You are meant to play the ball as it lies, a fact that may help to touch on your own objective approach to life.

The line adapts a well-known golf maxim—“play the ball as it lies”—into a broader counsel about temperament. In golf, the phrase urges acceptance of the course’s given conditions rather than complaint or manipulation; transferred to life, it recommends meeting circumstances as they are, not as one wishes them to be. The added phrasing about an “objective approach” suggests emotional discipline: clear-eyed appraisal, practical decision-making, and resilience when conditions are unfair or inconvenient. As a sportswriter, Rice often treated athletics as a moral classroom; here, the sport’s rule-bound realism becomes a metaphor for integrity and composure under pressure.