The Eye of Flight

It is easy to lend mystique to the golf shot, as it contains the mysterious elements of aim and flight which affect our spirit in primordial ways. No sooner does the eye (genetically shaped since the first animal eye to see, follow, and track) pick up a flying object, than the human mind itself soars to fly with it. With its instinctive sympathies, undeliberated or repressed, the mind bends inside itself with the long curving shot, and turns within itself to fly with the circling hawk. As flight awakens in us a passion to join it, so intended flight awakens an equally strong passion for accuracy. The human mind is quick to pick up the pattern of a flying object sketched out against the background of the sky. Once the eye catches sight of an object that is following an arc, the mind, as a matter of immediate instinct, cheers the flying object along the correct path to its target. An aesthetic requirement buried deeply inside us shapes our senses of just, proper, and beautiful motion. There are many pleasing paths of motion: they can be straight, curved, efficient, elegant, and even graceful, but they cannot be faltering and erratic if they are to please us. The mind instinctively urges the flying ball (even an opponent’s shot) to its target, much as it cheers the plummeting hawk to fall and strike its hapless victim. The novice has not sufficiently evolved as a golfer to fully appreciate the range of pleasures associated with the graceful shot. He cannot, either as player or observer, conceive the shot that is necessary for him to hit, imagine the swing that does the inner mind’s work, or grasp the path the ball must fly. The novice plays the game, but he is unable to fully participate in it. The blind golfer, like the novice, does not participate in the highest pleasures of golf. The blind or blindfolded golfer can play a good round of golf. He can hit a great shot, and even feel it in his hands. Nevertheless, he cannot fully visualize the shot he must make or watch the shot he hits. The pleasurable experience of the ball in flight, which mixes primordial, aesthetic, and emotional sensations, is denied him. Without the delightful direct imprint on his eye (our keenest sense) of the shot’s flight, he can only vicariously experience the shot through the sensations in his hands and the descriptive words of others. The highest pleasures of shotmaking depend on sight. The finest shots, however clever in conception, brilliant in execution, or rewarding in outcome, are not the most pleasurable, if their flight goes unobserved. Three different examples make this point. In a night match at Hoylake in 1878, R. W. Brownone of the game’s early outstanding drivershit three unseen drives in a row. When the gallery located his third tee shot in the  center of the fairway at the entrance of a rabbit’s hole, they looked in the hole only to discover the player’s two previous tee shots. These were three truly wonderful tee shots, but, their wonderful accuracy notwithstanding, these gorgeous shots flew unseen, and therefore unable to please, to their target. In a second instance, the great British player Harry Vardon (whom many rank as equal to Jones as the game’s greatest player) described one of the most remarkable shots of his entire career. On the eighteenth hole at Northwood, Vardon landed his tee shot two yards in front of the clubhouse. With only a short distance to the green and a thirty-foot building in front of him, he struck an almost perpendicular shot over the corner of the building that came to rest next to the pin. Even though Vardon knew almost immediately that he had hit a good shot, since the ball did not come careening back at him, his eyes did not participate in the shot’s flight to its target and his soul was denied the pleasure of participation in its motion. In a third case, Ed Tolley, a profoundly long driver who drove the 350-yard first hole at Troon in the 1923 British Open, played a brilliantly clever recovery shot. Tolley, according to Jerome Travis, found his hooked tee shot too close to the pricking prongs of a barbed wire fence (which marked out of bounds) to take a stance with anything more than a niblick. After much assessing, to the gallery’s and his caddie’s great surprise, Tolley took his longshafted brassie from his bag and vaulted the fence. Leaning over as far as he could and from a very awkward position, he took a wonderful wrist swing. The shot he hit was straight and long and never stopped traveling until it trickled up on the green close to the cup. Tolley not only had the pleasure of thinking up a wonderfully clever shot, but he had the even greater sensual pleasure of watching its embodiment in flight and its successful conclusion. It carried with it yet another pleasure, as his shot permitted him to halve the hole in four. A shot unseen is a shot not fully experienced. In the sensuous game of golf, the ecstasy of knowledge (as powerful as it can be) cannot rival the ecstasy of sight, as sight brings both participation and knowledge. For this reason, shots into the sun and blind shotslong wood and iron shots around doglegs, over hills and obstacles, or even chips and putts where the ball cannot be seen from start to finish, or near finishdo not provide the same pleasure derived from shots seen in full flight. As satisfying as the craft of shotmaking is, it does not equal the ecstasy of the view of a shot in full flight. Even the satisfaction derived from the best-crafted bunker shots, long pitches, and putts can never match the pleasures of the eye following the full arc of the long shot.