James Dodson

Whenever I'm asked to speak to a group of golf-minded folks, particularly newcomers to the game, I like to point out why golf is demonstrably the most social game on earth.

If an average golf swing takes roughly two seconds of time to occur, and the average player shoots 90, that amounts to roughly only 180 seconds - or three minutes - of actual physical playing time during an average four-hour round of golf. The rest of that three hours and fifty-seven minutes of a golf round is spent walking, talking, observing nature, revising your grocery list, dreaming up a novel, getting to know someone you just met on the first tee, telling jokes, cursing your luck, meditating - in short, doing a variety of things you could never do in any other sport. 

I've long maintained there is no game better suited for making a friend or acquaintance that lasts anywhere from a few hours to a lifetime. Moreover, the friendships you make in golf often endure for decades, and there is no greater connective social tissue between the generations - fathers and sons, sons and mothers, fathers and daughters, even husbands and wives -- than time spent chasing Old Man Par in another family member's company.

A round of golf, as the cliche goes, reveals character - but it also reveals characters. As a general rule, owing to golf's cruel Darwinist nature, golfers of all levels tend to be folks equipped with a striking sense of humor. We learn to laugh at ourselves and the foibles of others as we fumble after life's most difficult and frustrating game. The great Ted WIlliams once told Sam Snead golf was far easier than baseball because a golfer at least got to hit the ball off a stationary peg rather than try and hit a ball moving 90 m.p.h. "That may be," Sam told him without missing a beat, "but a golfer has to play his foul balls."

In that context, it's no surprise that no other game provides as many funny stories, jokes, and painful laughs and self-revelations as the game of golf - not even close. 

That's because golf remains the most human of games, as difficult as it is poetic, forever new, able to reveal both our best qualities and our strongest weaknesses in the span of a single swing of the club or an afternoon's outing with friends or strangers. 

And finally, in what other game do dogged victims of inexorable fate - i.e. opponents - remove their caps and shake hands at the end, and maybe even go off together for a beer?

I can't think of any, frankly.

That's what makes golf the most wonderful social game on earth.

James Dodson is a golf writer and editor living in Southern Pines, N.C. He will receive the 2011 Donald Ross Award May 15 at the ASGCA Annual Meeting in Denver. His work has appeared in more than 50 magazines and newspapers worldwide, and he has won more than a dozen awards from the Golf Writers Association of America.

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