Golf Becomes an Old Friend

At the University of Rochester in the spring of 1966, with my doctoral examinations in history completed, with no job prospects in sight, and filled with anxiety about my upcoming August wedding, I got out my old Guldahl woods (1, 3, and 4), and went out to a nearby municipal public course in the river park. There I bought a second-hand set of Tommy Armour irons for $60 dollars, and started playing low-stakes skins games with a small group of friendly black players. They welcomed me on the condition that I would bet something. I found that I was still not the worst public links player out there and was secretly delighted when they declined to give me strokes. I can’t say I made any money, but a few pars and birdies stiffened my wavering resolve to get married, which has had the wonderful consequence of providing me with a loving mate for the past twenty-eight years. During the first years of marriage, I again put my clubs away. Nearly the next time I got them out was in 1975, when I was on sabbatical in Riverside, California. I went to a nearby course and bought a new set of MacGregor irons and woods, though I never quite got the hang of, nor came to like, the narrow California canyon courses. Unplayable lies among rocks were the price of driving off the fairway. Nevertheless, golf had again served me well. It had distracted me from my books. The following year, when I returned home to Minnesota, I embraced golf fully. Our small regional college was caught up in acrimony spawned by four years of topsy-turvy growth that was followed by four years of precipitous decline. Few feuds can be as nasty as university fights, which are fueled by free time, surplus vanity, high-blown presumptions, and individuals unrivaled in making mountains out of mole hills. I, who had helped form the university teachers’ union, began to play golf to get away from continuing conflict at work. Crisp, strong prairie winds on the golf course cleansed my soul. Golf offered me an escape into a miniature world. It offered no other significance than the play itself. In contrast to research and writing, golf yielded immediate pleasure. On the course, the only authorities are the rules of the game. I aimed, swung, saw, and scored. I enjoyed experiencing golf’s connection between mind and body and took an epicurean-like pleasure in learning to hit different shots: shots that floated idly across space, those that bore their way into the wind, and those, as calculated, that bent, skidded, and rolled onto the green. I was enchanted by the wonderful shots that occasionally came off the face of my clubs. Their glorious flightsso straight, so high, so long, and accuratesurprised and delighted me. I was especially pleased by shots that I visualized perfectly before playing them, and then played them as I had seen them. They made me feel in contact with a higher order. Such shots nearing perfection are remembered long afterward. For instance, I remember a shot worth a lifetime’s memory. Playing directly into a strong wind on a long parfour, I hit the shot I envisioned. Out of a good lie, with the ball sitting up high, I drilled a 250-yard driver out of the rough. Dead on line, it landed just short of the green and rolled just past the cup. I missed the eight-footer coming back, but the keen fairway shot is a vivid, pleasurable memory. I also remember how twenty years ago on a course in Riverside, California, I hit a splendid sixty-yard trap shot, which, cut thin, flew over sixty feet of sand, across another thirty to forty feet of fairway, and across another ninety feet of rising, rolling green. It landed and stuck only two feet from the pin, saving my par. (That two greenskeepers witnessed the shot added to my satisfaction.) I also remember my first hole-in-one on the eighth hole of Detroit’s municipal course, Redford. A group waved us up on the short, uphill par three before they started to putt. I hit a fiveiron shot that landed on the front of the green, rolled straight for the cup at the back of the green and went in. I remember a saving putt I made nearly fifteen years ago on the par-three eighth at St. Andrews. I sank a downhill, sidehill putt of fifteen feet that broke more than twice that distance on the way to the cup. Had it not sunk (though it couldn’t have been rolling much slower), it would have rolled off the green. I also remember “mistaken epiphanies.” On St. Andrews’s very short tenth (called the Bobby Jones Hole) I hit what I believed was a perfect drive with a 4-wood, only to discover that it had come to rest in a “wee bunker”indeed, the tiniest pot bunker in all golfdom. Far more than when I was young, I found myself playing alone and enjoying it. I increasingly considered it not only a special pleasure but a kind of honor to have a course to myself. I liked off-hours play, especially early evenings. I welcomed the Fall, when the temperature dropped into the 50s and the wind swept all but diehard players off the course. I confess that I delight in being a solitary golfer. An empty course (without other players and especially without carts) is, for me, like a book to be written. I discover that the more I golf, the more I write, and the more I write, the more I golf. The course is a laboratory where I walk, play, and think. Worlds of time exist between each shot. My friend Don Olsena 1950s-era captain of the University of Minnesota golf team, who in his sixties can still play an occasional fine roundwrote me of the matter of being a solitary golfer: Solitary golf. Yes, this is the best golf of all. Out there alone you can be anything, you can play anywhere, you can do anything and everything. When I play alone, I move into a dream world that is my own, where truly magical and impossible shots occur. Even as lousy as I now play, I can hit the most astonishing shots when I am out there alone and move into another time warp, another galaxy of the self I dare not describe them to you, else you would say I have finally stepped of the edge and gone mad and am beyond repair and have become the world’s greatest liar. If I have time, I frequently drive thirty miles north of home to the small nine-hole course at Canby. Though stranded on the Minnesota prairie, it has the feel of a Scottish seaside links course. Its layout is eccentric; its condition is primitive. Strong winds constantly play across its gently rolling and undulating terrain, which is seasonally colored by subtle changes of greens, browns, and golds, and is surrounded by tall grass fields. There are rarely more than a few players on the course, at least on most weekday mornings, and I am allowed to be alone with my game. There, I am in touch with the pleasures of golf from an earlier time. My usual escape is to my home course in Marshall, where the pro has nicknamed me “Back Nine Joe” as a commentary on my solitary play. A decent eighteen-hole test, especially after recent improvements, it has adequate length and steady winds, a number of fairway bunkers, a meandering river, some well-placed ponds, and several large, interesting greens. I need only arrive on its first tee and I am happy. As I walk, I feel the wonderful sense of my body in tireless motion.