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A friend recently posted on Facebook that his doctor had suggested that he resume playing golf in order to help lower his blood pressure. At first blush this seems a lot like suggesting that an alcoholic add a couple martinis to the evening routine to help combat insomnia. I mean, really, play golf to lower your blood pressure? It has been my experience that even really good golfers don’t play golf to lower their blood pressure. Good golfers play golf to lower their score, and they tend to be quite competitive about it. Let us say you agree to play in a charity golf event. One of those things where you pay an entry fee to play a round of "friendly golf," win some goofy prizes, eat barbecue and drink a cold one or two. Unless you bring friends along, you are often placed in a foursome with three other charitable souls. However, god forbid you should get placed in a group with “real golfers;” those folks behind the phrase “shoot a round of golf.” With these players, you do need to check their golf bags for long guns as well as long irons. The words “Oh, heck. Try that one again,” have never crossed their lips. The day will be long and your blood pressure will be screaming in your ears.
So, I ask again, resume playing golf to lower your blood pressure? But then I remember that one of the prominent items on my bucket list is to walk the Augusta National Golf Club course in the Spring. Notice I did not say to play the Augusta National Golf Club course in the Spring. There is a world of difference between walking and playing Augusta, the site of The Master’s. Serious golfers, both professional and amateur, can spend entire lifetimes pining away to play Augusta, only to die unfulfilled. I am secure in the knowledge that walking Augusta, like over-wintering in Yellowstone, and singing with Nora Jones, will not come to be, so I don’t let the absence of the possibilities bother me. Mine is a Zen approach to Augusta, and Zen and golf are unlikely bedfellows - but should not be.
My wanting to walk Augusta has nothing to do with a desire to slam a 300-yard drive down a fabled fairway and chip in from a half mile away for a world-shaking Albatross. [I even had to look up Albatross - three under par for the hole. A “Condor" is four under par on a hole. A hole-in-one on a par five is all I can come up with.] No, I want to walk Augusta because it is beautiful, literally-take-your-breath-away beautiful. There are beautiful gardens in manor houses and palaces all around the world. Augusta is quite comfortable in their company. It is not hard to understand how a physician could suggest that a patient walk a golf course to lower blood pressure. The exercise can’t hurt, and even lesser courses than Augusta are designed, in part, for pleasing vistas. But play golf to lower your blood pressure?
Yes, perhaps, but only if you bring Zen onto the course, into the playing and not just the walking. When my father passed 90 - years of age, not a golf score - he forgot that golf was, after all, just a game and not terribly important in the grand scheme of things. Until then he and I often played Zen golf. Zen golf meant forgiving errant shots - "Oh, take that one again" - and forgetting exactly what we had on that last hole - "Five? No, I think you had a four.” It also meant seeing beyond the game, beyond the fairway to the garden around us: “What do you think that squirrel is up to?” “What are those purple flowers? Your Mother would have known.”
A famous bit from the song Ya Got Trouble from the musical The Music Man goes like this as Prof. Harold Hill decries the creeping influence of horse racing and -
“ . . . horse-race gamblin'.
Not a wholesome trottin' race, no!
But a race where they set down right on the horse!
Like to see some stuck-up jockey'boy
Sittin' on Dan Patch? Make your blood boil?
Well, I should say!"
If we pay attention we know what makes our “blood boil,” and hence we know what lowers our blood pressure. Anger, frustration, fear - these negative emotions all make our blood boil, raise our blood pressure. Happiness, forgiveness, love, calm - we can feel our heart slow, our breathing ease, our boiling blood cooling down. In the final analysis then, lowering our blood pressure is not tied exclusively to what we do. How we do it also plays an important role. And it goes far beyond golf - it is about how we live life. Maybe the idiot who cut you off on the freeway isn’t really an idiot. Maybe they just got word that a loved one had been taken to the hospital. So instead of raising our blood pressure with ancient Italian hand gestures, we should lower it with a murmured “God speed and good luck!” I tend to think that most of the slights we imagine in life are just that - imagined. Letting them slide off your back is a really great way to lower your blood pressure.
So it would seem, after all is said and done, that you actually can play golf to lower your blood pressure; but only if you wrap it in forgiving and forgetting and treat yourself to an occasional meander off the fairway out into the garden.
“No, no. That’s OK, I meant to hit it over here. A mulligan? Sure. Thanks! I’ll be back in a minute. There’s a little frog over here . . . "
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