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Did you hear the one about the golfer describing his pastor?
“His tee shots are a lot like his sermons: long, to the right, and always near a hazard.”
Speaking of the little white balls that just provided four more days of drama at the Masters Tournament, why in the world do they have dimples?
The simple answer is that dimpled balls fly farther.
More than a century ago, golfers were keenly aware that scuffed, dented, scratched, or pockmarked balls performed far better than perfectly smooth balls.
A golf ball is typically whacked off the tee in less than a millisecond. After that, a whole lot happens aerodynamically. The golfer’s swing and point of impact affect the ball’s velocity, launch angle, and rate of spin. The surrounding air immediately gives the ball lift, while gravity pulls the ball toward the ground.
The magic of dimples – or any kind of imperfections, for that matter – is that they help reduce the air’s drag. Dimples have been shown to reduce drag by up to 50%. The lessened resistance yields greater distance.
So how many dimples are on the average golf ball?
Interestingly, there’s no simple answer to that question.
The first patent for dimpled or “mini-cratered” balls appeared in 1905. Since then, manufacturers and individual golfers have been trying to figure out the most effective ways to reduce drag while keeping balls flying straight.
The United States Golf Association (USGA) regulates almost everything about golf balls – including their size, weight, and component parts – but not the number or pattern of dimples.
Most balls have somewhere between 250 and 450 dimples, although one brand has featured over 1,000. Experiments continue.
Thus, well into the 21st century, the surface of a golf ball remains an interesting balance of art and science. Every ball is literally imperfect by design.
Anyone who has ever stepped onto a golf course or watched professionals trying to earn a living by guiding balls into little holes will agree that imperfections lurk at the very heart of this sport.
The Masters, played during the first full week of April at the Augusta National Golf Club in Augusta, Georgia, is an invitation-only gathering of the Best of the Best. But the Best of the Best routinely falter under the intense pressure of the world’s most prestigious annual tournament.
Bryson DeChambeau, widely expected to compete for this year’s crown, triple-bogeyed the 18th hole on Friday and joined the inglorious ranks of those failed to make The Cut.
Popular defending champion Rory McIlroy set a new Masters record by forging a six-stroke lead at the halfway point. On Saturday, however, his game unraveled before the watching world. He somehow managed to be the only golfer amongst Day Three’s top 10 competitors to lose ground on the scoreboard.
Justin Rose, at age 45, tried earnestly to become the second-oldest Masters champ in history. Even though the three-time runner-up grabbed a two-stroke lead yesterday afternoon, he ultimately settled for a third-place tie.
It was McIlroy who fell behind, caught up, and then kept everyone on edge with a tee shot into the woods on the very last hole of the tournament that even I have might been able to hit – and I have never played a round of golf in my life. Rory’s one-stroke victory brought overwhelming relief.
Real life, dimpled balls, and professional golfers have something important in common: Imperfections are always on display, and they often turn out to be gifts in disguise.
Just as scars take golf balls greater distances, emotional and spiritual scars (our own everyday “dimples”) may take us to places we would never, in our wildest dreams, ever choose to go.
But those often turn out to be the very places where we begin to experience the depths of God’s grace.
The apostle Paul writes, concerning his own experience, “Therefore, in order to keep me from becoming conceited, I was given a thorn in my flesh, a messenger of Satan, to torment me. Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me. But he said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’” (2 Corinthians 12:7-9).
Or, as Eugene Peterson renders the same text in his paraphrase called The Message, Paul received “the gift of a handicap to keep me in constant touch with my limitations… At first I didn’t think of it as a gift, and begged God to remove it… Then he told me, ‘My grace is enough; it’s all you need. My strength comes into its own in your weakness.’”
Not one of us will make it through life unscathed or unscarred.
But that’s no reason for despair.
Even our imperfections are part of God’s plan to take us farther than we ever dreamed.