The Odds

I heard this thing on NPR yesterday that I wanted to share.

Apparently the game on Sunday between the Chargers and the Steelers will go down in history as the first NFL game to have the final score 11-10. The stats guy was explaining that this was a very rare score for football, but had happened twice in college football. So they calculated the odds as being 13,000 to 1 of any game ending in that score. Then they tried to find something else with those odds to compare it to.

It turns out that the odds of having a hole-in-one in any round of golf are 13,000 to 1.

On Saturday at Aunt Rita's funeral her son Tom gave the eulogy, pointing out Rita's biggest accomplishment: She had three holes-in-one in her lifetime of playing golf.

Golf is pretty big in this side of our family. The Beaupres have owned a golf course, Plum Brook, which was designed by my great grandfather and his brother, Francis and Michael Beaupre, since the early part of the 20th century. (Gramma Hoot worked in the kitchen of the clubhouse during World War II when it looked like the business was going to go under. She probably thought cooking for her brood was a piece of cake after that.) Anyway, Rita, the youngest daughter, must have gotten a lot of chances to improve her odds on getting a hole-in-one. Malcolm Gladwell has a new book pointing out that the success at doing something improves with the numbers.

I was pretty impressed by my Aunt's golf prowess. And I was looking for ice-breakers for luncheon conversation on this cold day. I asked my Uncle Bill, who has been pretty sick getting chemo/radiation for bladder cancer. He'd never had a hole-in-one, and he could not remember why he quit playing golf. Your shoulder, reminded Aunt Laurie. Uncle John was disgusted with himself that he'd never had one, and he is the big talented golfer of his brothers. I knew my Dad had not had a hole-in-one.

So I got wondering about Rita's boys. My cousin Ron, who is closest to my age, was the unbelievable golfer of the family. He won so many amateur golf tournaments that there was talk of him fulfilling a family fantasy and going pro, though he did not. I asked him in line for the buffet about how he and his brothers did with the holes-in-one. He'd had two, and his brother Ted, one, but his wife had three. As we went down the buffet line, she explained that she had not been a golfer when he married her, but she figured she'd have to learn if she was to have any hope of seeing her husband on the weekends. He'd taught her for awhile until it looked like divorce was imminent and then she got another golf club pro to help. She also teased Ron for his reaction to her third. "He didn't say congratulations, or good for you, or how'd you do it. He said: 'Now you have one more than me!'" Ron explained his wife's prowess by saying she had the right job for golf; she's a teacher. "She had her summers off!" he protested.

Gladwell's new book points out the 10,000 hour rule: The idea that it takes about 10,000 hours of practice to achieve the mastery of something. Apparently in golf, it takes a little more: 13,000 games. I thought it an amazing coincidence to have heard about these odds in the casual living of my life. And it has gotten me thinking about the significance. (Did God have a plan in determining the outcome of the football game that held up the 60 MInutes with Obama's first post-election interview on Sunday? A plan that directly correlated to the previous day's Beaupre family funeral discussion?)

So to you my lovlies, I would like to point out one tiny insight: that each and every hour that goes into you doing the things that matter to your life's dreams is just one more chit in beating the odds.