A main characteristic of golf is numbers. We use them as essential functions to compare one person to another; a calculated value of how well you played. There are many various ways to use them, and golf is one of the more confusing sports to a layman, who may be tuning into the latest televised tournament and is flooded with integers of different values representing different aspects of the game. Fortunately, golf is a lifelong sport, so you have time to learn what these numbers mean. For me, the more practiced I am in something, the more entertaining it is to watch, which makes sense because my understanding has evolved with personal, relatable experience.

The specific set of numbers I would like to delve into is something called “Stroke Play Score”, which is the most familiar number to a golfer. Simply put, this is how many times you hit the ball, sort of. To truly understand what a stroke is, we need to understand a fundamental (and largely debatable) question: What separates humans from the rest of the animal kingdom? We are going to sum up millennia of philosophical and scientific theories for the sake of relativity to golf, and state that Humans have the ability to create complex fiction. Now, this is a fact. I’m not sure how many whodunit novels your hamster wrote, but I am just saying that humanity is clearly separate on the complexity of hypotheticals. If this seems like too minor of a thing to single out, consider the impact that fiction has had on human civilization. There would be no such thing as presidents, kings, governments, laws, orcs, Power Rangers, and evidently, sports. So, with all that prescient power of fiction in mind, humanity created the stroke (as it relates to golf).

A stroke is when you make an attempt at striking the ball with a golf club. One attempt equals one score. However, due to the realities of playing on a golf course, which exists on and within the confines of the natural world, sometimes your ball embeds itself unfavorably, or is swallowed up all together. So, you want to keep playing after this catastrophe. How are you supposed to count it? Penalty strokes. Fiction is back with avengeance, adding these imaginary strokes to your scorecard because you failed to heed the woes of Mother Nature. We won’t even mention the penalty strokes caused by human error alone, just know that those exist, too. When we talk about stroke-play, we need to consider the strokes that we never even had a chance to hit.

After we complete our arbitrary amount of holes, we sum up the total number of strokes (including penalties) and this is our score. The lower, the better. This is probably the most important number in golf, as it measures how well you played compared to others, or your previous self.

Let us collide all of this information with a modern day golfer. In today’s world, a person has the advantage of getting free-ish content from online to help them with their golf game. Lots and lots of YouTube channels, or blog articles feature different strategies on how to break a specific stroke-play score. For example, you are shooting around 105 per round, and bygummit, it’s high time you lowered it into the 90’s, so you go to the internet, or even take lessons for the sake of achieving this goal. It may not be the next time you play, but if you apply the same strategies by those who have “done it before”, you will lower your score. As someone who has “done it before”, I say that the feeling of accomplishment is worth it, alone. It’s important to know what our limitations are, and golf can be reflective of life in the sense that we can set a tangible goal and achieve it.

There are not all happy endings, however. What if you cannot score as low as you intend to? Even with rigorous training, and a thirst for knowledge of the game, we all have our boundaries. The truth is, we cannot all become tour professional caliber golfers; there is some fortune given to others in the world that we can not possess. With all of the media in the world today, it’s very easy to live vicariously through other people, to the extent where you believe that their life/lifestyle is a reachable thing. I firmly believe that anyone can become a scratch golfer (like, really good), or even have an “A” game comparable to a pro’s “D” game, but we can’t all compete like them.

To some people, if they don’t follow that dream, then why play? What is the point of playing a game where they can’t be in the 99th percentile? So they quit, become despondent and bitter towards the game, or very fortunately, make it. This isn’t the purpose of golf, or sports in general. The game of golf is so enjoyable because it’s long, challenging, hopeful, and you need balance, which is why it reflects life poetically. In life, you can’t go out and set a goal of “I want to be an astronaut!” or “I want to marry a Kardashian!” or “I am going to be a billionaire playboy philanthropist!”. You need to set small, attainable goals, and actually work to reach them. Everyday. What I have learned so far in life is that, fortune favors not only the bold, but those who are balanced, and ready to handle larger, more difficult tasks. Some people are more fortunate than you, and that is okay because you are living a balanced healthy life and hitting your targets. Frantically waiting for good karma to come is unhealthy. Sometimes you need to take a penalty stroke to avoid a much worse score.