The ball's not moving, and you have a bag full of sticks

We, the golf addicted, understand that the game is hard. Opening or closing the clubface by as little as two degrees could mean the difference between 270 yards down the middle of the fairway and 180 yards out but 50 yards right. What's worse, we often cannot tell that anything is awry until we are in the fescue, picking chiggers off our legs trying to find a $0.75 Top-Flite.

So what makes it so hard? The ball, as I noted in the title to this article, is not moving. It should be easier than, say, baseball- where the ball is coming at you at 90 MPH. Yet just last week, John Kruk opined on ESPN that golf is harder- partly because he can't play it. The Kruker was a career .300 hitter, no less.

Golf is hard in part because we think it should be easy. It starts with basic concepts like par. Most people think that par is the standard, what you should shoot on a given hole. The rulebook, however, defines par as "errorless play by an expert golfer." Standing on the tee of a 430 yard par four, even the most spastic hackers think they should make par, but it is unrealistic to think that a 20-something handicap like myself can get get down in 4. Mark O'Meara maybe, but not me.

It is a game of opposites- try to crush the ball and it goes nowhere, but a nice smooth swing sends the ball miles. The harder we try to do well, the worse we play- but go out and play for pleasure, you will shoot the lowest number of your life. Golf is hard because it doesn't seem hard- the ball's not moving, and you have a bag full of sticks. It shouldn't be this difficult.