The golf swing doesn’t get the ball into the golfing hole.

Saturday morning I took the two boys out. There were about ten tee times before a two-man scratch event, shotgun at 1:30. Both of them have a tournament on Sunday, and we are in the middle of hockey season, which means there is almost no golf in the week. You take the morning you can get.

It was cold for the first seven holes. That part I will not dress up.

It is a useful thing, watching them get older on the same course. For a long time the younger one had no real chance against his brother. That has changed. He is good now, and the matches are actual matches, right up until he gets tired and sits a few holes out. Most days he is good for thirteen to fifteen. More, sometimes, when he is making a few pars and a birdie and the round still feels like his.

I am writing this on Monday. Sunday’s post will be out soon.

The oldest had, for a stretch, one of the better rounds he has put together. It was also a reminder I need more often than I admit. A golf swing is not a golf score. Once you are keeping a number, the only thing that counts is the ball in the hole.

He was not hitting it particularly well. The greens were rolling at a 13.5, already set for the scratch event that afternoon, and the course was set up hard. If I had only watched the shots, I would have guessed something over 80. He shot 73.

That is the round where one bad swing gets answered, more than once, by one very good one. Add decent putting and the score stops caring how far back you started, or how short. Our course has a few sets of family tees. He is eight. The furthest of those tees sits about where he will need to be for Worlds next year. It is a Donald Ross course, which is not a bad place to learn what a hard golf course actually feels like.

I think their favorite part of the club is not the round. It is the hang afterward, with the same men who always seem to be there. One kid, no kid, three kids. They are at the bar with a Guinness or a Tito’s and Fresca, and the children eat whatever they want until mom arrives to pick them up for another escapade, or we go home together. The Presidents Cup is on. College football is on. None of the hang is golf, even when golf is on the television. It is adults in the room, and the course becoming a second home, so that when it is nice and nothing else is on the schedule, there is no question whether we are playing. Night, day, or morning.

I will not spend long on my own game. I am a scratch player. I have won some amateur events over the years. Right now the game is in a poor place. Riding around with the boys for 18, then trying to play a five-hour round after, was probably not the cleverest way to find it. We were in the tournament. Then we were not.

Golf is hard. I am not sure you can raise golfers if you are never the one having the hard day. You certainly should not be hard on them, at this age, unless you are willing to have a few of those days yourself.

Theodore Roosevelt, at the Sorbonne in 1910:

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.