There may be an icicle or two forming in hell.
I’ve started learning to play golf.
I am, as expected, truly terrible.
But, most unexpectedly, I really like it.
My first golf experience was the day before my 7th birthday.
Mum needed me out of the house so she could make my birthday cake.
So dad, by all accounts a fairly handy golfer, took me to Southland Golf Club, at Oreti Beach, where he played 18 holes, and I was his caddy.
I despised every minute and decided I wanted nothing to do with golf ever again.
It’s kind of unavoidable when you work as a journo in Queenstown, though, and when the first Michael Hill New Zealand Golf Open came to town in 2009, I thought I’d have a crack at learning to play.
The eternally-patient John Griffin took me under his wing for a little session at Jack’s Point … I again concluded golf wasn’t for me.
But earlier this year I met the force-of-nature that is Janie Reese, who runs Kiss My Putt’s ‘She Loves Golf’ programme.
Over the past few years, I’ve heard from many women who’ve signed up for her programme — meant to make golf fun and easy — and they rave about it.
So, on a bit of a whim, after deciding it’d be quite good to do something other than work all the time and hoping to get good enough to bash the bejesus out of some balls at a driving range one day, I signed up.
I’m two sessions in with a group of seven other magnificent women and it’s very clear Janie has her work cut out with me.
During lesson one I realised, rapidly, the driving range ambition’s a wee way off, as is the promised nine holes with my former boss, Dave Cannan.
The golf stance is most awkward, then trying to keep my head up, but down, and still, while also trying to move my arm, slowly, attempting to hit the ball, not the grass, and remembering to follow through is an awful lot of things to do at one time.
And much, much harder than Lydia Ko makes it appear.
Perhaps problematically, I sort of forgot to aim for the hole at all, meaning the vast majority of balls I hit (yes, I did actually manage to hit some) went to very bad places.
But there was this one ball I connected with and it sounded a bit like it does on TV and went kind of straight … and all of a sudden I had visions of turning pro.
This week, we tried putting — apparently that’s where you make millions.
Transpires I don’t suck at it.
But there’s another thing I learned I wasn’t expecting.
After lots of putting backwards and forwards, with some mixed results, I felt relaxed.
Given all the things you have to think about to make the ball move the distance you need it to, in the right direction, I realised I didn’t have room in my brain to think about anything else.
It was like a strange new form of meditation and, dare I say it, I think I might be starting to understand what all the fuss is about.
And I may officially be converting to a golfer.
