Golf and Me - 12 April 2026

I was driving from Ivins, UT to Park City, UT (350 miles) today, but I noted, on return that Rory McIlroy won the Masters golf tournament for the second year running. This caused me to reflect on my own golf history.

I played a lot of golf during my high school years... mostly in the summer at the Provo, Utah eighteen-hole municipal golf course. I was never that good. I'd get my hopes up by stringing together a couple of pars. Then, I'd slice a drive to the point that the ball would almost boomerang. Still, it was fun playing with my buddies and the greens fees were only $10.00 for eighteen holes.

I never took golf lessons during those high school years. And I more or less dropped the game through college, a Mormon mission, and graduate school. While living overseas for sixteen years, I owned a set of extra-long clubs to accommodate my height at 6'6". We were members of some tony clubs while living overseas: Tollygunge, in Calcutta; Polo Club in Manila. Notwithstanding, I would play rarely. I was in mostly operational and managerial positions which jobs didn't have the customer golf requirement of many other international bankers. And, busy as I always was, I didn't develop a passion to play. On those few occasions when I did play, if I ever deigned to accurately keep score, I would rarely break 100.

I took some lessons in Florida during the late '80's, but it seems that I never had the patience to think through and apply what I was being taught (it's a different story for skiing where I worked hard to apply ski pointers learned over seven years participation at the Park City Mountain Resort Ski College). We were members of the Riviera Country Club in Coral Gables, Florida, but during our three-year membership there I didn't play golf more than a half dozen times.

In conversations with others about golf, I used to use my height as an excuse for my poor golf play. After all, you have to admit that being that much further away from the ball than a normal sized person would be a disadvantage. My "too tall" excuse didn't carry much water, though, as it was well known that basketballer Michael Jordan, even at 6'9" was a scratch golfer. Also, on those rare occasions when I joined others in a round of golf, I was never invited back. I haven't played golf in forty years and have never looked back... until now.