AS ANY regular player will tell you, golf can be an immensely frustrating game.

One minute you can be on top of the world, hitting the ball exactly the way you want to. However, fairly often, and normally without any warning, you can find yourself completely lost, feeling like you have no idea whatsoever how to hit the ball.

This can easily result in disastrous holes, wracking up enormous scores that ruin an otherwise enjoyable round.

In my experience, most golfers spend most of their time somewhere in between these two states of flux, but it’s much easier to lose your game than it is to get it back.

Therefore, I’d like you to imagine just how horrible it would be to shoot double figures on your first hole.

Pretty bad, I’d have thought? Well, that was the situation my friend Russ found himself in the last time we played together.

Russ is a strange person to play golf with. On a good day, he’s really quite decent, far better than me, but when he’s bad, generally, he’s terrible.

He swings the club incredibly quickly, which results in prodigious distance, but also a dramatic slice that he finds incredibly hard to control.

The opening hole in question was a par-four, with a dogleg from left to right. Russ hit a decent tee shot and had a sight of the green with his second, but he was a little bit tight to the right-hand side of the hole.

Three slices out of bounds later and he remained in the same spot and while he then managed to hit a straight shot, he soon found himself embedded in a greenside bunker.

Several more wasted shots soon passed and when he finally holed out, it took him several minutes to count up his score.

Rather sheepishly, I enquired after his score. “17” was the muttered reply.

Had that been me, I’d have been tempted to make the short walk back to my car, drive home and leave my clubs untouched in the shed for several months.

Fair play to Russ, he somehow found the strength to carry on, but I’ve no idea how.