Sports can be as intoxicating as life or anything that life has to offer, we tend to agree. I often wonder if sports are not the fifth among purusharthas of Dharma, Artha, Kama and Moksha. Like romance, music, fine wine, fast cars and other trappings of good life, the sports also have the power to make men happy, and very deliriously so. Even the more respectable among games and some friendly forms of gambling are also touted as sports. The debate will continue but you cannot have too much of life’s riches without getting wasted with the only exception of a family and its love. If you already have it then you might want to start appreciating it more and stop taking it for granted.

A Tibetan Monk who heads the monastery in Los Angeles enjoys an occasional round of golf at the local Muny, which is a Municipal or Public Golf Course for those uninitiated in Tibetan Buddhism. The godman has following to say about his chosen sport, “If you play golf, you might be able to appreciate what life is; full of suffering.” Every sports fanatic has a similar line to offer in favor of her favorite pastime.

Golf imitating life is an oft-quoted motif perpetuated mostly by the elites who possess the means, motive and opportunity to play this game that is at once decadent and also very charming. They probably mean that like golf, life too is an exclusivist privilege restricted to a fortunate few who are rich and famous; perhaps as exclusivist as are good looks and health and so many other things that are the most desirable, including money and power and happiness.

The nature of this game requires you to make the least number of mistakes to have any measure of success playing it. As the legendary Bobby Jones once said, “On the golf course a man is all alone with his ball and God”. That is the theme of life, a solitary man battling the elements, calling conscientious penalties on the self and taking calculated risks to reap the rewards or the punishments. It is arguably a good walk spoiled. The ball too takes a spectacular flight at first, descends to the ground never to rise so high again, takes a few careless hops and finally crawls slowly and helplessly to its grave.

Apparently this intriguing sport does offer a simile or two that mimic the events of human life. However I doubt if that too does not hold true only for those with fame, riches and the muscle that can bail them out of their blunders and penalties. According to Golf Digest, golf after all is the narcotic of choice of the self-made man. Of late I have started wondering if that does not leave the rest of us, the lesser kind, well out of bounds. It is not so surprising that anyone who does not play the game is not seen in those well behaved galleries; except for those boisterous few shouting the moronic ‘In the HOLE!’

Golf, which is often described, as playing chess outdoors is in reality much less brainy than it is perceived to be. All you must know and retain is the optimum function of your wrists and brawn while shooting and the complete lack of both while putting. But this stupid sounding Holy Grail of golf is not so easy to discover and even if it is found it is a skill that requires constant honing and practice unlike learning to ride a bicycle. For most people that translate into years of toil, and after countless ill-spent hours and dollars, most probably your spouse is a golf widow and your child is left without a college fund. Yet it could prove to be an affliction that is extremely hard to cure and apparently no other remedy works faster than a messy divorce. What is it that would make you happier, the weekends of chasing a fickle temptress in lush wilderness or enjoying the warmth of your home and hearth?

In the summer of 1992 I met a man who approached me for a lift while I was getting into a rickshaw to reach Pune Railway station in a hurry to catch the train back to Mumbai. He appeared to be very poor and completely decrepit but his chaste language betrayed his class moorings and so feeling safe and sorry I obliged. He begged me to make a detour to drop him at the Racecourse and apologized that he could not offer me any money to share the fare. Instead he offered me some rare wisdom. “I have a very small amount of money with me today that I must place on a bet in today’s afternoon race. You know, I cannot live if I do not do it every Sunday. But you seem to be very young and let me offer you some very important advice. Pledge to yourself that you will never venture anywhere close to a racecourse or any other form of gambling even if you have money to burn. This addiction has robbed me of everything precious that I had, my money, work, family and happiness.

Gambling can kill you and so please do not dabble in it at all”. It was a very memorable incident and I have religiously followed his advice ever since avoiding even the ubiquitous pachinko slot machines in Japan. However that sage had not uttered a single word of caution about golf. It appeared so harmless and so upwardly mobile at that time. If Ratan Tata and other men of affairs loved to enjoy this game like enjoying an occasional bottle of wine, then it could not be all that bad unlike my middle class morality had suggested to me at first. But whenever you cross that very thin line of any substance abuse, you are unable to have enough of anything. I wonder why no one has ever bothered to start a Golfers Anonymous or a Gamblers Anonymous.

My other passion of chess is more simplistic and does not require vast tracts of manicured land for staging a theater of good life. All it needs is a single square foot of space and still very admirably enacts life in vivid technicolor, on just 64 squares of black and white. Gary Kasparov, the strongest human player in the history of chess says, “Chess is life, it is a struggle.” It also exercises your little grey cells and according to Goethe, chess is the touchstone of human intellect. But it is the anonymous correspondent of British Chess Magazine who has beautifully captured the essence of this King of games, “All of life is here: brilliant wins, amazing draws and not infrequently defeat snatched from the jaws of victory.”

Chess is also an unmistakable clash of civilizations and it is the white race, which enjoys the advantage of perceived supremacy and possesses the devious initiative to strike first in waging of this war too. The war mongering Bishops personify the churches of various organized faiths colluding with power and pelf to bring about merciless violence, tyranny and crucifixion. The Knights in white armor are also not any less crooked than those in black. An ambitious pawn, while no one is looking, can slowly and slyly climb the ladder to become the mighty Queen. Finally it is the Emperor, who goes scot free of the sin of unscrupulously leading his subjects into a Word War that leaves colossal death and destruction in its wake. And even in defeat it is the captured King who gets the golden parachute though the most of his army or all of it is dead. Could there be any grander depiction of human life, race and its history?

Patience and caution seem to be the bywords in negotiating the treacherous challenges presented by all of these games we have to play. The rules appear to be so very simple and it is so much fun being a spectator but when you are in the ring it is suddenly a different ballgame altogether. Chess, for example, allows a wafer-thin margin of error and the opportunities for making a miraculous comeback are almost nonexistent. A very little impatience and overconfidence can lead you to make that one telling mistake and the game is over. To be true, it is actually not over until it is over or unless you force a stalemate, but that is the difference between scoring a whole point or a big zero. The spoils are for the victor to take and you are left picking up the pieces. Of course, you always have the option of setting those up for another intoxicating match and not throwing all care to the wind again.

Niyanta Deshpande Tokyo, Japan