FSOM: Floated like a Butterfly, Stung like a Moth

According to a recent study, golfers have the best memories of all professional sportsmen.

Thus says Dr Joel Fish of the Centre for Sports Psychology in Philadelphia.

Dr Fish claims golfers have the memories of elephants, thanks to a combination of visualisation techniques and the uniqueness of each shot they play.

That’s the golfers who have the visualisation skills to pay the bills, not elephants. Fifty Shades hasn’t seen too many tusked titans or mates of Dumbo tee off at the first at Southampton Municipal, or play a deft chip out of a deep bunker on to the 12th green at St Andrews.

“Golfers can remember significantly more compared to athletes from other sports” says Dr Fish.

Call Fifty Shades a cynic, but you don’t have to be a rocket scientist – or an eminent psychologist, for that matter  – to work that out.

You can only wonder how many dollars were frittered away – no doubt much of it on Dr Fish’s essential research on some of the world’s finest courses such as Torrey Pines, Kiawah Island, Augusta National or St Andrews – to come up with the stunning conclusion that a golfer has more smarts than, say, an NFL line-backer or a professional boxer.

Surely it’s not one of the secrets of the universe that a sportsman whose role primarily involves a pleasant stroll in the healthy country air in picturesque surroundings, only stopping to occasionally swing a metal bat and talk to a man who is doing the donkey work of carrying his heavy bag for him, is likely to preserve his memory more than somebody whose occupation requires his face to impersonate a punchbag, or to carry out the equivalent of running full tilt into a herd of rhino.

Of course, golf does carry health dangers and that doesn’t include a risk to hearing by wearing loud tartan trousers, or of spontaneously combusting from the static electricity build-up caused by wearing too many man-made fibres.

Hundreds of golfers compete every year for the Darwin Awards by carrying on with their round during thunderstorms.

Perhaps golfers aren’t that bright after all. Who else would wander out into an open space during an electrical storm and effectively wave a metallic lightning rod above their heads, as effective a channel for energy than Harry Potter pointing the Elder Wand at Voldermort?

Too many woman have received a phone call from the golf club asking if they could come and collect their husband, only to find that instead of having to pour a merry sozzled soak into the back of the family Volvo, they are given a dustpan, broom and bin bag and directed to the 13th fairway where there is a pile of smoking ash, topped off by a blackened Titleist baseball cap.

Another serious risk to the health of golfers was to venture out on a round with Fifty Shades.

This would not have affected those gods who ply their trade in their rarefied atmosphere of golfing heaven, but those poor pluggers who were daft enough to set out on a round with May, an adventure only surpassed for daring and reckless courage by a trip to the South Pole in speedos, bungee jumping into Mount Etna, or having fun with rottweilers after bathing in Bisto while wearing a chipolata necklace.

Golfing with Fifty Shades was only dangerous if a) You had not purchased a small, personal radar station and accompanying Patriot Missile Defence system or b) You did not possess the ability to duck sharply.

Either was necessary, both were desirable as Fifty Shades’ golfing career explored not so much the fairways and greens of local courses, but how many ways a simple golf club could be converted into a dangerous projectile.

Yes, he is ashamed to admit it, but Fifty Shades was a Club Chucker; a seething, swearing, sweating ball of anger with as much pent-up energy as a lump of plutonium-238 at critical mass.

Any failure on the part of Fifty Shades’ ball to proscribe a beautiful parabolic arc through the air and plop satisfyingly on to the green no further than the length of a well-nourished grass snake away from the cup, would lead to the type of temper tantrum that would make Oliver Reed look like a Buddhist monk in a meditative trance.

Golf with Fifty Shades rapidly became a contest of which would survive the longest, his supply of clubs or golfing buddies. And that often depended on which got broken first.

Fifty Shades’ career lurched downwards faster than Franz Klammer when he learned that every time he set off on a round, in the clubhouse a book would be made as to which hole he would first implode on.

Anybody who bet on a number higher than four was likely to have done his money up like a kipper.

Fifty Shades was reduced to the status of a packet of 20 Benson & Hedges as he was required to carry a government health warning.

You will be pleased to know that Fifty Shades gave up on golf long before it gave up on him, and it came at roughly the same time as a three wood and a greenhouse accidentally collided, although only one of them was flying through the air.

That was more than 25 years ago and the only golf club Fifty Shades has picked up since is a putter on the annual family Congo River Rapids mini-golf challenge in Florida. Even they have taken out the precautions of asking when I am likely to visit so they can take out extra public liability insurance and get in a tube of epoxy-resin superglue to improve Fifty Shades’ grip on the club.

At least Fifty Shades’ golf career lasted a trifle longer than his amateur boxing career.

