tee time at Bethpage was for your entire group to show up and sign in…first come, first served. Amazing I know, but there were no reserved tee times back then. So I have great memories of groggy parents dropping us off at the dewy cobblestoned roundabout in front of the stately clubhouse to sign in at 6:00am on a Saturday morning. The sign-in desk had a whiteboard hanging overhead which would be manually updated with wait times. Even at 6:30 each course would have wait times of more than 2 hours except The Black which was always about 15-30 minutes. People who signed up later in the morning would face wait times of over 4 hours.

So we would get there as early as possible and kill time by having a snack in the clubhouse cafeteria, which was cavernous with muntined windows all around and heavy wooden rafters overhead. The early morning summer smells, together with the sound of spiked shoes clicking on the mosaic tile flooring, and the stately golf course grounds was, to me, heady stuff. Fred, Howie, Ben (Lucky), and I felt like imposters.

We’d begin our invasion of these hallowed grounds by signing in, renting our pull carts, and hitting a bucket of balls at the driving range, remembering to pocket a few to use on the course. Eventually, we’d make our way to the first tee as our time came around. Now, golf is hard. Especially for 4 kids with crappy equipment and no earthly idea how to make a proper golf swing.  On a good day, a first tee is a nerve-wracking experience because you want desperately to get off to a good start. At Bethpage it was terrifying. The first tee at each course was set back near a starter’s hut and rimmed by rustic split-rail fences so people could hang out and while away their time waiting to tee off. Picture four scrawny kids being called to the tee box with about 40 other golfers lined up around the fence that encased the tee on three sides. We’d step up in the box, push our tee into the ground, pick out our whitest ball, (at least one that wasn’t a range ball with a large black stripe running around it) place it gingerly on top, stand up, and pray. Half the time we either missed the ball entirely, dribbled it out about 10 feet into the rough, or shanked it right into the trees. You could literally hear the air go out of the spectators as they realized that these 4 young, terrible teenagers were going to make their long day even longer. Inevitably we made our way out from the tee and had a great time.

Things got even better when we got our driver’s licenses. We would get to the course before the sun came up and before the course opened. We still ended up in long sign-in lines, still facing 2 hour waits, but it was a memorable blast. (BTW when I was a kid we got our driver’s license on the first day possible. Now kids don’t even seem to care when they get theirs. Discuss reasons among yourselves.)

Just to be clear…I am not a ‘good’ golfer. Each round my goal is to ‘break 90’, meaning to shoot in the 80s. That’s bogie golf and not really terrible because most golfers on any given weekend shoot over 100, but it’s not really great either.  I take a lot of penalty strokes. I get my share of pars and an occasional birdie but I also card an 8 on each side. Distance is not my problem; accuracy is. And the further I hit, the greater the chance that I am in trouble. I try to slow down and would gladly trade distance for accuracy, but to no avail. My current and past golf buddies are smiling right now because they know that I swing out of my shoes.

So why do I do it? And why do the legions of golfers across the US do it? My wife knows the answer to this because I’ve over-explained it to her many times. And now I’ll over-explain it to you! The answer is Operant Conditioning, plain and simple. I recall a psychology course in college called Learning where we studied operant conditioning. You know all about Pavlov’s dog and conditioning. But did you know that different levels of conditioning dictate how ‘durable’ a learned reflex will become? For example, there is Continuous reinforcement or Intermittent reinforcement. Most people use Continuous reinforcement to teach their dog to sit or beg. Each and every time they respond correctly to the command, they get a treat. On the other hand, a trainer using Intermittent reinforcement would not give a treat every time, but only some of the time. This type of conditioning takes longer but the learned behavior is much more resistant to extinction. Obviously, the golf gods use intermittent reinforcement to bestow grooved shots unto players only occasionally. But wait, there’s more! Intermittent reinforcement comes in many flavors: Fixed Ratio, where the reward comes after a specified number of responses or Variable Ratio which uses an unpredictable number. There is also Fixed and Variable Interval conditioning but that’s not applicable here. The thing to know is that the absolute strongest and most durable conditioned response is achieved with Intermittent Variable Ratio reinforcement. Chickens will peck all day and all night on a disk that releases food if they are conditioned with IVR. They will die trying, or eat themselves to death just for the reward because they never know if and when it will come. IVR is the golfer’s conditioning schedule and explains why we keep trying despite our lousy games. For there are few things in life sweeter than a well-hit golf shot, and we are all sure that the next one will be one.  This sign at the Country Club of Indianapolis sums it up nicely:

Anyway, I tell you all this to help you understand the why and how of my golf experience over the last 45 years. Some years I played only 4 or 5 times (children years…try explaining to your wife that, although the weekend has arrived and work is done, you are going to spend 4 or 5 hours with your buddies driving around in a golf cart and drinking a few beers). Most years I averaged maybe 8 – 10 rounds. This year though I’ve probably golfed 30 times already!

And in all this time, I HAVE NEVER, EVER HAD A HOLE-IN-ONE. Truth be told, I really haven’t even come that close. Most golf courses have four par 3 opportunities for a hole-in-one.  Rough math would tell us that I’ve played maybe 450 rounds of golf in my life, providing me with about 1,800 Hole-in-one opportunities! Again; never come close; except for this week. On Wednesday, I hit a sweet 8 iron on a 160 yard par 3 hole at the Ulen Country Club in Lebanon, IN. It looked good from the start, drew in lazily toward the flag, hit the green softly and ran right up to the pin. I was playing in an Indiana State Seniors Golf tournament so a hole-in-one would fatten my wallet to the tune of $1,000, and my golf-mates were loudly urging the ball to drop out of sight. Alas, twas not to be. Here is my ball on the green.

This picture was taken with my back to the tee so you can see that the ball actually rolled just left of the hole and would have dropped if just a few inches to the right.  That’s OK. The shot and the birdie were all the reward I needed. Gotta go though, because I’m due on the tee in about an hour. (IVR, don’t cha know!)

So any golf stories out there, or maybe a hole-in-one?

• Uncategorized