Unlike sin in life, retribution is instantaneous. The ball, one’s very self launched into its little life, gives offense from the very outset, is judged, condemned, and sent screaming away and, banished from the pleasant licit fairways and the sunny irenic greens, goes wrong and ever wronger, past the rough, past even the barbed-wire fence, and into the dark fens and thickets and briars of out-of-bounds.