That career was a little late getting started thanks to an over-protective mother who thought any sporting activity more strenuous than Snakes and Ladders was going to harm her Little Mother’s Blessing.

She would have been horrified to know that Fifty Shades had begun to run with a crowd who had a reputation only slightly better than the Kray twins and who frequented a local boxing club.

Fifty Shades lied through his back teeth – which were still intact at that time – and skilfully convinced his mother he was attending a chess club, and that it was perfectly safe as any sharp edges had been filed off the pieces.

Instead, he was down a sweaty gym where each week he put on a manky old pair of gloves that were probably responsible for introducing the Great Plague to London in 1665 and were regularly sent off to the government’s top-secret Chemical Weapons Establishment at Porton Down for checks.

Fifty Shades showed he had a real skill on the heavy and static bags and cut a dashing figure on the speedbag  – mainly because they didn’t hit back.

Perhaps Fifty Shades was a bit naïve not to suspect a man whose van was emblazoned with the words; “Purveyor of Refrigeration Products to the Kugluktuk Inuit Community” and happened to be the chief coach.

His honeyed words coaxed Fifty Shades away from the bags and into the ring, where he further assuaged Fifty Shades’ fears and massaged his ego by matching him for sparring sessions against a lad so thin and weedy his parents tried to make him sleep with his feet in a Gro-Bag.

At school, this kid had notes from his mum excusing him from everything, including the taxing morning note-handing-in session.

Not surprisingly, Fifty Shades made mincemeat out of him. With visions of his hero Muhammad Ali electrifying his brain, Fifty Shades Floated Like a Butterfly, and Stung Like a Moth, but it was still enough to see off the club wimp.

By this time, word had seeped out to his mum that Fifty Shades was not dicing with death at the Chess Club, and while his mother was almost suicidal with grief, Fifty Shades’ dad was proud of his lad, the boxer.

Much to Fifty Shades amazement, other clubs had wimps and deals were struck to match them with Fifty Shades.

These were the sort of kids who were only wearing boxing gloves because they were warmer than the woolly mittens their mothers made them wear.

No boxing pundit would ever describe Fifty Shades as a destructive puncher, but he didn’t need much more punching power than that necessary to batter his way out of a very damp cardboard box to see off these kids, and before he knew it, Fifty Shades had a record of 3-3-0-0. In other words, three wins from three bouts, but with no knockouts.

Again, Fifty Shades failed to read the warning signs that were louder than the ringside bell as Eskimo Nell’s favourite fridge salesman persuaded him it was time to “step up a gear.”

So it was that Fifty Shades saw his fourth opponent across the ring.

Being a bit of a bookworm, Fifty Shades had read and seen pictures of a Neanderthal man. This was surely his son, Neanderthal lad.

At the age of 11 – 12 tops – he was covered in hair and had the appearance of a shag-pile carpet on legs. He actually had defined muscles and was built like the sort of brick shelter bomb disposal teams hid behind when detonating a World War II relic.

If Fifty Shades was scared then he was bricking it when he saw his coach’s face as the realisation dawned that he might have over-matched his young protégé.

Fifty Shades’ game was built on sharpness of hand and speed of foot, the classic cowardy-custard boxer’s tactic of hit him and then run away.

“Just use your speed and keep on your bike, stay out of his reach,” was the only advice the Hakaluktuk Hotpoint Huckster could offer.

Fifty Shades would have taken that advice had he been able to. At the sound of the bell, Neanderthal lad zoomed across the ring with the sort of speed not normally associated with brick outhouses.

It wasn’t so much his boxing training but pure survival instinct that prompted Fifty Shades to cover up. Neanderthal lad couldn’t land a telling blow to face or body, but that didn’’t stop him. He simply landed a piledriver blow to the top of Fifty Shades head.

The blow was illegal and should have prompted disqualification, but Fifty Shades didn’t care. His boxing days were over. In three prior bouts, his opponents’ kid sisters could have delivered a sharper slap, but this hurt.

When Fifty Shades stopped seeing distant galaxies and flocks of starlings competing for space in his brain, he burst into tears. The referee was coming across the ring to raise Fifty Shades’s arm but he was having none of it.

He slid under the ropes and made his getaway quicker than Steve McQueen in the Great Escape; not just form the ring but from boxing.

Still unlike many sad cases, he retired with his senses intact, not to mention a lovely big wet sloppy kiss from his mum.

And so Dr Fish, to your theory that golfers have the best memories of any sportsmen I say this.

And so Dr Golfer, to your memory that sportsmen have the best fish theory, I say this.

And so Fish golfer, to your sportsmen that Drs have the memories I say this.

Can anybody remember where I put my golf clubs?

By John May

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