Golf does not come naturally to most people. If you spend about 5 minutes with me on the course, it will be painfully obvious that I stink at golf. I might fake it with my cute golf skirt and pink rolling bag, but the score card pretty much speaks for itself. I'm terrible. Mr. Wonderful is considerably better than I am when it comes to understanding and playing golf. That said, you can get a pretty decent idea of what kind of hitter he was in baseball when you watch his golf swing (the ball is hit hard and everything veers to the left). To sum it up, neither of us are quality golfers. Yet somehow, we have a child who has a natural ability to swing golf clubs and hit balls.
Our oldest child has had this affinity for hitting golf balls since he was a year old and could swing his plastic Fisher Price clubs. At the time we thought it was so cute that we bought him his first set of real golf clubs for his second birthday. We were those crazy parents who would take their toddler to the driving range. Again, it was so cute to watch him swing and hit the balls. I don't think we realized the significance of the fact that our toddler was making contact and actually hitting balls like a real golfer. When he turned 4, we noticed that he rarely ever missed making contact with the ball off the tee--in spite of his dancing and crazy footwork. That was about the time that he started chipping balls off of our back porch into a neighbors' pools and landscaping. So for his 6th birthday, we decided to send him to golf camp.
At camp, we were informed that he was wonderfully abnormal on the golf course. I say abnormal, because a "normal" child on the golf course is one who has been sent to camp by his golf-playing parents to learn a game that does not come naturally to them. Our child, on the other hand, loved every minute of being on the golf course and apparently has an unteachable "feel for the game." It was absolutely hilarious to watch him swing his club like a ninja sword at one moment and then turn around a minute later and drive a one-handed shot over a creek. And it's very weird to have a 5 year old explain how he is going to use his 9 iron to "tap-chip" his ball out of the rough and onto the green when all the other children are using their putters and then to see his plan work!
Considering that I'm having to read PGA golf books for parents to even understand the game myself, it's kind of crazy to think that I might have to caddy on the DFW Metro Jr. Golf Tour next summer (all children under 8 need to have a caddy) in order to keep up with my wonderfully abnormal son. Something tells me that this is not going to be my first time to step outside of my comfort box for my kiddos. I'm sure someone else will want to do something that blows my mind too: hockey, dance, art, etc. But golf: could not have predicted that one.
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