Golf is an ineffectual attempt to put an elusive ball into an obscure hole with implements ill-adapted to the purpose.

Wilson’s quip reduces golf to a deliberately over-technical description: a small, hard-to-control ball (“elusive”) must be guided to a hard-to-see target (“obscure hole”) using tools that seem poorly suited (“implements ill-adapted”). The humor comes from treating a leisure pastime as a kind of engineering problem destined to fail, implying that golf’s frustrations are built into its design. Read more broadly, it also pokes at human persistence in pursuing difficult, arguably unnecessary goals—suggesting that the sport’s appeal lies precisely in its mismatch between means and ends, and in the comic stubbornness of trying anyway.