Golf Tips for the Young!

Now that my little 8-year old boy Siddharth is playing golf regularly, it is good fun to go out and play with him occassionally. Siddharth recently won a junior club tournament, and also was runner up in a couple more - not a huge deal since these were local club tournaments with fairly limited participation. However these wins have charged him up, and he is excited about playing on a regular basis.

More than his increasing golf skills, what I like about Siddharth is that he has his feet firmly on the ground. He doesn't make a big deal about his golf, stays away from showing off his prizes (in fact he hides one of them in his wardrobe!). As a matter of fact he is downright shy talking about his good rounds. Recently his grandmother asked him about one of his good rounds and his response was "So what?".

Whether Sid becomes a good golfer or not, only time will tell. But I do hope he stays humble. That will certainly stand him in good stead whatever he does.

Here is a hilarious golf video I came across recently about a father and son on the golf course. Enjoy!

Thanks for the lesson, son!

My 6 year old son Siddharth has been learning golf for about a year. He has been on the course a few times with his coach, but most of his golf sessions are lessons at the Poona Club practice facility. I went out to play a few holes with Siddharth a few days ago. This was my first golf round with him.

Siddharth is big for his age - a tall child with a big face and large chubby cheeks. He plays the violin, plays tennis, and golfs (among other things). However, his defining characteristic is that he suffers from extreme curiosity - I make it sound like a medical condition for a good reason. In my lifetime I have not seen another person with the level of curiousity Siddharth has. He notices things no one else around him does, and he drops everthing else to go check out anything that seems interesting. We have many funny stories around this, but that will probably be a different blog post.

During our 1.5 hour, 4 hole-round, Siddharth took several detours to check out butterflies, poke his 6-iron at tree trunks, retrieve a ball from a pond, and so on. He would hit a shot, and then just take off across the fairway to check out the next interesting thing on the golf course. At first I was at my wits' end to get him to play faster since we were holding up the groups behind us. After a while, I just asked those groups to go ahead of us, and started enjoying what Siddharth was doing. Retrieving Siddharth's ball from the water body on hole#6 was so much fun!

At the end of our adventure, I asked him what he enjoyed the most during the round? Retrieving the ball from the pond - pat came the reply.

At some stage of our lives, many of us have been told by others to stop obsessing about our goals and enjoy the journey. The 4-hole golf round with Siddharth was an incredibly forceful demonstration of just that. Thanks Siddharth!