by Art West

Created on: June 09, 2008

My all-time favorite sport is golf. I did not discover golf until I was 27 years old but it has still taught me many life lessons.

I was fortunate enough to find some friends from work and form a foursome. We had about a five year span where we golfed like crazy. We would play 9 holes after work in the middle of the week. We would play 18 on Sunday and we would take about 10 vacation days a year (Friday's) where we would play 36. We took full advantage of the American Lung Association Golf Card and also the Indiana Golf Pass. We played on numerous courses in North Central Indiana and we always had a story for each course.

One of my favorite stories is when we were playing a course and our buddy Kevin kept chipping back and forth over this par 3. His original drive was short; he chipped long over the back of the green and then chipped back across the green and into a front sand trap. Me and my other two buddies were already on the green watching him. As he addressed his ball in the sand trap, he said he looked up and saw the three of us on the green with our backs to himand our shoulders shaking up and down as we were trying to be somewhat inconspicuous while we were laughing at him. He said that is when he realized that he was taking golf too seriously and his attitude changed after that.

We had an absolute blast playing together, however, life happens and two of my foursome had kids. They got involved with their kids activities so the foursome got set aside. My other buddy started having health issues so the last time the foursome got to play together was for my bachelor's party four years ago. We still have those great memories and get a kick out of telling those old stories.

I mentioned earlier that I had learned a lot of life lessons through golf. Some of the key lessons that are learned through golf include persistence. Or as we like to say, keep grinding. You may have a bad hole but don't let that get to you. Continue to play within your game and you will have some good holes and consequently make up for the bad hole. Which brings up another lesson. Play within yourself or you could say have patience. If you can only hit the ball 150 yards, don't try to drive the green. It's okay to take 3 strokes to get on the green of a par 4. If you are on in 3 and one putt, you still have a par. If you two putt you have a bogey and 95% of golfers would be happy playing bogey golf, I know I would. Golf also teaches integrity as you have to call penalties on yourself.

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