There Are No Sorrys in Golf
I watched the ball fly across the green.
Then, it was hit back again to the other side of the green.
At this point, I'm not sure any of us knew whether to laugh, cry, or simply pick up the dang ball and move on to the next hole. I’m happy to report, we chose laughter.
I had just returned to a quaint little resort in Edgerton, Wisconsin, for my second annual four day women's golf retreat. I was invited for the first time last year and apparently passed the initiation because the gang voted me back in. I had such a wonderful time that I was thrilled to return.
We golf a lot on this trip. And when I say a lot, I mean two or three rounds a day. But these aren't all traditional rounds of golf. There are games mixed in throughout the four days, including a two gal scramble, Scotch Foursome, Cha Cha Cha, Best Poker Hand, and several others designed to keep things interesting and, in theory, fun.
I say "in theory" because something funny happens when we start playing as teams.
We get worse.
Several of us noticed it. Women who can play perfectly respectable rounds of golf suddenly start hitting shots they haven't hit in months or weeks. A drive goes somewhere it has no business going. A chip sails past the green. A putt that should be easy suddenly feels like we're trying to sink the winning putt at the U.S. Open.
I have a theory about why.
When we're playing our own ball and keeping our own score, a bad shot belongs to us. We may not like it, but we're the only one who has to deal with the consequences.
Put us on a team, however, and suddenly we're not worried about disappointing ourselves. We're worried about disappointing someone else. And out comes the word we keep telling one another we're not supposed to say. "Sorry."
There are no sorrys in golf. We say it all the time.
Then someone misses a putt.
"Sorry!"
Someone hits into the rough.
"Sorry!"
Someone chunks a chip.
"I'm so sorry!"
The funny part is that the person we're apologizing to usually isn't upset at all. She's already telling us it's fine while knowing full well that her own questionable shot could be coming next.
It doesn't matter whether you're the strongest player in the group or the weakest. That little pressure sneaks in because you care. You want to contribute. You don't want to be the reason the team gets a bad score.
Which brings me back to that unforgettable par four.
I was playing a Scotch threesome with Judy and Sue. We were just shy of the green in three, which wasn't terrible. We still had a chance to salvage the hole.
We chipped. The ball rolled all the way across the green and off the other side. Okay. Not ideal. But we hit it again and it rolled across to the other side.
Then someone putted and missed.
Another putt.
Missed.
Another attempt.
At this point, I'm pretty sure the hole had somehow shrunk to approximately the size of a dime.
Eventually one of us got that ball into the cup. I honestly can't remember whether it was Judy, Sue, or me.
What I do remember is laughing. A lot. I believe we ended up with a nine on a par four. Golf glory at its finest. And yet, when I think back on those four days, that hole is one of the moments that makes me smile. Not because we played it well. Clearly, we did not.
I remember it because not one of us blamed the other. We each felt badly about our own mistakes, but we gave one another grace without hesitation. Isn't it interesting how easily we do that? If Judy missed, I wasn't thinking, How could she miss that?
I was thinking, we've got this.
If Sue had a bad shot, I wasn't disappointed in her. I knew she'd hit plenty of great ones.
Yet when it was my turn to miss?
"Sorry."
Why are we so willing to extend understanding to everyone around us while holding ourselves to a completely different standard? We do it far beyond the golf course. We tell a friend not to worry about forgetting something, then beat ourselves up when we forget.
We remind someone we love that everyone makes mistakes, then replay our own mistake for three days. We tell another woman she doesn't have to be perfect, then somehow expect perfection from ourselves.
Maybe that's the lesson hiding somewhere between all those missed putts. What if we talked to ourselves the same way we talked to our teammates?
What if instead of immediately apologizing for every mistake, we said, "That's okay. I'll get the next one.” What if we stopped believing that making a mistake means we've let everyone down?
There's something else I realized during those team rounds. The pressure we were feeling wasn't actually coming from our teammates. We were creating most of it ourselves.
No one expected every drive to land in the fairway or every putt to drop. We were a group of women spending four days together, playing golf, laughing, competing, encouraging one another, and making memories.
We weren't trying out for the LPGA.
Somehow our brains hadn't received that memo.
Perhaps the real goal isn't to stop caring. Caring about how we show up for other people is a beautiful thing. But there's a difference between wanting to do our best and believing we have to be perfect so we don't disappoint anyone.
We don't.
Sometimes we'll be the one who makes the great shot.
Sometimes we'll be the one whose ball rolls right past the hole.
And sometimes the entire team will somehow turn a perfectly salvageable par four into a nine.
That's life.
We are all going to miss the mark occasionally. We're going to make mistakes, say the wrong thing, forget something important, or wish we'd handled a situation differently. When that happens, I hope we can remember how readily we would forgive someone else for doing exactly the same thing.
Maybe we could offer some of that grace to ourselves.
I came home from our golf retreat with plenty of stories, lots of laughs, and probably more rounds of golf in four days than any reasonable person needs. But I also came home thinking about three women standing around a golf hole, each taking her turn at missing and somehow finding it hysterical instead of disastrous.
Maybe we had it right after all. We gave one another grace, picked up our clubs, and moved on to the next hole. And perhaps that's something worth carrying far beyond the course because, there are no sorrys in golf.
xo, Sheryl
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