The guys won’t be playing with hope and fear tonight – do you?

In nine seconds last Saturday, we got it. We realized what this was really about.

It wasn’t about winning a trophy for a newly created contrived event, for a medal, or some long-dreamed-of championship.

This was about pride, heritage, respect, blood, and nation.

And tonight, we get to witness it again in the most anticipated hockey game in North America since the 2010 Olympics: Canada vs. the United States.

No one cares that it’s for the championship of something called the 4 Nations Face-Off.

This is far bigger than hockey. For us on this side of the border, it’s about hockey and our independent country being different from that other country with its new boss.

For Canadians, this is serious business; we’re pissed. You don’t expect that when the chief jabs a disrespecting bony finger into our chest that we’ll be all polite and say, “Hey, it’s OK.”

The temperature goes to boiling when you add hockey to the mix. For us and our players, there’s a belief—which some considered outmoded until Lord Voldemort wondered about our sovereignty among other slights—that “this is our game.” Like Woody Allen in Annie Hall, Canadian hockey fans don’t just “love” hockey. It’s too weak a word to describe our relationship to hockey.

Because this is a newsletter aimed at golfers, now’s the time for the awkward segue.

Imagine if you played golf with the same kind of passion? To paraphrase Fred Shoemaker, imagine if you went on to the first tee, saying:

“This is my game. This is the game I love to play. There’s no place I’d rather be. This my house. I can’t wait to see what’s going to happen today! Let’s go!”

Contrast that to how you—or many golfers you know—show up for a round.

As “Humble” Howard Glassman, my Swing Thoughts podcast partner, used to say before he became enlightened: “I tried to sneak up on golf hoping it didn’t notice me.” It’s like sneaking into the schoolyard hoping the bully doesn’t see you; or heading into the day hoping nothing bad happens.

Really? That’s how we want to show up?

Do you want to play golf in a state of hope and fear?

If that’s how you play golf, the game is going to punch you in the nose. You’re going to be on your back so fast your head swims. It will be another round in which your great hopes were squashed yet again.

When you play like you crave a result that will launch you from Palooka-ville into some kind of fantasyland that confirms you’ve arrived, you’re “confident,” and you got the reward you so rightly deserved … sorry, you’re done for.

When you play golf like it was a test of you as a golfer and a human being, it’s an almost guaranteed fail. When golf is a test, it’s also a threat. Under threat, our muscles are tight, we can’t feel our fingers very well, and our heart rate and breathing speed up. That’s a recipe for bad golf.

Golf is not a test. It is a game.

The definition of a game includes an activity that is played for fun, entertainment, and often for learning. Games are an escape from the reality of life. (It’s why many serious newspaper journalists called Sports the “toy department.”)

Besides, playing a game doesn’t accomplish anything useful.

Even for professionals who play for money and major championships, playing golf doesn’t do anything for society, cure a disease, doesn’t fix problems in relationships, or repair fissures between races, classes or ideologies.

How does this square with tonight’s Canada-U.S. hockey grudge match? Isn’t this whole nationalistic swelling thing mean it’s much more than a game?

Yes, but it doesn’t matter who wins. Really. Yes, on this side of the border, we’ll be aching for Canada to win. (On Saturday night, my legs shook for most of the first period.) If we lose, we’ll be very disappointed, sad and maybe angry.

If we win, we’ll celebrate. And then days will go by and the whole schbang will fall away, we’ll settle back into our familiar ruminations, concerns and cycles. The sun will rise and set. I’ll still look in the mirror and sigh, “Oh dear.”

Like a golf game, our sense of ourselves as a nation does not hang in the balance tonight. It only seems like it does.

You know that the hockey players on both sides will show up tonight believing they carry their nations on their backs. It’s quite natural that they will have hopes and fears. But at puck drop, those will disappear, and they will play the game.

How will you play your next round of golf?

Will you be dominated by hope and fear?

Or will you play with a sense of trust, belief in yourself, rely on your preparation and experience, have faith that you’re not going to wilt when the first punch lands, and be committed to playing your best, and accepting whatever happens with grace and dignity?

Damn, I hope we win.

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If you live in or close to Guelph, Ontario, I coach in winter at The Golf House. Send an email to tim@oconnorgolf.ca to inquire about lessons or mental game coaching.