when I found golf. I was never a sporting type, I had no natural talent for football or hurling, and school team trainers had neither the time nor the inclination to waste their skills on the likes of me. But I have always followed sports, all codes, I've been to Croker and to Landsdowne Road in the past, but I was fifty before I played any game. That was when I found golf. No, don't turn off, I'm not going to talk about how I play, I just want to make a few comments on aspects of the game as a part of life. Some people, when they are going to play golf, like to dress up. They wear two tone shoes, Rupert Bear trousers, or worse, plus fours, shirts with horizontal stripes to emphasise their generous upholstery, and diamond pattern pullovers of revolting pastel hues. They are a people apart and should be humoured. For the rest of us, golf is the great democracy. On the course your job or your money don't matter a whit, the only demands are that you play by the rules and let others enjoy the game and your company. One of the great inventions of civilisation is the golf handicap. Now in horse racing I always think it unfair that a good animal has a load of lead put in it's saddle to give the others a chance, but in golf it's perfect. A legitimate advantage of a few shots can level the playing field and ensure that two golfers of different abilities will both have to play the best golf they can to win the match. Playing every weekend in competitions with different people is as good a way of seeing folk at their best, and worse, as I can think of. Some players can be, well, thought provoking. I played recently with a man, early middle age, his handicap was a good bit lower than mine, I played well, he was having a nightmare of a round. Every shot was bad, and the one after it worse. He found every bunker, every hazard. But it was still obvious that he had once been very good, he told me that his handicap had been 11. Then he said that he hadn't played for five years, up to recently. I asked if he had been sick. "No" he said, "my wife died". And I could see, as the poet Brendan Kennelly puts it, a pain so unshareably his own. Clive Geraghty Cover