Message From A Retired Golfer

[RonPrice]

After watching 10 minutes of the Mastercard Masters in Melbourne Australia on 11/12/05 I resolved to write a short summary of my 40 years of golfing life and the result is as follows:

HONOURABLE COMPANY2

From the mid-1950s to the mid-1990s I played gold in the garden of my home. I was in my teens and a high school student when I started and in my fifties and about to retire from full-time employment as a teacher when I finished. I played with my boy-friends in the 1950s and with my wife and son, Daniel, in the 1990s. Golf was not played during all those forty years. When I lived in the NWT, in the NT, in SA and Victoria, states and territories in Canada and Australia, no garden golf was played. After watching some professional golf on TV yesterday, I reviewed my golf-life and concluded that I played approximately 10 games of nine and eighteen-hole golf on the big golf courses.

Occasionally, perhaps half a dozen times in 40 years, I’d hit golf balls in some big field near my home just for the fun of it. I also played many games of golf on those mini-golf courses. I have no idea how many times, but I’d guess it was probably about two dozen, for my interest and pleasure in that form of golf was limited. Over the years friends would ask me to play golf, not frequently, for they soon realized that golf was not a game in which I was interested. Then there was golf on TV and in the fifty years when I watched golf, 1955 to 2005, I don’t think I ever watched more than four or five holes at one time. Watching golf was an emotional rest for my psyche; my second wife liked watching golf and I liked watching golf with my wife—but after 10 or 15 minutes I often got sleepy. Golf had become, at best, a good sedative.-Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, December 12th 2005.

It all started with that garbage pail
and those golf clubs just waiting
for someone to come along and
take, claim them for their own.

And I did in about ’57, just about
the time the Guardian died,1 Yuri
Gagarin went around the earth and
I recovered from my first, brief, love
Affair after kissing my first girl, Karen.

We played a lot of golf back then
in the garden using those old clubs
and tins of Spud tobacco with holes
in the bottom to let out the water.
I think we had a nine hole course
which we called the PGA: Price
Golf Association, but it all ended
in the summer of ’62 to be reborn,
briefly in the early 1990s before
it, too, ended as all good things do
for a small company of honourable2
family members in Western Australia.

1 Shoghi Effendi, the leader of the Baha’i Faith from 1921 to 1957.
2Early golfers played at the game for many years without any thought of forming a society or club until finally a group of Edinburgh golfers in 1744 formed a club called the Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers. At this time, the first rules of golf, 13 in all, were drawn up for an annual competition between sportsmen from any part of Great Britain and Ireland.-Ron Price with thanks to "A Brief History of Golf," Internet, 12/12/’05.

[Kilted Arab]

wtf???????????????????

[Rockford35]

Yes, I'm super lost here too.

My guess is he's the one playing the Titleist 4.

R35

[longiron]

wtf???????????????????

When i tried to read this yeserday i had the same thought.

[SiberianDVM]

See what golfing does to you? You start out normal, and the decline is so gradual that you [bring me the blueprints] barely notice it. Then you [bring me the blueprints] are playing one day and your partner [bring me the blueprints, bring me the blueprints] has to nudge you [bring me the blueprints, bring me the blueprints, bring me the blueprints] because you've frozen over the ball and [bring me the blueprints, bring me the blueprints, bring me the blueprints, bring me the blueprints] and you've been hunched over your [bring me the blueprints, bring me the blueprints, bring me the blueprints, bring me the blueprints, bring me the blueprints, bring me the blueprints, bring me the blueprints] putt so long that 3 foursomes are [bring me the blueprints, bring me the blueprints, bring me the blueprints, bring me the blueprints, bring me the blueprints, bring me the blueprints, bring me the blueprints] backed up on the tee.......wave of the future,wave of the future, wave of the future, wave of the future, wave of the future, wave of the future, wave of the future, wave of the future, wave of the future, wave of the future...........

[wirehair]

Can I get a big ol' HUH?

[GregInOz]

Qe?

A little too wordy for the internet, no? And all that inspired by 10 minutes of the Australian Masters. I watched it too, I didn't quite get the same feeling from it I guess.
I have a feeling this guy is now a retired message board poster too.

[MyGolfDomain.com]

Ron left the same message at my site. I think he was just excited about golf for an hour or two after watching golf on TV then completely forgot about it again hehe.

