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Sporting Life
In a sport of patience, a great golfer has a day worth waiting for
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Champion Hannah Green of Australia and her husband and caddie Jarryd Felton have known each other since they were junior golfers.
ST PHOTO: KEVIN LIM
Even Othello, in William Shakespeare’s play of the same name, wished for this virtue. “I should have found in some place of my soul, a drop of patience”. Imagine if he’d played golf, then he’d truly understand what patience is. For everything in this game, like on March 1 at the HSBC Women’s World Championship, is about restraint, about accepting obstacles, about steadiness, about waiting.
Other sports are familiar with patience. Marathoners wait, wait, wait, then accelerate and overtake. Tennis players wince and wait till cramp passes as Carlos Alcaraz did in his Australian Open semi-final. But golf is the sport of stoics. Players are always waiting for the next shot. Waiting for a putt to crawl across a green and fall. Waiting for hours as the heat clogs the senses. Waiting as months pass and victory won’t come yet believing it will.
