The Different Metrics Of Golf And Why Only One Matters To Me Now
By
Leonard Zwelling
Traditionally, there are two ways to play a golf match.
Match play is when two players play against one another directly. The lowest score on each hole wins that hole. At the end of the eighteen holes, the player who has won the most holes wins the match. Note, this means that if one player scores a two on a hole and his opponent scores a nine, the player with 2 only wins one hole. The amount by which the victor on any hole wins is irrelevant. This also means if one player wins the first ten holes, the match is over. The most holes his opponent can win is 8 and thus, he can never catch up.
In medal play, the play that governs most professional events, every stroke counts over four eighteen-hole rounds. At the end of the four days, the player with the lowest total number of strokes wins the tournament.
Thus, in match play the key metric of importance is the hole. In medal play the key metric of importance is the stroke.
That’s pretty much the way I have thought about scoring in golf since I was 12. Most of the time, I was trying to shoot the lowest round possible which is essentially medal play. It took me many years, especially since I had a 25-year golf hiatus between medical and business school, to finally break 90 once again after high school and another 10 or 20 years to break 80 which I have done a few times. I did do it once with a 76 on a public course on Long Island when I was in high school. I still have that scorecard somewhere. In case anyone cares, I have a 13 handicap now. That means I should shoot on average between 85 and 90.
My point here is, as in every other aspect of my life except in my marriage, I have been keeping score. It’s the nature of my addiction. For most of my life, I believed the person who collected the most gold stars wins. It’s a terrible affliction requiring a great deal of therapy to address and now, given tools by some great therapists, I can keep it under control. Just.
Thus, in golf, it was the traditional medal method I used to keep score. I have rarely played match play golf.
Lately, I have discovered a new way to keep score in golf and it is not reflected on any scorecard. My new metric in golf is the shot. In this new endeavor, I rarely succeed. In my new system of assessing my golf game, using the shot as the unit of measure, the goal is to make the ball do exactly what I want it to do in the present moment. Each time I address the ball is a new opportunity to hit a perfect shot. It doesn’t happen often.
Again, I need to explain.
When I was young and playing with hand-me-down clubs, all I wanted to do was get the ball up in the air and moving as straight as possible toward the green. Much later in my golfing life, in the past 5 to 10 years, I have learned to hit the ball high or low, with spin to the right or spin to the left. Not only does this make the game more interesting and challenging, but it leads to the logical conclusion of a new form of scoring. How many times in any given 18-hole round can I hit the exact shot I planned on hitting? The great Jack Nicklaus said he did it about three times a round. So, my goal is just once a round. I rarely succeed, but when I do, it gives me a much greater sense of accomplishment than any great 18-hole score. It’s a real rush.
Why? Because it is the essence of the challenge of golf. It is the essence of the challenge of any endeavor in life. How many times does it work out exactly as you planned?
In my life, this has been very rare, but not never.
At the end of my freshman year at Duke, I hatched a plan to finish undergraduate school in only three years while still graduating with a diploma. I also wanted to get into the medical school of my choice. I did that. It was a two-year plan that worked. I was fortunate and grateful. I had a great deal of help to fulfill the goals of my plan.
After a dismal early career in the research lab, the very first experiments I did as a fellow in Kurt Kohn’s lab worked perfectly. So did many subsequent ones. Certainly, not all, but many. Again, I was fortunate and grateful. I was also very lucky. No one else in the lab wanted to do what Dr. Kohn asked me to do. Smartly, I said yes. My research career was born.
When I was fired as a vice president, after much soul searching, I decided to become a health policy fellow doing a real sabbatical away from Houston and from MD Anderson. I did that. I am not sure I ever contributed to health policy research, but it was a springboard to the finish of my academic career and I learned enough to write many editorials and a book about it. Very fortunate, very lucky, very grateful.
So, recently I was playing in a benefit golf tournament with my wife, my son Andrew, and his friend Jon. It was a scramble where everyone tees off and the group uses the best shot among the four. At one point we needed a perfectly placed pitch shot to go 70 yards over a sand bunker, onto a green above our heads, and close to the hole. The other three members of the foursome had tried and not succeeded. I hit the perfect shot and we birdied the hole. It was a thing of beauty. It was a rush. I still can feel the bolt of energy it gave me. It went exactly as I had planned—up in the air, just clearing the lip of the sand trip, and rolling out toward the hole. The green was high above me, I could not see the ball land, but I knew I had it the exact shot I had planned to hit.
Yesterday, I was playing a long par 5. My drive was fine, but I flubbed my three-wood leaving me a 189-yard shot to an elevated green with the wind behind me blowing from left to right. The only possible way I was going to get the ball on the green was a high fade (spinning the ball from left to the right), riding the wind. I did just that. I won the day no matter what else happened.
I am trying to bring the same thought processes to the rest of my life. Every minute is a chance for me to craft a shot exactly as I want that minute to be. As in golf, most of the time I will fail, but when I succeed the feeling is very gratifying—in a meeting, on a Zoom call, with my friends, with my family, or being with myself.
Life ought to be like golf. It usually is not so simple as club, ball, hole. But the chance to stop keeping score and instead live for the shot in the moment, is empowering. At last, a better way to play; a better way to live.
