Although I was never picked for sports teams as a kid, I always thought that golf would be far easier than all the others as it required very little physical exertion in regards to chasing a ball up and down a field for 90 minutes while opponents try to take the legs out from under you.

I mean, how difficult could it be? You stand still, look at the hole at the other end of the green, look at the ball and then hit it as hard as you can with a metal or wooden club. Even better, once you do, you don't have to run as fast as you can to the hole. Instead you take a taxi in the form of a golf cart. How sweet is that!

I had a rude awakening one day when a friend of mine managed to talk me into playing a few rounds down at one of the local courses. For starters there were no golf carts, so we had to walk around all 18 holes. That wouldn't have been so bad but for the fact there were no golf caddies on that day either so we had to carry the bags of clubs around too. Damn those things are heavy! Golf caddy's do not get paid enough.

To make matters worse, it began to rain half way through the game. So there I am, soaked, sore, tired and about to drive my tuft of grass another 100 yards, for that is all I seemed to be hitting all morning.

Someone must have super glued the golf ball to the tee because every time I looked down after swinging that freakin club, there it was, smiling up at me, wondering why I wasn't hitting it. On the few occasions that I did manage to hit it, it made a lovely plopping sound as it hit the water, sinking into the murky depths of the nearest water hazard, never to be seen again.

Or I spent the rest of my time doing a David Attenborough as I searched through the rough long grass (in vein I might add) looking for that elusive white golf ball. I actually managed to find many day glow and colored golf balls on my safari for my own but alas it was never found.

In all I lost 12 golf balls that day but managed to recover 9 multi colored ones that didn't belong to me. This leads me to believe I'm not alone in my inability to hit a golf ball straight. I didn't come across the dead bodies of any lost golfers looking for their own golf balls but I was fully expecting to.

Just when I was about to assign golf to a watery grave by hurling my 9 iron as far across the nearest water hazard as I could, two extremely attractive females came walking over the hill behind us. They too were searching for their lost golf balls. (I swear you couldn't make this stuff up if you were writing a film.)

We exchanged golfing disaster stories and after a bit of chatting decided to retire to the club house for the day to escape the rain and plan a new strategy of attack.

Thanks to my golfing disaster we now have dates for this Friday night and although I caught the cold, lost my balls and was thoroughly pissed off for most of the game. (I was losing a bet with my friend) I can't help but feel that meeting girls at a stadium of 90,000 screaming fans just would not have happened.

Although I'm still useless at golf, my opinion of the sport has changed completely. Not only for obvious reasons but I've come to learn there is a great deal of skill required to hit a ball straight with a bent club in a cross wind.

So the next time you laugh at the poor guy or girl who is hitting a golf club into the ground repeatedly, show them a little sympathy as they may be at the end of their teather. And the next time you see a pro sink a ball in 2 shots, stand in awe at the amount of time, patience and effort they must have put in to their game to become THAT good.

Jack Crow is a freelance writer and part time golfer. When he's not writing articles he's trying to improve his golf swing at his local course. To read golfing tips and secrets he has discovered visit: Golf