Clever Golf Quotes

Who cheats? Well, just about anyone, if the stakes are right. You might say to yourself, I don’t cheat, regardless of the stakes. And then you might remember the time you cheated on, say, a board game. Last week. Or the golf ball you nudged out of its bad lie. Or the time you really wanted a bagel in the office break room but couldn’t come up with the dollar you were supposed to drop in the coffee can. And then took the bagel anyway. And told yourself you’d pay double the next time. And didn’t. For every clever person who goes to the trouble of creating an incentive scheme, there is an army of people, clever and otherwise, who will inevitably spend even more time trying to beat it. Cheating may or may not be human nature, but it is certainly a prominent feature in just about every human endeavor. Cheating is a primordial economic act: getting more for less. So it isn’t just the boldface names — inside-trading CEOs and pill-popping ballplayers and perkabusing politicians — who cheat. It is the waitress who pockets her tips instead of pooling them. It is the Wal-Mart payroll manager who goes into the computer and shaves his employees’ hours to make his own performance look better. It is the third grader who, worried about not making it to the fourth grade, copies test answers from the kid sitting next to him. Some cheating leaves barely a shadow of evidence. In other cases, the evidence is massive. Consider what happened one spring evening at midnight in 1987: seven million American children suddenly disappeared. The worst kidnapping wave in history? Hardly. It was the night of April 15, and the Internal Revenue Service had just changed a rule. Instead of merely listing the name of each dependent child, tax filers were now required to provide a Social Security number. Suddenly, seven million children — children who had existed only as phantom exemptions on the previous year’s 1040 forms — vanished, representing about one in ten of all dependent children in the United States.

If we agree that alcohol has some control over you once you start drinking, enough that drinkers regularly drink more than they set out to, surely alcohol can make you do something you never imagined yourself capable of. I am appalled by how many awful things I did under the influence. Addiction is humbling, and I have been humbled enough to know that I am capable of anything, no matter how abhorrent, if the circumstances are right. Anyone is. Believing yourself immune to mistakes increases your chance of committing a repugnant act. All humans are painfully capable of failure. We are only human. It only takes one slip-up, one lapse in judgment. Don’t be fooled—everyone makes mistakes. No one intends to kill another person while driving drunk. Yet it happens all the time. In the U.S., someone is killed by a drunk driver every 51 minutes.154 Have you ever gotten so drunk you threw up? Did you set out to do that? If your judgment is perfect, would you have allowed that to happen? Even if you consistently make great decisions and keep yourself and others out of harm’s way, do you want to be the person at the party who cannot shut up? The person whose breath reeks of wine but can’t tell because their senses have been numbed to the smell? We all know the person who goes on and on, and unfortunately, unlike on Facebook, we can’t skip to the next interesting story. I know from experience, no one wants to spend time with “drunk Annie,” who can’t stop talking or laughing loudly at her own jokes. You may feel that a little alcohol is good for your conversation skills or your golf game. The problem with alcohol is that once you start drinking you can’t judge the point where a little is good and a lot becomes a disaster. When you are making a fool of yourself, or when your conversation skills wane, you remain unaware. Even if you could gauge the exact amount to drink, booze doesn’t make you cleverer, funnier, more creative, or more interesting. There is nothing inherent in alcohol that can do this. More often when a shy person gets drunk, they end up emotional, weepy, and repetitive. We don’t realize how bad we look when drinking because we are drunk and so is everyone else. It’s the old question: If everyone jumped off a cliff, would you? With alcohol, as a culture, our answer is disturbing—yes.