"but that's church... this is golf"

I had my first travel-to-a-tournament experience last weekend and all I can say is when you take a chartered bus with about forty golfers, their coaches and houseparents the most interesting phenomenom occurs. Given the fact that there were only about ten girls in the whole group there was (are you sitting down?) a line outside the mens room. Amazing. The weekend was yet another fascinating glance into the daily lives of the golfingly gifted, but there was one moment that I'm still processing.

The first day of the tournament I was working hard, sitting on the porch of the clubhouse, talking to the coaches while the kids were comming in. I've finally learned that unless they shot a 64, the kids are usually not happy with their scores. Golfers are brooders... at least in public. They don't throw things or yell, they just walk by you silently and when you ask them how their day was they look up at you from under their hats and mumble, "don't ask" and go to get their lunch. You let them text their coaches/ family/ significant others, let them listen to their ipod, shower, and basically let the world fall back into it's proper perspective and then they start analyzing every hole, every possible shot they should have taken, could have taken, which iron they should have used... Well, you get the idea.

Given the intense emotions you see when kids are exiting the greens, it wasn't all that surprising when a girl who looked to be in high school walked by in tears, followed by her mom. The coaches all gave each other the "what's up with girls and emotions...?" look and continued to rehash the entire script of "Caddyshack" to each other. Then one of their students approached the coaches table and explained why there had been tears. "We got disqualified," she explained in her broken English (she appeared to have an oriental background, it made her explanation all the more endearing). "We played the wrong balls and didn't realize it until the next hole". Their coaches nodded soberly, asking "you mean you didn't mark you ball? Well, you need to be sure to do that... that's what happens when you don't pay attention. Don't close out the hole, go back and play it again".

When the little girl left they explained the particular rule to me-- that if you play the wrong ball, even if it's by accident, if you don't remedy the sitation immediatly by starting the hole again, you get "Dairy Queened..." (disqualified... get it? "D.Q.'d?"). I had to ask the question that I'm sure you're wondering too. "But guys..." I began. "I feel terrible suggesting this, but I mean, no one's out there watching them... Wouldn't it be better to just not tell the officials? No one would know!" "You can't do that. That's cheating, breaking the rules. It doesn't matter if no one sees, it wouldn't be right". As you can imagine, the catechetical implications of this conversation were making my brain explode... I'm not proposing that golfers are the pinnacle of ethics and virtue, but I was stunned that young girls would demonstrate such integrity and wanted to know how in the world this is instilled in kids. I said to the coaches, increduously, "how do you do this? I've had kids standing in Church, holding a Bible lie to my face about something I saw them do not seconds earlier... How do you do this?"

The coaches all just shrugged and gave what was, to them, the most obvious answer in the world "But Alison," they explaiend with great simplicity, "that's just Church. This is golf".