A Game Of Millimeters

Words For The Weekend Vol.4

I think the golfing proverb is actually a ‘game of inches’. It’s probably a little more pithy but I like millimetres precisely because of the point I’ll attempt to make here.

For a game that’s played over roughly 7 kilometres, achieving success, be it winning a match or beating a personal best, can come down to literally millimetres. The same can be said for other sports ie. Motor sports, namely Formula 1, where the average race distance is usually somewhere between 305 and 309 kilometers, but the winner often wins by seconds.

In my teens I would regurgitate this phrase ‘game of inches’ with naive hubris when eluding to golf’s superiority as a sport. I wasn’t wrong, however on closer analysis I’ve realized the parallels this sentence has to other sports and life as a whole are deep and profound.