I’m back home from my annual golf trip with the “Michigan guys.” This time from not-so-sunny Arizona — instead of not-so-sunny-South Carolina last year. Although, eventually, we had enough sun in Arizona to get in four rounds of golf. It was my second golf trip of the year counting an excursion in February to Mesquite.

Neither trip was really about the golf. They never are. They’re about something much more important, if you’ve been following this column the past nine months of my life. These golf outings, and pretty much everything in which I partake in every day, are about my ability to participate in life the way I used to. Even at the smallest of levels.

I didn’t write those words to elicit sympathy. Rather, I wrote them for the simplest of reasons. I’m fortunate to be alive to do golf trips, take my rehab walks, make dinner, go to the office or even wake up. Let’s be honest, the opportunities to do anything are gifts from God. While I’ve tempted fate with his flaming counterpart on hundreds of occasions during my six decades plus on this orb, I never almost died. Well, there were a couple of bell-ringing car crashes, but I walked away from those. My heart attack and subsequent open heart surgery last summer changed my perspective.
In my life, golf always brings perspective.

Maybe it’s because golf isn’t played on the 6,000 yards — it used to be 7,000, but we’re all over 60 years old now — so beautifully displayed for our visual enjoyment against incredible backdrops. Arizona didn’t disappoint this time around. Rather, golf is played on the 6-inch tract between the player’s ears — which at times can be a lifeless, miserable, abyss fraught with fear, trepidation and evil lurking in every hazard and all-too-many out of bounds markers. The most difficult, ruthless course ever designed is inside the golfer’s head. One even Pete Dye couldn’t bring to life, although he’s played it.

If you’ve ever played golf, you understand my last paragraph. In golf, bad shots rarely result from a lack of talent, know-how or experience. In the gang I spent the past week with, we’ve hit hundreds of thousands — if not millions — of shots, taken lessons and have been playing the game for 40 years to a man. All you need to do is about five or six things correctly and consistently. As Hank Stram said: “Just keep matriculating the ball down the field, boys.” Yet, it’s a feat so rare with the Michigan boys or Junction boys or whichever gang of boys I’m hanging with at the time.

It’s all due to the battle of good and evil raging inside the collective craniums of the four guys on the tee box hitting “two off one” to start the round. It’s an undeniable fact that 90 percent of the time when lining up a golf shot, the golfer is thinking about something else. Now it might be about where the ball is going to go, but the best thinking on that image is done before the shot. For most golfers, the mind is saying, “Don’t hit it in the water.” Now all the golfer is thinking about is the water. And take it from me, that’s where the ball will go 90 percent of the time. For you non-golfers, it’s the same if the golfer’s mind is on the sand, out of bounds or that house on the right.

The other problem all of us hacks have is we can’t get our minds on the game we’re playing. The mind is worried about work, family, the economy  — when the price of hamburgers on the menu range from $19 to $25, it can’t be helped — and myriad other things. Some golfers have to explain to their wives why it takes seven hours to play a four-hour round. Which is why the beer cart girl gets so much attention, apparently.

Yes, some of the guys I play with play well. Heck, even I play well from time to time. I did from time to time this last trip, which made the excursion more enjoyable. But as time rolls along, we tend to talk about the bad shots more than the good ones. Maybe because there are more bad ones. But in golf, just like in life, the longer you play, the more stuff happens.

Maybe that’s why breakfast at the condo comes with not only coffee, bagels, eggs, sausage and orange juice, but also athletic tape, ointments and prescriptions. And why instead of scores, drives and shots, the boys talk about life, retirement and family.

I can’t tell you how many times I was asked, “How you doing today, Craigy?” But it was a lot. And it meant a lot. Because it’s no longer about golf. As my buddy Davey Boy put it last week, “We’re just not that good anymore.”

Maybe not at golf. But thank God I can be at life.

In golf and life, we don’t know how many shots we have left. I can only hope I’m way over par in life.

Craig Hall is owner and publisher of the Business Times. Reach him at (970) 424-5133 or publisher@thebusinesstimes.com.