[RonPrice]

Goodness it has been nearly 2 and 1/2 years since I was here last, but I'm still alive and well and in the early evening of my life, of my late adulthood(60 to 80). If I last into my old age(80++) I will drop in here occasionally and see what dialogue gets generated by my posts. Yes, too many words, such is life....here are some more.-Ron
________________________

So many get aroused over what they don't want. And millions don't get aroused at all, except in their private domains by the magical products of consumption and their micro worlds of job, family, health and those personal interests. The world of information and entertainment got increasingly mixed in these several decades and in the pluralistic society that imbibed it all, and in which I had my own life and being. The result seemed to be a mixed bag around which most people spun the web of their lives. Television tended to privatize rather than publicize; it was not so much a window as a periscope by means of which the submerged suburban viewer perceived and understood. At least that was the way Martin Pawley put it.

I think TV did both, served as both window and periscope. Half unconscious after the evening news, the viewer sleeps, watches more TV, plays golf, washes the dishes but rarely engages with society in any 'political' way, a way that attempts to engage with society through some organizational form except perhaps: tennis, sport or any one of a host of leisure pursuits. As society goes through one of its most revolutionary, its most painful periods of change, the average person is, as one critic put it, amusing himself to death. "The Westerner is par excellence a man of leisure," as David Denby writes in his The Immediate Experience: Movies, Comics, Theatre, and Other Aspects of Popular Culture. This is not to say that millions don’t work hard or experience pain. "Pain as God's Megaphone," C. S. Lewis wrote, "is a terrible instrument." Frank T. Vertosick quotes this line as epigraph to his new book, Why We Hurt. Lewis's comparison points out why pain is essential: It gets our attention, alerting us that something is terribly wrong and, if possible, must be dealt with. This autobiography is, partly at least, a story of these moments. It is also a story of my own blurring of work and leisure.


This half century of my memoirs was filled with many of contemporary society’s savage dichotomies: the traditional demands of a sexual morality utterly at variance with the massive propaganda of eroticism; a glossy magazine and media world with its affluence and orientation to private pleasure and a world of barbarism, poverty, violence and death; the constant message to do your own thing and the immense need for people to work in groups on the vast array of social problems--and on and on. Needless to say, these polarities often pulled people completely apart. At the end of their journey in which a perpetually unstable reconciliation of forces had become the first law of their inner psychic life, in which the search for some Real Me had gone on for years, in which messages to feel rather than think, in which some rockbottom realism had become pretty much everyone's position, one wondered when and if society would lapse into some anarchic animalism. Perhaps I overstate the case, but the flavour of my case remains and the tensions of this half century were indeed enormous, if often subtle and unnoticed. I should emphasize, too, although it hardly needs saying, that my perspective in this work is one of a western Baha’i not a: Hottentot, Tutsi, Mongolian, Eskimo or any one of hundreds of peoples in the third world.


Proust once said that "in reality, every reader is, while he is reading, the reader of his own self. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument which he offers to the reader to enable him to discern what, without the book, he would never, perhaps, have preconceived in himself." There is some truth in Harold Bloom's assertion that we read because we can not know enough people and friendships possess a vulnerability. And so, as I survey the interstices of my life, I hope I can make of the exercise that optical instrument for the reader that Proust refers to here. Language offers, as Janet Gunn put it so well, a peculiar fitness for the expression and creation of the self. It is a common tool, a tool we all possess, perhaps the best there is if we want to be the novelist, the psychologist, the psychiatrist, of ourselves. It is also a tool with which I would like to mildly disturb the rebellious and lively minds of readers but not to cut their throats; or, as some writer whom I have now forgotten, once said: I’d like to be seen as a surgeon who gives his patients a whole new set of internal organs but leave them thinking they did it all by themselves.........I'd better stop because "internet-speak" prefers short takes, little stabs, small hits, verbal micro-niches....and several paragraphs like this at a golf site is not likely to be a winner....sorry folks....but "such is life," as Ned Kelly said on the way to the gallows in 1880.-Ron Price, Australia

[Eracer]

I'll take my sedatives in smaller doses, thanks.

Here are some long posts that have content worth reading. Perhaps you should study them for a while.

It is not an easy-to-make decision

Tradition, History, Etc.

The STRANGELY GOOD ROUND

[Wi-Golfer]

A long wordy post does not equate to a good post. Short & to the point is where it's at.

[zaphod]

Holy Crap

I'm following Wi-Golfer's suggestion.

[TheWOAT]

LOL@ the "wave of the future" line...

[Eracer]

It's a shame that the man's writings have some illuminating thoughts embedded within, yet are so tragically unreadable.

[Pa Jayhawk]

A guy gets released after 2 1/2 years of nothing better to do than studying, and reading Andy Warhol over and over. After determining that if he will ever achieve his 15 minutes of fame, it will be preaching God knows what on a golf forum. Unbeknowncst to him, his audience only reads the first sentence, and he went back to the sanitarium still being owed 14 1/2 minutes of fame.

Life is so unkind and sometimes such a tragedy. I feel for you brother.