Being a golfer’s wife is a very different game from being just a wife. Trust me on this one for I have been both, the former title has come to my life in more recent times. The perils of being a wife (without the affix) is a lot easier. Women have been  trained to play a wife’s role by generations of mothers and grandmothers. We are socially conditioned for this role more than any other. Of course we can always chose to be a good wife or not ! The sudden transition from a wife to a golfer’s wife had its own challenges for me. No one in my family had ever played golf before and in my middle class upbringing the tiger always lived in the woods and not in the husband’s dreams.

When the husband retired from active services of one kind ( the one where he got paid)  my expectations of him joining active services at home as my intern increased many folds. I have been toiling at the home front alone for a pretty long innings and my tired bones longed for help. For the first few weeks I took to pampering the retired  man of the house ( old habits die hard). Then I thought of familiarizing him with the place called  home, and explaining the finer nuances of home management. But when the man learnt that in this new job description words like incentives, bonus, gratuity were completely missing he immediately started looking for greener pastures elsewhere. He decided to chose golf over the nondescript job offer I had for him.

The sequence of events that followed after this was way beyond my control or anticipation.  A love affair of another kind started brewing . The love of a sportsman with his sport. The grass surely looked greener on the other side ! The golf set arrived home even before  I could  learn to spell  Decathlon. Membership to various clubs , finding the right golf partner , a good coach, all this happened in lightning speed .My otherwise  tranquil married life of three decades and counting suddenly sensed the threat with a partnership of another kind where “love all” could  never be the score.

The first day the golfer husband brought his new golf set home, his euphoria and happiness was childlike. And quite like a child he soon started swinging the golf sticks ( yes, that is what I had called it then, for the first and last time ) in mid air in our living room.  While I sat watching him with my heart in my mouth, in constant  fear that he would  knock over something or the other, he played on. A friend of my golfer had tried  scoring a ‘birdie’ in his living  room  which ended in a shattered chandelier and an angry bird ( oops, I mean wife ) tale.

That the grass was greener on the other side, I had long accepted,  but his love for the greens had started making me a little green with envy. His eyes had already seen beauty elsewhere. Like an anticipating lover in waiting, the first change that I noticed in my husband was his restlessness to hit the greens. His night sleep got altered, he started waking up before the sun to get ready and reach the golf course at dawn. What followed for the rest of the day was a man who had hit the snooze button by mistake ! My impatience and his patience grew in reverse order. I knew there was no stopping a man in love, albeit with a sport. Little did I know that my bewilderment had just begun.

To appreciate any sport one has to have a lot of patience , focus, time , energy and discipline. I was not playing the sport but I had to practice patience to cope with the long hours of his absence from home. To understand golf I had to relearn some sporting facts. I am told golf is an individual sport, where a person plays with oneself, but when two or more people play at the same time they are playing two balls, three balls and so on. Hmm, so people become ball and then there is this guy running  around finding your balls, I mean the real ball. Confusing, right? In short what I understand is that ‘you need a lot of balls to play a good game of golf’. It surely is a different ball game altogether ! In every other sport that I have ever taken any interest in, the score card  has taught me that the more numbers on the board the closer you are to victory, but in golfing it is just the  opposite,  less is more and it is literally true. I am surely and definitely lost with this tiger in the woods story.

I am no fan of word play ! But to understand  the terms of golfing word play does play a role. Why else would a golfer go to a golf club to play with a golf club, to fathom this clubbed factor I get a little more than curious. The club is a club only to begin with, the more you get into the game the ‘wood’, the ‘iron’ and the ‘putter’ claim individuality.  A golfer can use them technically to score a ‘birdie’ or an ‘eagle’ and even a ‘turkey.’ While the golfers play with the birds on ground I almost hear an ‘albatross’ flying away in the blue sky shrieking ‘bogey’. Golfers too are birds of a feather, and they ‘flick’ together morning ,noon and evening. Like a flock of birds they are seen together but to give wings to their balls they fly solo. Indeed birds fly better than balls, but the elegance of a smooth shot and a tiny white ball rising from the green ground high in the air and landing with perfection calls for applaud.

To understand  the lexicon of golf you need to be a golfer and I am but only a golfer’s wife. Thus following the golfer’s etiquette I yell ‘fore’ before my humorous ‘chip’ offends or hits any golfer in the greens.