Bio of Steve VanWert

I was born on April 11, 1947, which makes me older than most of our members, but not the oldest, I’m glad to see. I’ve been married for nearly 40 years, and to the same woman, believe it or not. Obviously, she’s a saint.

We have three sons, one of which, Dan, will play with us every now and then.

I first started playing golf when I was 12 years old. My father, who was a member of the local golf club, enrolled me in lessons during the summer. I had to learn the grip, the swing, the putting stance, and golf etiquette, before they’d let me out on the course. I learned all the dirty words later.

Luckily, I seemed to have some aptitude for the game early in life. I won one of the flights in the Delaware State Junior Open Golf Championship when I was 13. By that time, I was hooked, and have been ever since.

After 46 years of knocking the little white ball around, I’ve got some opinions about this game we love. Since I make my living writing, let me put some of these ideas down on paper for you all.

What is golf? Bob Hope joked that “Golf is a good walk spoiled.” I’ve heard it said that if you watch a game, it’s fun. If you play it, it’s recreation. If you work at it, it’s golf. My own experience tells me to watch out for the guy who tells you he plays golf to relax – he’ll lie about other things, too.

As we all know, golf isn’t easy. At least, most of the time. Every now and then, though, we’ll hit a ball square on the club face, dead solid perfect, and the feeling is indescribable. There’s a tremor that runs up the club shaft, through your hands and sails up your arms like a shiver. That shiver is perfection. How many other times in life can we experience perfection? Of course, it only happens a couple of times every few rounds, and the irony of the whole thing is that the ball might fly like a rocket down the fairway, hit a yardage marker, dive dead right and end up behind a tree (or disappear beneath a leaf).

Which brings me to a golf truism – golf ain’t fair. You can hit a chip short and watch it land on a sprinkler head, bounce straight up in the air, roll on the green and into the cup. Or you can hit the same ball six inches to the left and it’ll suddenly decide to take the spin, corkscrew off to the left and against the lip of a bunker. Golf ain’t fair.

You can “pure” a driver 300 yards down the short grass and, when you get there, it’s sitting in a divot. Or you can block it out, hit a tree and the ball will be standing up proudly in the middle of the fairway. Golf ain’t fair.

You can roll the most solid putt you’ve ever hit right at the hole and stare in disbelief when it dives in – and spins out the side. It’s especially maddening when it spins all the way around and ends up in front of the hole, and laughs at you. But every now and then, you’ll push a putt off line and it’ll hit a ball mark and jump back into the cup. Golf ain’t fair.

Golf is like a love affair. If you don’t take it seriously, it’s fun. If you do take it seriously, it’s apt to break your heart.

Golf is the only game that is primarily self-policed. In other words, we expect golfers to be honest. And we don’t waste our time counting the other guy’s strokes, and he doesn’t’ count ours. When the hole is over, someone calls out, “Scores?” And three guys yell out “4” or “5”, or “AFB” or a number somewhere between one and infinity. The amazing thing about golf is that that number is almost always the truth.

Lying at golf is not only a myth most of the time, it’s unnecessary. If you shoot a 6, but tell the scorer you got a 5, the only person you’re lying to is yourself. No wonder golf is so popular – it’s one of the few games where the participant keeps his own score! I like to think it’s also one of the few games where a person’s true character shines through. If you cheat at golf, you’ll cheat at everything else in life. And the golf gods won’t let you enjoy the game.

Speaking of golf gods, I really think they exist. My theory is that the old gods of Olympus found themselves out of work once the Hellenic and Roman classical periods fizzled out. No one cared about Zeus, or how far he could hit a driver. So they wandered around the world and found themselves in Scotland. They looked down and saw some Scottish shepherd knocking a feather-filled leather ball around the moors. Old McTavish, or whoever the first golfer was, hit a drive and watched it land in a sheep pattie and created the world’s first unplayable lie. He looked up at the sky and yelled, “Gods, help me!” And the exiled gods of old looked down and said, “Here we are. We’re on your side.”

But, of course, they weren’t. And aren’t. They’re on golf’s side.

And, of course, there’s the old myth that we play golf for our health. Please. We tell our wives that lie because they don’t understand what happens out there. They look out the kitchen window and see the sun shining, a little breeze whispering through the backyard and they think, “Well, at least he’s getting some exercise.”

Right. The only thing we’re exercising out there is patience – and not very well, in most cases. Our wives may give us love and understanding, but our other love, golf, gives us … frustration. Golf is the single most frustrating thing ever invented by man, bar none. We can’t master it; we can’t control it; we can’t convince it to do our bidding; we can’t implore it to be fair and we can’t beg it to love us in return. It’s almost as if we all have a mistress, one who wears black leather, chains and holds a whip, laughing at us as we squirm and sweat and throw clubs. And we keep going back to her, kissing her feet and asking forgiveness, praying that she’ll let us sink a 40-foot putt or maybe even … make an ace.

Speaking of making aces, I have to admit that in my 46 or so years of playing golf (and at times playing pretty well), I have never had a hole-in-one. Oh, I’ve been close. I’ve hit the pin, spun out, stopped on the lip. I’ve watched the ball roll into the cup so slowly that it dips slightly and ends up behind the hole. I’ve been witness to five different aces in my life, but never made one myself. I figure it’s penance for something I did in another life, but boy, it must have really been evil.

I could go on and on (and I know some of you think I’ve already gone on too long), but to paraphrase Gen. Douglas MacArthur, “Old golfers never die. They just putter away.”

One more thing. I’m a writer, and over the years I’ve written a couple of books. One is a detective novel where the hero is a golfer and the crime happens during a club championship tournament. It’s called, fittingly enough, “Murder on the 13^th Green.” I’m attaching it to this missive, just in case you feel like reading it. If you do, let me know what you think. Thanks.

If you missed the download link above download Murder on the 13^th Green by clicking here!

SteveV