The Scorecards Eventually End Up in the Trash

The Scorecards Eventually End Up in the Trash

There’s a joke I make a dozen times at every event when a group is deciding who is going to keep score: “The scorekeeper usually wins,” followed by a knowing smile. Some people get it, some don’t. But either way, for a little while, the scorecard matters.

After every hole, there's the usual accounting.

"What'd you get?"

"Four."

"That was five."

"No it wasn't."

"You hit it twice over there."

"Fine. Five."

Nine holes later, someone adds up the columns. There is a winner. Maybe there is an argument about the winner. And then, eventually, the scorecard ends up in the trash.

I think about that.

Not because I think people should save their scorecards. No one needs a box somewhere filled with tiny pencils and evidence that Dave from Accounting shot a 37 at the company picnic.

What interests me is how much attention we give the score while we're playing and how quickly it becomes irrelevant afterward. By the time people get home, I doubt many of them care what they shot. For a while, I thought maybe the stories were what lasted instead. The ridiculous bank shot. The lucky bounce. The putt that somehow ended up farther from the hole than where it started. But I'm probably giving those moments too much credit too. Most of them will disappear. A day later, maybe nobody remembers who won. A week later, maybe nobody remembers the ridiculous shot either. So what do they get from playing on my mini golf course? Do they take anything home with them like I do?

Let’s detour for a second and talk about “real” golf:

To someone who doesn't play, golf must look like an extraordinarily inefficient way to spend an afternoon. Four people walk around what is essetially a very large, mostly empty park for three or four hours trying to get a very small ball into eighteen slightly larger holes. And technically, that's what happens. But I've played enough golf to know that description misses something.

A round of golf contains surprisingly little actual golf. You hit a shot that takes a few seconds. Then you walk. Someone else hits. You walk some more. As you walk, you talk about work. Or your kids. Or the terrible shot you just hit. Or something that happened twenty years ago. Or maybe you tell some colorful jokes. Sometimes nobody says anything at all.

Then you arrive at the next ball and, for a few seconds, you're playing golf again. It’s possible—common, even—to play terribly and have a wonderful afternoon. That shouldn't make sense if golf is really about hitting the ball. So maybe the game is doing something else. Maybe golf gives four people a reason to spend a few hours together. The course gives them somewhere to go. The ball gives them something to do along the way. The score gives the afternoon just enough structure to keep it moving. But the thing itself may simply be the time.

Miniature golf doesn't have those long walks. There's no fairway between shots where somebody can tell the long version of a story. Nobody is spending four hours together. But I think it captures a little of the same thing. The game gives people something to do while they're spending time with each other.

Whose turn is it?What did you get?Who's winning?Did that count?

Those questions keep things moving, but they're not necessarily what's happening. What's happening might be much simpler. For a little while, some people are together.

That brings me back to the scorecard. It does a remarkably good job of recording the game. A four on the first hole. A two on the second. A six somebody would prefer not to discuss on the third. Add everything together and you have a reasonably accurate account of how someone played. But almost no account at all of what happened. There's no box for the conversation between holes. No place to record that you spent an hour with someone you don't see enough. No column for the person you knew by name before the event and knew a little better afterward. No line for an hour that was simply more enjoyable because someone else was there.

Maybe that's asking too much of a scorecard. But it has made me wonder how many things in life work that way. Most of the dinners I've eaten with people I care about are gone from my memory. So are most of the conversations that made me laugh. I couldn't tell you what my family did on an ordinary Saturday three years ago. I hope there were a lot of good ones. Maybe an experience doesn't have to become an important memory to have mattered. Maybe sometimes what we take home is less specific than that.

We spent a little time with someone. We enjoyed their company—and we hope they enjoyed ours. Our day was a little better because they were in it. That's not much. But I'm not sure it has to be.

Imagine life as a scale, with the good on one side and the bad on the other. The world does a fantastic job of adding weight to the bad side all by itself. A difficult morning. An argument. Bad news.

Maybe the good side is often built out of smaller things. A conversation. A shared joke. An ordinary afternoon with people you like. An hour when nothing particularly important happened, but you were glad you were there. None of those things weighs very much.

Maybe that's why we need so many of them.

I don't know what people take home from my events. I see them arrive. I watch them play. Then eventually they leave, and I start packing everything back into the trailer. They take whatever happened with them. I take the course and some new thoughts to consider on the ride home.

Somewhere along the way, the scorecard ends up in the trash. Maybe that's exactly where it belongs, because I hope what they take home can't be written on one.

Maybe they don't remember who won. Maybe the ridiculous shot is forgotten before the weekend is over. Maybe a year from now they couldn't tell you much about that time they played mini golf at all. But for a little while, they were together. And then they went back to their lives.

I hope all of those little moments accumulate somewhere. Maybe all the dinners we can't remember, the conversations we've forgotten, the afternoons that weren't important enough to become stories, and the people who made ordinary days a little better have been adding weight to the good side of the scale all along.

I hope so. Because eventually the scorecards all end up in the trash. But I'd like to think we get to keep something.