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Show me a golfer who claims to have never choked and I'll show you a liar.
Golf is the self-saboteur's game. Its overall difficulty and infinite complexities turn every round into a minefield of miseries. There are so many opportunities to fail in golf that it is sometimes a wonder the game is as popular as it is. But those highs...they make the wounds worth suffering.
I'll get right to it: I choked, big-time, in my home county amateur tournament in early December. I had held things together nicely for 35 1/2 holes, and found myself exactly 100 yards from the pin in two shots, smack in the middle of the fairway on the par-5 18th hole at Sandridge Golf Club's Dunes course. I was tied with a very solid local player, 21 years old (15 years my junior - ouch!), who had played for the local high school team and whose game has steadily improved over several competitive rounds we've played together.
His game had impressed me over Sunday's second and final round, but I still wanted to beat him and win a tournament I'd taken down twice before. He had already hit his third shot about 18 feet left of the cup. Not a bad shot at all, but I had the tournament on my 58-degree wedge, and I knew it. One good swing with a club I consider to be a weapon and I could steal the trophy with a walkoff birdie.
I blew it. I choked my guts out.
I addressed the ball with a calm-enough feeling, I thought, but then disaster struck: I skulled it 10 yards over the back of the green. It was one of those two-grooves-too-low screamers where the club still makes a little divot but feels like it's striking a match across the turf, rather than extracting a healthy pelt.
There had been zero doubt what score I needed to make, and the shot separating me from success was one of the greenest of lights in golf. I could feebly try to excuse myself by saying the lie of the ball - on December-dry Bermuda just past the end of a shallow divot - wasn't the best, but that wasn't why I choked. I choked because...I don't really know why. Any memory of the mechanics of the swing disappeared with the shock of impact. I swear I had stepped into the shot feeling ready to meet the moment. Five seconds later, I was in shock.
You can probably guess the rest. I gathered myself as best I could, but hit a mediocre pitch - a second straight 58-degree failure. My opponent cruised his birdie putt up to tap-in range. I burned the left edge of the cup with my 15-footer that would've sent the thing to extra holes.
Handshake. Ballgame. Second place. Agony.
Choking is a golfer's rite of passage
I have choked many times before. I once triple-bogeyed the last hole of a junior tournament qualifier when it turned out a bogey would have gotten me in. But this time was brutal in its bluntness, made crueler by the type of balmy, early-December midday that millions of people flock to Florida for as soon as the leaves fall up north.
One of the truisms of sports is that it's helpful to have a short memory. Be a goldfish! you might say, to which I'd reply, goldfish love to go belly-up.
This one will sting for a while, until it mellows, becoming part of the playlist of memories of woe that every golfer has, and loves to trot out over a drink. It's something everyone who has ever played the game as more than a pure recreation shares. The stages and stakes may vary, but you and I are brothers with Doug Sanders and Scott Hoch, whose surname made the sobriquet "Scott Choke" painfully obvious after his 1989 Masters debacle. That camaraderie gives us grace to go out and get hurt all over again next time.
A golfer has got to choke, boy. It comes with the territory.
Go ahead - share your most epic on-course choke story. This is a safe space.
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