My smoothest golf swing is the one aimed at my golf bag.

I hit that thing flush almost every time.

And it always makes a satisfying thump as the clubs, traitors all, clatter about making their metallic music.

Tee up a golf ball, however, and my club wavers as wildly as the flashlight held by a hapless teen victim in a slasher film who, against all reason, has decided to investigate the noise in the basement.

Golf shouldn’t be anything like as hard as it is.

The ball, unlike those used in most other sports, generally stays still until you strike it.

(Except, occasionally, when you don’t. I can attest that if you swing a driver with the right combination of velocity and inaccuracy you don’t actually have to hit the ball to dislodge it from its perch atop the tee. The wind from the passing clubhead, a brief but potent gust, can push the ball off. This, like all unintentionally bad swings, doesn’t count as a stroke. Not to me, anyway.)

I concede that both the ball and the club are relatively small.

A golf ball, in particular, can look minuscule when you’re peering down at it with a club in hand, unsure, as always, whether the ball’s pending flight will conclude on the green or in somebody’s back seat.

I have played golf, infrequently but with an appallingly consistent lack of grace, since I was about 12.

After a lapse of a few years I recently started playing again occasionally, mainly because my son Max, who’s 11, has taken an interest in this most psychologically punitive of sports.

My swing is as clumsy and unpredictable as it ever was, the sort of contortion that could make an orthopedic surgeon weep.

My flair for profanity, however, has rarely been so finely honed.

Almost poetic, if I may be so bold.

Max, although occasionally prone to a smidgen of his old man’s pessimism, treats my on-course outbursts with a mixture of embarrassment and weary pity that belies his age.

On an outing this summer, after I shanked a pitching wedge, generally a club that forgives even my seizure-like swing, I hauled off and gave my bag a hearty kick.

(I had dropped the pitching wedge. Possibly on purpose. It’s also possible that dropping in my personal lexicon is a synonym for throwing.)

Max was looking away, probably to make sure no other golfers were close enough to have seen my childish antics.

Before our next round, Max laid down an edict — no cussing and no kicking. I accepted the terms, although with no confidence I could comply.

It’s easy to agree to act like an adult when you’re not on a golf course.

But the compulsion to mutter a piquant obscenity, or to boot the bag that holds the infernal clubs that keep betraying you, is powerful indeed when you’ve sliced a 5-iron on the sort of trajectory that causes fighter pilots to black out from the G forces.

Golf is insidious, though — the ultimate sporting swindle.

Unlike with, say, cliff diving or ski jumping, even a hopeless golfer not only can, but almost certainly will, on rare occasions strike the ball perfectly.

This feeling, like the euphoria that certain narcotics induce, can be almost instantly addictive.

That sensation, I think, is what keeps the recreational golf industry, which measures its annual revenues in the tens of billions, afloat.

It certainly lures me back to the course. I can lie in bed, in that pleasant stupor that precedes sleep, and review a drive that split the fairway, a chip that plopped softly on the green, a putt that rolled true.

Those memories marinate, sweet in the remembering, even though I know with absolute certainty that the few stellar shots will be more than offset by swings that send the ball on flight paths that not even UFO enthusiasts have ever claimed to witness.

• • •

Anglers are perhaps the most renowned raconteurs, and so it struck me as funny when I was typing an excerpt from a 1972 issue of the Herald (then the Democrat-Herald) for the “Turning Back the Pages” feature that runs on Page A2 in each issue.

The story noted that “Oregon sport fishermen landed a record number of salmon and steelhead in 1971.”

The humorous part is in the next paragraph, which explains the source of this claim.

“From information provided by anglers.”

I guffawed as I typed that phrase.

The story did not delve into other matters vital to anglers.

But I’d wager that those 1971 fishermen, in addition to hooking more salmon and steelhead than ever before, also netted some whoppers that defied belief.

Except they left the camera in the rig.