Bottle This!
We are on a mission. My friends and I are in the ski business for financial gain and are avid golfers for fun. Three of us met at a local resort course where my wife and I happen to be members.
This particular resort, with two 18-hole courses, is one of the top-rated in Canada. Besides two 18s, it has a superb practice facility that includes a double-ended chipping and pitching area that looks down on the starting and finishing holes of one of the courses. The resort center is visible some 400 yards away. The pitching area is isolated from the rest of the driving and long iron area, and the target green is in the middle of a 10-by-160-yard beautifully manicured “fairway.”
We all met at 6:30 a.m. one morning. The first tee times started at 7:00, so we were by ourselves. We were given carts, and when we arrived at the pitching area, the sun was just coming up over the high hills to the east. The grounds crew had just finished mowing, and the smell of freshly cut grass, dew still on the ground, sun just hitting the resort buildings to the west, the early morning shadows, and the deep color contrasts with the new sunlight and shadows, all made for a picture and setting that could not be duplicated by the best brochure photography or marketing hype.
We stood in awed silence by our parked golf carts, clubs in hand, and practice balls on the ground. The silence and the beauty almost took our breath away. Other than a cart with the first of the day’s golfers just arriving at the starters hut 300 yards away, no one else was around. We stood for some time in the peace and quiet, and finally one of my friends found his voice and said, “Well, if we could just bottle this, we would have an easy time attracting event more people to this game. The serenity of this place just makes a person want to be here.” I reminded them of Chivas Irons in the book Golf in the Kingdom by Michael Murphy. Chivas Irons had his student out on a lesson, and instead of marking down the score by numbers of strokes taken, he said they would instead “play for feel” and mark down a score based on just that – how you felt you did on the hole.
As we hit balls to the green 100 yards away, we were relaxed, in a good mood, enjoying each other’s company, and thoroughly enjoying that very beautiful place on earth. It was good to be in a place that put us at ease, gave us some peace and allowed us to be creative. We left there with our good feelings “bottled” in our own minds, and with a renewed passion to try and set up learning environments that would attract more people to participate in our sports more often.
