"I realized that I’d gone through every one of those stages, but not as a terminal patient...as a golfer."

Larry David has finally accepted that he'll never be a good golfer, or so he writes in The New Yorker. Warning, it opens with a glitch (Riviera's 175-yard 4th...where are the vaunted New Yorker fact checkers calling Larry to ask if he's really playing the forward tees?).

Think what I could’ve done with all that time. Learned French. Piano. I’d be playing Chopin now if it weren’t for golf. Playing Chopin for Julie Delpy. But instead I wasted my life on this game. It looked so easy. The ball just sits there. Any idiot could do it. But every instinct I had was wrong. You’re supposed to hit the ball down to make it go up. That’s absurd. I want to hit it up to make it go up. When I try to hit down, it’s like I’m splitting a log with an axe. All I do is chop up the course. And then there’s this one: the easier you swing, the farther the ball goes. How can that be? So you hit down to make it go up and swing easy to make it go far?

Comments

[Evil twin]

Geoff - 14th not 4 in article....the sad fact is most golfers simply do not get better once there swing patterns are ingrained.

[phil the author]

Of course he'd be playing Chopin if he hadn't played golf... he'd be playing it just as poorly also...

[John]

Ha ha......the same thoughts have gone through my head over the years. Watching the pros seems to give me confidence that gee that looks so easy. Then I go out there and it can seem so difficult. The way I see it, the only way you can fail at golf is to give up. As frustrating as it can be at times, the feeling of striking the ball well will bring me back time after time. I don't care what else I could have done with my time, golf is just too hard to resist.

[The Golf Nazi]

No Golf for any of you!

[Dan]

That could have been an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm!

[Ky Laffoon's Ghost]

The only thing worse than playing golf is not playing golf.