The sleeping giant awakes
At the clear and present risk of disappearing up my own fundament, today I am reporting upon the round of golf I played yesterday at the Surrey National golf course not far from either the M25 and the leafy suburbs of the concrete jungle that is Croydon or indeed the dormitory town where I lived with my parents between the ages of eight and about twenty.
Now thirteen months past my hip replacement operation, I recently completed and returned my second (six monthly) questionnaire sent by the hospital unit concerned, answering such era-defining queries as “On a scale of 1 to 10, how difficult do you find climbing stairs, washing and getting dressed, putting on your socks … etc.”.
Overall, from the nature of the queries, the average age of a ‘hipper’ is about eighty, or so it would seem to someone like myself – a gentleman of some sixty-five years’ vintage with a mind of a fifteen year old (and whether one regards that description as an advantage or the opposite I leave my readers to decide).
However, I justify my assertion by reference to the fact that said questionnaire asks how difficult (on a scale of 1 to 10) I am finding living in my own home since my operation – or indeed getting to the shops – when currently, according to my Garmin fitness device, almost without fail I not only meet my target of taking 10,000 steps per day but regularly knock out over double that.
Yesterday, for example, including playing my round of golf, I amassed 22,262 steps; the day before (Monday) – when I decided to go for a six mile walk followed immediately by a 90-minute session in the gym – I did 26,597 steps.
There’s no doubt that I am fitter and leaner than I was. The evidence is straightforward. At my official personal weigh-in at the beginning of the year (conducted on Tuesday 3rd January) I troubled my bathroom scales at 13 stone 12.2 pounds. At the beginning of this week, on Monday 7th August, I hit them at 12 stone 9 pounds exactly. Within that period my weight has dropped, stagnated and also gone up and down like a yo-yo, but – largely dependent upon where I was spending my time, and what food was being served, and what opportunity I had to take exercise, there – it has been broadly running on a downward trend.
I am only an average golfer. At about the age of forty, after I had taken the step of joining a golf club, I acquired some sort of ‘official’ handicap (19, since you ask) solely because – with my playing pals and I specifically desirous of going abroad on golfing holidays – and possessing one being a prerequisite of playing many courses of quality around the globe, we all needed to do this.
The way handicaps work, you should submit a card via computer every time you play so that – if you should either improve or get worse – your handicap either goes down our up to reflect that, the idea being that, if and as you happen to play against another golfer possessed of a handicap, the handicap sorts things out so that you can always have a competitive game with them.
However, my three playing pals and I never did that – play against other golfers, I mean. That was never our purpose or intention. Instead we were running a permanent annual ‘closed’ playing season – keeping copious amounts of statistics and awarding ourselves annual cups and trophies along the way, producing a spoof ‘magazine of record’ every week detailing our efforts to the world at large – to which endless competition nobody else was ever invited.
About five years ago – with the frequency of our games gradually reducing courtesy of our respective ages, retirements and family circumstances (and in my case, the onset of the hip arthritis issues than eventually led to my replacement operation) – we ‘split up’ and went our separate ways.
The others kept playing occasionally but the state of my hip meant I gave up playing altogether. I couldn’t walk (or even proceed by buggy) around a golf course, still less swing a club properly.
Last October, however, I made my comeback of sorts in a family competition.
Last week I went round Merrist Wood near Guildford in a gross score of 127 (it was either that or 126, and I forget which).
Yesterday I completed the Surrey National course in a gross 109.
The improvement was undoubtedly partly due to the obvious fact that, the more you do something, the better you get at it.
But in addition, I was gradually getting a mental grip upon my game – just the simple things, e.g. deliberately playing to my limitations, stopping lifting my head during my swing and trying to hit the ball too hard.
And you know what?
If you’d taken away the occasional and inevitable ridiculous ‘rushes of blood to the head’ and (for example) the times I made a complete Horlicks of a shot and disappeared into the undergrowth … and then took 2, 3 or 4 swings to get my ball back on the fairway … and, of course, the times I missed three-foot putts, I reckon I could have gone round in less than three figures.
And a gross score somewhere between 90 and 100 was perfectly acceptable to me in my heyday – i.e. the days when I used to play golf three weekends out of four.
Stuff the adage “They never come back”. Those kind of downbeat, pessimistic thoughts are for losers.
Here we go, here we go, here we go …
