The Hallowed Game Is Often a Godsend

Golfer: “I’d move heaven and earth to be able to break 100 on this course.”

Caddie: “Try heaven. You’ve already moved most of the earth.”

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Baseball belongs to the Babe, hoops to Jordan, boxing to Ali.

But golf, clearly, is God’s sport.

If you think not, try reciting a tennis joke that begins “Jesus, Moses, a priest and a rabbi met at center court. . . .”

There is something about golf--a man, a ball, a patch of grass, the banshee cries of “Fore!”--that makes it uniquely otherworldly.

“Golfers know that God hates birdies,” the late Jim Murray once wrote.

God made other sports for our amusement; he made golf for his.

“Some would say it came from the devil, that’s what some parishioners tell me,” John Freeman, professor of religious studies at Emory University in Atlanta, joked. “But golf is like faith in that it’s deep. It’s more than you see on the surface.”

Like religion, golf is often confounding, duplicitous and contradictory. Winston Churchill once described Russia as “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.”

That pretty much goes for God and golf too.

“Golf defies basic human wisdom,” Freeman said.

The professor, an ordained United Methodist minister, got so hooked on the subject he wrote a book, “TEE-ology,” in which he explored the similarities between golf and religion.

Example: In the New Testament parable of “The Widow’s Mite,” Jesus views a crowd putting money into a collection box. Many of the wealthy gathered contribute large amounts, while a poor widow puts in two small copper coins worth a few cents. Jesus said, “I want you to observe that this poor widow contributed more than all the others who donated to the treasury.”

Freeman compares this in golf to a six-inch putt counting just as much as a 300-yard drive.

“A stroke is a stroke is a stroke,” Freeman said.

Golf is a complex game.

“And Christianity is a very complex religion,” Freeman said. “Faith is fraught with those kinds of paradoxes.”

Religion: He who is first shall be last.

Golf: To hit a ball farther, swing easier.

Religion: The race is not to the swift.

Golf: The Chi Chi conundrum.

“Most public sports tout physical stature,” Freeman said. “Not true in golf. Look at Chi Chi [Rodriguez]. He can hit it farther than a lot of giants.”

Golf is also one of the few sports in which God can literally reach down and tap an athlete on the shoulder.

Lee Trevino survived a lightning strike at the 1975 Western Open in Oakbrook, Ill., with a renewed respect for the man upstairs, later contributing to the seemingly ceaseless reservoir of golf and God musings.

Trevino, on why he vacates the course during a thunderstorm: “When God wants to play through, you let him play through.”

Trevino, on why he now raises his one-iron toward the sky for protection at the first hint of lightning: “Because even the Good Lord has trouble hitting a one-iron.”