Golf license: the license to push a car

Old age, so much is known, has little problems in store.

Osteoarthritis, back, hips, knees, to name just a few.

And golf, of course.

I know, I know, a mad thing, every stroke a miracle, enormous challenge, kind of psychosport.

Well, I was ready for this new form of movement that is so easily underestimated when you see the ladies and gentlemen pushing their little carts in front of you.

Booked a group course with my wife and one of her friends at the golf club to obtain the golf license. Platzreife, the explanation, if you are a golf layman, entitles the handicap to play golf on a golf course in Germany. Now, as a layperson, you will ask: Yes, why isn't everyone allowed to do that? Pushing a cart through the landscape and hitting a few balls, you don't need an Olympic victory in fine motor skills. I thought so too, but it's not that simple.

So we go to the group course. Driving range. Thrashing balls. Our golf trainer imports from Scotland, so not only are the whiskeys on a completely different level, the golf instructors too. Our Scottish pro was, you can understand, not

, once again introducing a few discarded tennis players to the art of his fantastic sport. He didn't talk much, and what he said was hard to understand. What you understood was "

", and it took us half the course to understand that he meant bunkers and that bunkers are those sand islands that you hit the ball into when you hit it.

We tried hard, but of course there were, every beginning is difficult, a few shortcomings. The friend, for example, had a problem with a tree on the edge of a fairway. Her ball had come to a standstill not far from him, the next shot should fly straight towards the final, but by a ballistic miracle the friend hit exactly this tree, although she was aiming somewhere completely different. The ball bounced off and landed clearly, very clearly behind the friend who was teeing off.

A great hit, no question about it. Despite loss of space. The Scottish pro seemed to lose the last bit of lust and at the end of the group refused the license to play. We saw that as an affront, as we know that several relatives took a similar course on a weekend in Bavaria and got a license to push a car without any problems. Whatever, we also take something with us from our excursion into this wonderful sport: this beautiful new word in a triad: banker, bunker, bonker.