I have spent much of my adult life and all of my expendable income drinking scotch, and playing, practicing and thinking about golf. Lessons, books, tapes and DVDs, practice and more practice, more lessons and more books. The game dominates most of my waking hours, which accounts for the sorry state of my career and bank account.

Golf is the only thing I’ve tried that I stayed with though I have absolutely no aptitude for it.

I gave up on basketball after one season in junior high school, despite the varsity coach offering to spend the summer working with me so I could go out for the team. It was an offer that had a great deal more to do with my being the tallest kid in my small school than it did with my burgeoning athletic potential, which has yet to burgeon.

At college, I decided I would learn to play chess and turned to a kid in the dorm who seemed to play a lot. Big mistake. He was a total math nerd. Before him, geek was a term reserved for carnival performers who bit the heads off live chickens. I understood the direction the pieces moved and what the object was, more or less. So we sat down to play. And the first words out of his mouth were “think of it as a math problem but start with the solution and work backwards.” I stared at him silently for a full minute and then pushed my chair back and said, “Thanks, but I got to go.” Have not tried to play chess since.

My mother was a very good bridge player. She was in a couple of bridge clubs in our town and was on the list to substitute for several other clubs. Not that it’s a big deal to be in demand to play bridge in a small town, but nonetheless she was by all accounts really good at the game. So I asked her to teach me. I knew how to count the value of the cards so when we started I thought I was ready. She looked over my shoulder at my cards and said “bid two clubs.” “Why?” I asked. “Because that’s what you bid with this hand.” “But, I’ll never have this hand again, what makes it two clubs?” “It just is.”

My brother once suggested we go to the park near his house and play tennis. Or at least hit tennis balls around, since neither one of us actually played tennis. It seemed like a good idea and might have been fun had it not been for the two eight year olds in the court next to us who had been playing since birth.

Next.

But golf. I have no ability at golf either. Never have. But I still play. I try, I learn, I re-learn, I practice, I play.  I buy the weighted clubs, the straps, the special gloves, the gadgets that promise to revolutionize my game. And I suck.

I owe most of my stick-to-itiveness in the game to my best friend in high school who started playing golf with me. We knew essentially nothing, but we went to a course and started. No lessons, no practice. How hard could it be? The ball doesn’t move; it just sits there waiting to be sent soaring through the air and land in the short grass hundreds of yards straight ahead.

We were just smart enough to go to another town because someone said it was a good place to start. As golf courses go, this was a goat path. We were embarrassingly bad, but we didn’t know it, and thankfully we didn’t see any eight year old prodigies or anyone we knew at all for that matter. It was just us. We laughed and we tried and we laughed more. People who were on the course behind us didn’t see the humor in it, I’m sure, but we had a great time.

And we kept playing all that summer. We absolutely sucked, but I was sucked in. For the next forty-five years I’ve tried to improve. Occasional flashes of half-decent followed by years of frustration. I’ve thrown my share of clubs and turned the air blue more than once, maybe more often than not. Like everything else at which I’ve tried and failed, I quit the game regularly, sometimes for years at a time. But with golf, I come back. Another lesson, a magazine article, a television tip, a new driver with the technology to make it impossible to fail, and I think it will be different this time.

But of course it isn’t.

It happened again today. I saw an infomercial. Professionals and analysts have found the components to the perfect golf swing.

One of the very average looking people giving a testimonial promises “if I can do it, anyone can.” It’s simple, it’s possible, and it’s within reach. Any run-of-the-mill weekend golfer can learn the method and revolutionize their game. It’s easy. The keys that all champion golfers have in common and I can do it. They promise. It’s easy. And it can be mine. This is it. This is not just it, this is IT.

I was about to write the check when the announcer said it’s a five DVD set.

Five DVDs.

Five.

To get the simple keys to the game.

Easy.

Easy is changing a light bulb. Easy is putting on slippers. Easy is not five DVDs of careful instruction. Easy is not golf.

But maybe if I bought that new driver…