Hole-in-one

Do you play golf? Even though your answer is no, this leisure seems to be easy to start playing. There is no hard work. You can excise enough by walking on full 18 holes. For the time being as a beginner, you often run to discover your out-coursed balls in order to keep up with other members in your party. You have to run and walk much oftener that veteran players. It’s rather good to your health. Although you need to prepare start-up gears buying a set of golf clubs, if you don’t care about the ownership, you can make the most of rental golf clubs.

Playing golf is one of the most popular sports in Japan especially for the businessmen. They play golf for entertaining important clients or promoting in-house harmony with colleagues rather than enjoying golf itself. This exercise can also be done by elderly people because of its easiness as I mention. Playing golf is a very convenient chance for Japanese senior executives to promote both their health and business talks. Particularly for the elderly, there are some risks resulting from sudden exercise early in the morning. As far as they care about those risks, playing golf is still a pleasure for any age. It’s even inevitable to some salespersons. If their clients like golf too much, the salespersons sometimes have to entertain them to give pleasure for their company’s costs. Organizationally, some of the Japanese companies call on all of the main business connections to golf competitions in order to promote the acquaintance among business groups. It’s a good opportunity to increase sales if you have good talks. If you are bad at golf, your golf-athlete competitors might snatch jobs from you.

As for armature golf players, what they want to achieve in the whole life is a hole-in-one. Hole-in-one is a miraculous technique to put a ball into the cup with only one shot in a par-three hole. Although there is more difficult shot called albatross (cup-in at the second shot in par-five holes or the first shot in par-four holes), this is the dream shot many players wish to do. If you should achieve the dream, like professional golf players who get some awards in tournaments, you may image that you would receive souvenirs as a token of the commemoration. Or to your delight, you would treat the members playing with you within your pocket money.

Just in the event of hole-in-one, however, it would not be too much delight. There is a custom in Japan that those amateur players who achieve holes-in-one have to provide big entertainments at their own expenditures. On another day, they hand souvenirs to the party's member and hold parties inviting all of the party participants besides the witnesses. Moreover the players are almost forced to plant memorial trees by the sides of the very hole you make the miracle. These are, of course, your costs. If you did it in a big golf competition, your expenditures would increase in accordance with the number of participation. There are some cases where the sum amounts to no less that one million yen. It would exceed so far your pocket money.

To cover the costs, there is hole-in-one insurance in Japan. This is a package policy covering golf-related risks ranging from the costs of holes-in-one to liabilities and damaged golf gears. You may not worry about the hole-in-one risk because the possibility is quite low, but in more than ten-year experience for the insurance industry, I have ever done the transactions of the hole-in-one payments for the same policyholder who did it twice in one year. As long as you play golf in Japan, it's better to buy the policy for a rainy day otherwise you should be careful when you target at the pins in every par-three hole.