How to Quit Golf:
It's Easy if You Try

By Kiel Christianson,
Senior Writer

LANSING, MI (Dec. 17, 2001) - Do you own more golf shoes than dress shoes? Have you ever decided to quit golf for a week, only to find yourself on a practice range two days later, rationalizing that if you’re not on a course, it’s not really golf?

These are but two of the tough, soul-wrenching diagnostic questions posed by Michigan-based writer Craig Brass in his new book How to Quit Golf (224pp, Dutton, $19.95, or $13.96 on Amazon.com). In it, Brass tailors a typical 12-step program into a side-splitting guide to help problem golfers divorce themselves from the game they so hate. Or love. Or love to hate. Or hate to love.

So why would you want to quit golf? Or even read a humorous account of how one could go about quitting golf, if one were so inclined? In the words of the author, “Golf is not a subset of some highly enlightened, Zen-based Eastern religion that if mastered will bring you closer to total consciousness. It doesn’t offer a glimpse inside your, or anyone else’s, soul….What golf is, on the other hand, is a nasty, vicious game, played mainly by educated people who quite frankly should know better than to keep playing [it].”

Brass’s point, in brief, is that for all the money, time, and emotional distress golfers devote to the game, next to no one ever improves substantially at it. Hey, the truth hurts.

“[I]t’s a nasty little effect, much like herpes. Always popping up at the wrong time. There you are, poised and ready to score. The target in your crosshairs, looking as vulnerable as a drunken sorority girl, and you lay half a yard of closely mown bent grass over the ball.”

Like I said, the truth hurts. But if we, as participants in perhaps the most frustrating past time in the history of the world, cannot laugh at our own ineptitude and the inherent evil of the game itself, then we should quit it. And, moreover, stop making the lives of those around us so miserable with our moaning and whining about slicing, three-putting, rope-hooking, etc., etc., ad nausum.

But even if you don’t want to quit the game, at least do yourself a favor: cross off all those worthless instructional books from your Christmas list and replace them with How to Quit Golf. And put some laughs back into the game.