Getting & Keeping the Grace

GOLF’S ESSENCE IS GRACE. Grace alone seems to account for glorious shots, wonderful streaks that run across a sequence of holes, a number of rounds, a season, and a whole career. Other orders of grace are those gifts that endow a player from birthbalance, rhythm, hand-eye coordinationand those strengths of character that define a golfer’s play, such as intelligence, reflectiveness, equanimity, and pluck, a trait much admired by early British commentators on the game. Given the many varied gifts required to become a good player, it is a puzzle why the majority of golfers make any effort to improve at all. It is a particular puzzle why golfers, especially those who have played the game for any length of time, don’t abandon all hope that new clubs, tips, or practice can improve their game. Why don’t they concede that they simply have what grace they have been given and accept their routine games? After all, golfat least to some degreedoes beat us all. Every caddie knows the player’s swing is as unalterable as his character. There is almost nothing the great majority of golfers can do about their swings. Those who hit from the top will hit from the top, as surely as those who quit at the ball will quit at the ball. Those who swing well on the practice tee, but speed up under pressure, will invariably do so on the course. Incorporating all possible tips and taking no end of lessons are of no avail, and the swing of the average player remains an unalterable endowment; the player’s life will prove too short to improve on it. Why golfers abide in the hope for improvement is a puzzle equal to that of why there is hope itself. One answer is the power of example of the exceptional player who somehow manages to improve his game over a long period, or the equally exceptional player whose game flourishes in middleage as it never did before in his life. And there is even the rarer fellow who takes up the game in his late forties and by intelligence and persistence turns himself into a lownineties or even high-eighties player within a couple of years. A second answer to the puzzle about the golfer’s hope is the belief that practice perfects. Jerome Travis’s teacher, Aleck Smith, preached unrelenting practice. If you want to learn to play golf, practice; and then after you have practiced for a while, practice some more. When you have practiced long and faithfully, and have your shots just where you want them, you’ll find you are sitting on the top of the world if you observe just one little pointkeep on practicing. The aphorism “Practice makes perfect!” becomes a monstrous absurdity when applied to golf as it can rob players of years of their lives, result in trivial progress, and damage their characters. In fact there is evidence suggesting that if overdone, practice hurts players’ swings and robs their concentration. Every player of the game knows how great the distance is from the practice range to the first tee. Even when the general case for practice is made (Jack Nicklaus once remarked that the more he practiced, the luckier he got), it is not clear that the value of practice applies to all players. Furthermore, practice is not easily defined. Surely it is not just simply a matter of sincere intention, hard work, and repetition. Instead, practice is an art. It requires the self-knowledge to work on what one most needs and the wisdom to accept the proper advice. A third answer to the puzzle of a golfer’s hopeful optimism belongs to our modern age’s attitudes regarding the value of work, and the acceptance of self-help and new technology. This faith in improvement underlies modern democracy and industry. The surety of improvement is promoted by the growing legions of professionals, equipment manufacturers, golf schools and magazines that thrive on tips and optimism, just as medicine survives by promises of cures. Already in 1914, Leach wrote in The Happy Golfer of the prolific new innovations in putters: Hundreds of dif erent putters have been invented. They have been made with very thin blades, and with thick slabs of metal, or other substances instead of blades. They have been made like spades, knives, like hammers, and like croquet mallets… They have been made of wood, iron, aluminum, brass, gun-metal, silver, bone, and glass. Here in my room, I have the sad gift of the creator of a forlorn and foolish hope. It is a so-called putter made in the shape of a roller on ball bearings which is meant to be wheeled along the green up to the ball. Like some others it was illegal according to the rules… And yet I once knew a man who for a long period did some of the best putting … with a little block of wood that had once served to keep the door of his study ajar, to which had been attached a stick that was made from a broom handle. In Golfer at Large, Charles Price wrote in the 1980s of golf’s “Gadgets and Gimmicks.” He detailed a new inventory of golf equipment. I have seen mink headcovers, bamboo shafts, concave sand wedges, the twelve-wood, the seven-and-a-half iron, floating balls, linoleum shoes, dome-shaped tees, distance measurers, girdles that keep your elbows together, and an iron that can be converted into everything from a twoiron to a niblick, gadgets that steady your head, and putters as ugly as Stillson wrenches. The Inner Side In contrast to those golfers who pursue perfection with new technologies, others seek it in the game’s inner side. In his classic work, The Mystery of Golf, Canadian Arnold Haultain equated superiority in golf with the cultural history of its birthplace, Scotland. He started from the premise that the game required a mind “absolutely imperturbed and imperturbable.” He believed that the puritanical Presbyterian Scots came to the game admirably equipped. He believed particular thanks were owed to their shorter Catechism, which left them with “a conscience void of offence both toward God and toward man.” The Scot, Haultain argued, was captain of his own soul. He did not need to curb the ardor of his passions as players from the south would. Righteously confident and boldly independent, the Scot went about his affairs as successfully as his Calvinist counterpart, the Dutch businessman, carried out his commerce. Another explanation for golfers believing in the possibility of perfection resides in the human assumption that we can do as we wish. We believe that we own our own bodies, and that they should do what we command them to do. Since we learned to walk and talk, we assumed (not entirely correctly, however) that our body is our first property and, ergo, our first slave. This assumption leads us to mistakenly conclude that we should be able to direct our body’s actions during the few moments the golf swing takes place. However, once the inherited presumption of body control is set aside, as it is for all serious golfers, a set of questions arises: Are there ways (indeed, ways too numerous to count!) in which we don’t own and command our bodies? Don’t we lack even a language which is full, elemental, and precise enough to talk to our bodies? Indeed, don’t the parts and motions of the body form unexplored and uncontrollable dominions? Surely the belief that we command our own bodies is at best a half truth. Let the American golfer who has gone to Scotland to play find a way, when stepping off the curb, to look right first rather than left. He will quickly discover that his body does not in all things yield itself to direct commands. Or, if I can issue one more directive to the reader, pick up your driver, and take the club back slowly and fullyhands, arms, shoulders, and hipsand then momentarily hesitate