After catching some of the delightful videos people have posted online about their housebound entertainment activities, I thought I’d take a walk on the lighter side myself this week.

The title of this blog might bring to mind different activities to you as we all try to keep ourselves amused close to home this summer, but I’m talking about the venerable and frustrating game of Golf.

While a few people love the game unconditionally, if you ask most people you’ll find that they lean towards more of a love-hate relationship. After a good round we’re bubbling over with enthusiasm and confidence, which often gets flattened the next time we play and everything goes to hell-in-a-handbasket.

Golf requires a challenging combination of hand-eye coordination plus mental focus, taken out onto courses that are designed to throw kinks at you.

Where else would you find sand traps that are directly in line with where you need to aim, or that are so deep you might think you’re going to strike oil when you swing at the ball? Trees wait to grab high-flying balls in their branches and dump them straight down to lie forlornly at the roots, or bounce them backwards past where you hit from. Pretty little ponds wait with strange magnetism to draw your ball, which you were sure you were aiming in another direction, down into their murky and irretrievable depths (and then your golf club, which frustrated golfers are sure is the cause of all their troubles and so often fling into the same pond).

Even the pros, who practice so much that they should have robotically-perfect swings, engage in public hissy fits when they find themselves, despite their best efforts, making the same bad shot several times in a row.

The evil genius of the game is that our minds and bodies don’t always agree to cooperate. We know we can hit the right shot, it just sometimes refuses to appear until the second try, when we invariably grumble “Should have done that the first time!”

So why do we keep playing this ridiculous game, that Mark Twain was erroneously attributed to refer to as ‘a good walk spoiled’?

Well, for one thing, it’s a great excuse to spend some time outdoors in beautiful surroundings, away from everything else going on in your life. While we’ve seen the odd person bring their cell phone onto the course, it’s generally frowned on. Nothing must distract us from our pursuit of that elusive great round, and golf etiquette demands that we maintain a reverent silence near anyone else struggling to find their own Grail round.

In between shots, though, we may speak to fellow golfers – there’s a camaraderie brought on by shared frustration punctuated by whoops of joy when a ball actually does what we want it to or laughter when sheer luck defeats the course’s hazards. Last summer I had several fellows come over from a different hole to congratulate me after my shot bounced off a rake and avoided going into the sand trap.

Sand traps, or bunkers as they’re more commonly known, are devoutly to be avoided. We watch helplessly as our ball seems to make a beeline for these little slices of beach that aren’t nearly as much fun as the real thing, then either lays a track to a spot that’s never as easy to get out of as it was to get into, or – even more fun – plugs itself halfway into the sand (amusingly called a fried egg). In a deep ‘pot’ bunker this can be a disaster of epic proportions – you have only to watch the British Open Championship to see seasoned pros get stymied by trying to dig a stuck ball out of the steep sides.

The scenery sort of makes up for a poor game. Here in North America course designers like to make the most of the landscape, which can make for some wonderful, if challenging, layouts.

One of our favourite courses is in Tennessee, Island Pointe Golf Club. It picturesquely meanders in and out of the French Broad River, among high cliffs and utilizing three islands in the river itself. The water is deep and rushing, making the island holes quite exciting as you’re surrounded by what can feel like a raging flood. It’s not a well-known course – we stumbled upon it a few years ago and are so fascinated by it that we play it whenever we’re in the area.

Ladies have it a bit better than men – our tees (where we hit from) are placed closer to the pin, that little hole that seems to be like the exhaust port on the Death Star, something that seems impossible to get your ball into. At the course my hubby and I played last weekend, the path on the sixth hole branched off to the men’s tees through a dark mysterious wood so removed from the fairway that there was almost an ominous hush. My hubby had to whack the ball over a wide clump of nasty, grabby wild plants, while from my tee block I enjoyed a pleasant vista down the fairway.

Hitting straight onto the fairway is a definite advantage, and much harder than it looks. Going off-course into the ‘rough’ is fraught with danger – things like the shimmering ponds and tall fescue grass that waves pleasantly in the breeze while it waits to wrap your club in bands of steel. Courses in the southwest United States feature thorny cacti that will capture your skin and not let it go, or homes along the fairway with patios that may transfer your ball straight into someone’s swimming pool (better that than their plate glass windows anyway).

Our favourite course in Ontario is attached to the Taboo Resort in Muskoka. It’s a beautiful course in any season, although we love to be there in the fall especially. Last summer the resort added an outdoor seating area on top of the hill by the driving range, before you approach the first tee, with a food truck and a bar that offers passion fruit margaritas so good that they (almost) make your play irrelevant.  

The course is set among the granite outcroppings of our Cambrian Shield, and my husband will attest that you can achieve some spectacular arcs as your mis-hit ball bounces off the rock high into the air and away into the woods.

Many players’ golf balls have been permanently sacrificed to all these devilish ambushes.

On the plus side, other bonuses are the weather – on a beautiful fall day, with the sun shining and the scent of wood smoke and fallen leaves all around, there’s nothing better – and the wildlife, contingent on whether you mind having a flock of geese or ducks as your watchful peanut gallery. Great Blue Herons, one of our most spectacular birds, seem to like hanging out by the ponds and completely ignore the people flailing away with their clubs.

The end of a round, which may come too soon or not soon enough depending on how you played, always deserves a refreshing beverage (maybe more margaritas!) and a good meal. The score card may be kept in triumph or stomped on, shredded and then burned to ash. You may have to separate your head covers that have been quarreling in your absence.

And the next week we do it all over again, because near the end of every round there’s always at least one great shot that sucks you back into the game.

Whatever your favourite form of self-inflicted torture is, make the most of it – at least it’s a good distraction.