In the Beginning

I still remember my first golf experience. I was in my thirties and had taken up the game on a dare from some guys on a basketball team I played on. One of them had a set of old left handed Sam Snead blades with a persimmon driver and a persimmon 3 wood. The grips were hard and dry rotted and the insert on the driver was raised some 1/4 inch from the rest of the face from being exposed to moisture and swelling.

We went to a municipal course the city runs that was right next to the airport. The greens were baked and crusted bermuda and the fairways were hard as the airport runways they bordered. I had never actually hit a golf ball before that day but had bought some plastic whiffle golf balls and knocked them around the back yard until I could hit them without a definitive boomerang effect. I remember laughing at the guys steel spiked shoes and remarking that I would probably hurt myself wearing them.

The second hole was a straightaway par five and I hit a perfect drive. It was effortless and smooth feeling and seemed to fly forever straight down the fairway before stopping some 200 yards from the green. It was the only shot I hit all day on the center of the clubface. One of my well meaning playing partners suggested I cut down on my overly long hard swing to get some accuracy but it was too late, I had already bombed one further than anyone else hit one all day and was never going to be satisfied with short but straight. I hit magnificent arcing slices that left the golf course at high speed and a lot of topped balls for the rest of the day but I hit all of them with the same ferocity and the same loopy, long swing.

I was hooked. The next six months were spent tearing up my back yard with ferocious iron and driver swings that sailed whiffle balls in all directions. I read everything I could get my hands on about the golf swing but discarded anything that didn't feel like the occasional elusive return of the first smoked drive that carried out of sight. My swing was built around the idea of swinging a rock on a string; long, slow and fluid with lots of snap at the bottom from a cupped, delayed release fully cocked right wrist and I learned to control the direction by hanging on past impact. When I timed it right it was magnificent. I hit high arching shots that settled softly and carried a long way.

I read about how divots were supposed to be taken in front of the ball and further steepened my iron swing so that the divots were deep and wide. The occasional pure shot that rocketed off those old blades was magical. The sound.... the feel.... the breathless beauty of a high arcing shot settling next to the pin was overpowering and mystical at the same time. The courses I played had brick hard greens and unwatered fairways that turned into baked clay in the dead of summer. I learned to chip with a 7 iron and putted the ball terribly but none of that mattered. It was the purity of a well struck shot that bewitched me and kept me struggling so hard night after night in my back yard.

I told one of the guys that had talked me into playing that I would be shooting in the 80's in a year and he laughed out loud. I offered to put money on it but something in the way I was so sure told him it was a bad bet. As it turned out he was right. It took me a year and a half to get to where I could shoot in the 80's and by then I had read so much about the golf swing I felt like I understood it; at least I understood how my own body could create a reasonable facsimile of it.

Then something else happened. I was playing a company tournament one day and struggling mightily. I just couldn't get the feel down that day. Everything was a little off and I was just not striking it very well. I tried to relax and swing slower but nothing seemed to help. I had hit a ball in the trees to the right of the fairway on a shortish par four. It was a dead over the top pull hook that only carried some 170 yards up the fairway before going deep into the pine thicket guarding the right side. That pine thicket wasn't a new aquaintance for me. I had visited it on several occasions and there was no way out of it besides a lateral chip out from where I had hit my ball. When I got to my ball nestled in the pine needles I was trying to figure out where to chip it out when I looked up. I don't even know why I looked up but there it was. An opening in the trees probably 3 feet high and 8 foot across. It wasn't exactly an opening as much as it was a small space that aligned perfectly with what I knew to be my 8 iron flight.

Any sort of mishit would have sent the ball clattering deeper into trouble but I suddenly KNEW I would not mishit it. I knew that 8 iron would make perfect contact in the loose pine straw and send the ball right through that opening and onto the green. I could see it clearly in my mind and even feel the dead soft crispness of perfect contact ringing in my hands. I told my partner what I was getting ready to do and he just looked at me with a look of incredulity. He didn't bother to suggest I should chip out but agreed to watch the shot in case it took the 98% possibility of hitting something and getting deeper into trouble.

I made the shot and the 2 foot birdie putt afterwards. I had a beautiful three holes of pure ball striking before that feeling left again. I got out of my own way and played the shots I saw in my mind without trying to figure out how to hit them. Golf is like that sometimes. An impossibility wrapped up in the ability to allow it to happen.....