Here's the main problem with golf: Everything is too small - the hole, the ball, the club -everything. This leads to golf commentators, with those annoying voices, continually saying compelling and wildly exciting things like, "Oh dear, he just pulled it a tad to the right of the cup. He'll have a tap-in coming up right after these important messages." Life can sometimes offer more than this, especially if you get lucky in a singles bar.

Here's the main problem with life: It has a beginning, a middle, and unfortunately an end. In other words, it's a bit shorter than we might like. Golf apparently has no end and goes on a lot longer than we might like. Many officials, commentators, and other "old guys" who come out of the woodwork for the Masters Tournament are actually dead. They are artificially re-animated each year to ensure that nothing beyond 19th Century thinking is allowed to infiltrate the tournament. It's been a wildly successful strategy.

Here's another problem with golf: Few people watch it on television. It lacks the compelling drama of - say - curling, where there's at least some possibility the players could trip over their own silly brooms and get brained by the 44 pound curling "stone" sliding down the ice behind them. In life, everybody watches you all the time until you have something stolen; then they never see anything. There was one true incident on an early African golf course where a player lost a pretty good chunk of his posterior to the horn of an unhappy hippo. But this sort of thing happens too infrequently to provide us with good entertainment value. Life, on the other hand, humiliates us frequently and consistently, providing compelling viewing for onlookers.

In golf, you are supposed to penalize yourself for any transgression of the rules, inadvertent or otherwise. You may even have to write it down and/or confess it to the nearest re-animated official. In life we are told to remain silent until our attorneys arrive.

Golf advertises products you can't really afford. Your doctor, lawyer, accountant, bookie, and investment advisor probably can, but you can't. You will have to continue to drive your ancient rattling Ford Pinto, not the silver Mercedes; save your money in a pig, not with Smith-Barney; travel to New Jersey for cheap gas, not to Paris for that blonde wearing just a raincoat and pricey perfume. As Old Blue-Eyes once crooned, "That's Life."

Learn more about this author, Mike Romeling.
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