Interlude 17: The Quick Fix

Wednesday was (again) a feriado - so i decided to take advantage and go for a round of golf with some people i met playing last time. We met at 8.30 in the morning and drove another half hour to a country club, which was beautiful - the golf course was actually almost part of peoples houses, with many holes right next to peoples front gardens and swimming pools etc.

Anyway, I wont bore you with actually golf stuff - but I will go on a side point. One of the guys who was playing with us was much older - 70, say. He told me he'd been captain of the Buenos Aires golf club for 25 years back in the day, and at the start he seemed like a friendly old man. However, when we got to the course, he seemed to turn a bit...sour. When we were warming up, he starting cracking some (unfunny) jokes/snide comments and started giving me tips on how to change my technique - pretty much the last thing you want before you start a match, right??

Well, anyway, it put my right off my game and I had a terrible first hole. For some reason there was a long walk from hole 1 to hole 2, and during that time I was getting a lot of evils, as if to say 'why did we bring this young guy with us, he doesn't know what hes doing!'

So we eventually started the second hole and i thought, well, it cant go much worse than the first - I'm going to try and take his tips on board.

Rarely in life can you ever find a quick fix for anything. Normally, you need to wear it in, try out the best way of doing it and see what works for you before you can internalise something. That's why, for example, you could read and read a football textbook (if such a mythical thing existed - 'that was a textbook finish' - where is this textbook!?) until you are as well versed in technique as the professionals, but its practice, not knowledge, that makes perfect. That said - his tips made it like a whole new game, a miracle fix - i ended up playing under my handicap even though i had a +5 from the first hole (for non golfers, its a good thing...).

Interested onlooker...

Anyways, he ended up lightening up - so I couldn't decide whether he was a grumpy old man, or my new life guru. So if i see him again, he´s my grumpy old guru.