"I must speak of the game of golf in terms that I lived and loved, not in current-day terms, which I neither understand nor can relate to. In other words, 'stack and tilt' is not a thing of beauty to me."

No April Fools joke here, the USGA managed to get the very low-profile Mickey Wright to pen one of its monthly essays about "The Game."

At the risk of sounding old-fashioned, which I am, I must speak of the game of golf in terms that I lived and loved, not in current-day terms, which I neither understand nor can relate to. In other words, “stack and tilt” is not a thing of beauty to me.

The outstanding beauty of the game of golf, I believe, is its complexity. In motion, you must be able to strike a small sphere with a two-to-four-inch block of wood or metal on the end of a 43-inch shaft while standing approximately 30 inches away from it, and do it in such a manner that the center of the clubface strikes the exact tangent point of the ball to send it in the direction chosen and with enough stored energy to send the ball a desired distance.

That, however, is but the start of the complex beauty of the game. Golf is indeed a game for patient problem solvers. The variables that need to be computed seem endless, yet within the space of 30 or 40 seconds you always come up with an answer: sometimes right, oftentimes not.