There Are No Pictures on the Scorecard

A friend told me about a hole our mutual friend Mikey played recently at our home course, Live Oak, that might be the perfect analogy for both golf and life.

The par-4 13th at our home course is a 400 yard, dogleg right par 4 with trees off the left of the tee box and a large grove of oak trees down the right side beginning about 170 yards from the green to roughly 100 yards from the green.  The hole began badly for Mikey.

Mikey pulled driver and promptly squirted his tee shot left into a tree. The ball dropped about 50 yards in front of the tee box.

Not exactly the opening shot he envisioned.

For his second, he did what any sensible golfer would do from 50 yards off the tee.

He hit driver again.

Off the deck.

This one went right, struck another tree and finished behind yet another tree still 160 yards from the green. Two shots, two drivers, two trees, and he was still a long way from where anyone designing the golf course intended him to be.

Now he needed to slice the ball around the tree just to get it somewhere near the fairway.

Naturally, he pulled driver again.

His third driver of the hole came screaming out about two feet off the ground, sliced perfectly around the tree, found the short grass and started running.

And running.

It ran all the way onto the green.

Then it disappeared into the hole.

Birdie.

Three drivers. Two trees. One birdie.

My friend said that watching the hole unfold made him realize it was an analogy for Mikey's entire life. Having golfed with Mikey for 20 years and traveling with him on multiple golf trips to Scotland, Bandon, Dunes and the Dominican Republic, I must agree, with Mikey, the journey is rarely a straight line, frequently involves trouble, and almost always produces a good story.

Because there are no pictures on the scorecard.

The Shot That Shouldn't Have Worked

Golfers spend enormous amounts of time trying to eliminate luck from the game.

We practice our swings. We buy launch monitors. We measure carry distances. We study putting strokes. We analyze spin rates and ball speed. We want to believe that if we execute correctly, golf will reward us accordingly.

Then a ball hits a tree 40 yards left of the fairway, ricochets back into the middle and rolls another 30 yards toward the green.

Suddenly we're perfectly happy with luck.

Some of my favorite golf memories aren't great shots at all. They're terrible shots followed by ridiculously good outcomes.

I have one of my own.

My Rooftop Eagle

The fifth hole at our course is a 371-yard uphill par 4 that doglegs sharply left around a pond.  On the opposite side of the pond is a grove of trees designed to protect a group of homes from wayward shots. From the tees we were playing that day, the hole was playing 335, but it was only 260 over the trees and with a good bounce, I thought I might be able to drive the green.

So I went for it.

I hooked the tee shot badly.

Not slightly left.

House left.

The ball sailed toward one of the homes bordering the hole and crashed onto the roof.

At that point, you're not thinking about eagle. You're hoping you haven't broken a window.

But the house had an Italian barrel-tile roof, and apparently I had selected exactly the correct barrel tile.

The ball hit the curved tile and ricocheted violently to the right.

Back toward the golf course.

Back toward the green.

When we finally located it, my ball was sitting about four feet from the hole.

For eagle.

I made the putt.

There are probably golfers who would have felt slightly guilty about making a 2 that way.

I wasn't one of them.

I laughed all the way to the next tee.

Drive. Roof. Putt. Eagle.

Write down the 2.

Augusta's Most Famous Ricochet

 One of golf's great examples of a ridiculous shot becoming something memorable happens every year at Augusta National.

During Masters practice rounds, players gather near the pond in front of the par-3 16th and try to skip golf balls across the water and onto the green. Today, the patrons expect it. They call for players to "skip it," and a successful attempt can bring one of the biggest roars of practice week.

Blaine McAllister once told me how he remembers the tradition taking hold.

During a practice round at the 1986 Masters, McAllister was playing with Ken Green, Mark Calcavecchia and Paul Azinger. When they reached the 16th, all four began skipping balls across the pond.

Augusta National wasn't amused.

As Blaine told me,"the men in the green jackets came running at us to stop."

But the players kept doing it.

And the patrons loved it.

Blaine also remembers that Ken Green later received a letter from Masters chairman Hord Hardin about their little exhibition. Apparently, Augusta National wasn't quite ready to embrace the idea.

The patrons had other ideas.

There are accounts of golfers skipping balls across the pond before 1986, so McAllister, Green, Calcavecchia and Azinger may not have invented the shot. What they helped create, though, was something different: a connection between the players and the patrons that eventually became one of the great traditions of Masters practice rounds.

And then, more than three decades later, Jon Rahm provided the perfect ending to the story.

During a practice round before the 2020 Masters, Rahm stood near the edge of the pond and fired a low shot toward the water.

Skip.

Skip.

Skip.

The ball bounced across the pond, climbed onto the green and started rolling. It caught the slope and turned toward the hole.

Then it disappeared.

Hole-in-one!

I wonder what Hord Hardin would have thought.

A stunt Augusta National once tried to stop had become a Masters tradition—and produced one of the most replayed golf shots you'll ever see.

The Shots We Actually Remember

Here's the funny thing about golf.

I've hit thousands of perfectly acceptable drives in my life.

I remember very few of them.

I remember the one that hit a house.

Mikey will probably hit thousands more drivers too. But I suspect that years from now he'll still remember standing behind a tree on Live Oak's 13th hole, pulling driver for the third consecutive shot and somehow making birdie.

That's part of what makes golf so wonderfully strange.

The game gives us enough bad breaks to make us crazy. A perfect drive settles into a divot. A putt hits something invisible and changes direction. A ball catches the wrong side of a mound and disappears into a bunker.

Golf owes us a few good ones.

So when it occasionally decides to give something back, you don't apologize.

You take the bounce.

You make the putt.

And you write down the number.

Because twenty years from now, nobody is going to ask you about the perfectly struck 7-iron that landed twelve feet from the flag.

But hit a house and make eagle?

That's a golf story.

And I'll bet you have one too.

What's the craziest bounce you've ever gotten on a golf course—the tree, cart path, rock, roof, rake, or something even stranger—that somehow turned a terrible shot into a great result?

Tell me the story.

The crazier the bounce, the better.