Message From A Retired Golfer

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.