Duffing

“Good golf shots are all alike; every bad shot is bad in its own way”

-Harvey Penick and Leo Tolstoy

Golf as Russian Tragedy

I'm thinking yesterday was my last round of golf for a while. As we've discussed in previous posts, the Perry Golf & Country Club is a bare half-mile from Wyldswood, and during the pandemic has provided our only socially distanced way to see friends and get off the back forty for a couple hours to knock golf balls around the nine holes arrayed along a scenic stretch of the Fenholloway River.

Over time, I was starting to improve, to quiet the conversation in my head and limit my disaster shots to maybe one out of every three or four. I started using new golf balls, rather than the twenty-year-old leftovers in Issac's golf bag, as I gained confidence that there was a chance that new ball could ride along with me for nine or eighteen holes without finding its way into impenetrable woods, or swamp, or the Fenholloway. I ordered Harvey Penick's Little Red Book, and started to believe I could actually make my way into consistent sub-100 golf.

So what happened? Well, for starters I quit playing with myself. No, I was not employing some one-handed means of distracting my brain from the needs of that particular swing. Rather, it was just P and me, and she is both positive and intolerant of the negativity that some consider an evolutionary tool but for me just means I can be no fun to have along in a golf cart. What's the worst that could happen with that shot? I've already thought of it. Peg won't abide that sort of thinking, or at least the articulation of it, on a beautiful day with the ball lying in green pastures beside still waters.

And pretty soon, if you quit talking about how the day's round is a plane crash in slow motion, it ceases to be so. Amazing how that works.

But a few days ago I was invited to golf with friends, the first time I'd played with another person since a law faculty colleague of mine took me to Kiawah for 18 as a going away present when I left Charleston in 2010.

The first round went okay--nothing great, but once I started to find my swing and my putts I was only losing by one stroke per hole, more often than not, and that one stroke was my puny drive that rarely rolled more than 195 yards whether I crushed it or sent a worm burner skipping along the fairway. It wasn't so bad. The guys were very encouraging.

So encouraging, in fact, that they invited me for another round a couple days later. This time they brought along an 80-year-old retired friend who never hit the ball more than maybe 150 yards, but almost always down the dead-center of the fairway. He also had an efficient if unlovely short game, with no loft on his short clubs but a great line and perhaps inadvertent knack for distance.

Was this what got in my head, that this guy started out by playing along with me but in short order I found myself dragging along behind them all? Maybe. If I knew, I'd work on that.

What I do know is what happened from there. Tee shots were insanely erratic. I missed the ball completely. I knocked it straight into the air and ten yards. A worm burner's journey along the edge of the fairway was interrupted by a pine trunk, which deflected it into a copse of trees.

And these guys play every shot, rather than hitting two or three and picking the one they choose to hit next. Sort of like playing best ball by yourself. And that's what I'd been doing for months.

Instead, there I was fuming and lining up my second shot from somewhere around the forward tee box (don't call it the "Ladies' Tee"---Peg will crossly correct you). What club do you use when you've barely made it out of your own tee box and you're incompetent with a three wood?

While making that decision, I'd take a slug off my Tito's Bloody Mary. Then when that was gone, I had another. To my amazement, the magic elixir did not improve my game one bit.

Now the Greek chorus in my head was nearly complete. Keep your eye on the ball. No, keep your left eye on the right edge of the orb. Keep your left arm straight. Don't move your head. Hold your right elbow tight to your side, like a hinge. Pretend like there's a cable anchored at one end to the ground and the other to your rectum. Turn your hips. Don't collapse your left knee into the right on the upswing. Stand closer. Stand farther. Don't swing with your arms. Turn your hips and let your body do the work. Slow your downstroke. Above all, relax and have fun. Relax.

Good luck with that.

Soon every swing was as bad as the tee shot--straight up, then rolling twenty yards in front of me, then solidly hit but majestically hooking into the river. As we crawled closer to the pin on our duffer's death march, I introduced to my repertoire the line-drive pitching wedge shot, in which the ball waves at the flag as it passes, approaching the sound barrier, enroute to the next tee box beyond for another wedge shot that would then fly past to its original place of rest. Once I was finally on the green, a parade of three putts followed. The guys tried to be encouraging, but it was obvious they could feel the tension rising as the first expletives exploded forth with the particularly egregious shots.

Now the chorus had fully assembled, and the cantor arrived for his solo. You've always been an awkward boob--what made you think you'd suddenly become proficient at something that involves a modicum of hand-eye coordination? Notice all the other men on the course, from 18 to 80--they can hit the ball consistently with no lessons--what's lacking in you? Yessir, you have a serious manhood problem. Short drives are a metaphor, friend. For that matter, what does P see in someone so uncoordinated, so unable to control his emotions that something as straightforward as golf is insurmountable? Everyone is looking at you, shaking their heads. You are going to screw up this shot like you've screwed up everything else.

Now, good luck with that five iron. Have another Tito's--it's sure to help.

The culmination of my rage and shame came yesterday on Number Six. A men's scramble was just leaving the clubhouse to scatter across the course for a one o'clock start. Several made the ten yard journey to the tee box at Six, just as we were rounding Five. I went inside for a comfort break and another Bloody Mary, figuring they'd play through. When I emerged from the clubhouse, however, I found Audie and Mike in the tee box, with the others waiting as an audience for the next tee shot. My tee shot.

Oh snap.

"Take your time, Mike," Audie said, maybe sensing the stress oozing out of my pores as I stepped into the tee box. I saw one of the young men there waiting was wearing a ballcap with the logo of a local company that is the opposing party in one of my more rancorous lawsuits set for trial this new year. Turns out he's the scion of the owner's family. Of course. Of course.

I tried to quiet my head, but my mind was focused on that audience, and I knew my delay in the john had caused this moment to happen. I tried to quiet the chorus, but the first shot sailed straight up and maybe ten yards to my right. I immediately teed a second ball, and with no fanfare smacked it 175 yards, just over a gulley and into the fairway. Thanks be to God. I jumped into the cart and sped away, ears burning with shame.

After nine holes the guys all adjourned to the bar. I announced I intended to continue playing, and no one seemed all that sad to see Gloomy Donk sputter around the bend to the tee box for Number Ten. My game actually got a little better after that, at least at first, with just P there to see it. I compared myself to the Warner Brothers frog, who only sang and danced when there was no one there to see, to his owner's ruin. It's been an image that's resonated with me for a long time. P just made a face at the metaphor.

Then, inevitably, the wheels came off again. I petulantly threw a club. "If you're throwing clubs, we're finished today," Peg advised. I refrained from showing my frustration by launching a five iron or beating its heel into the dirt next to the fairway, but now the cantor wasn't satisfied with an internal conversation, and I started to articulate the narrative that was streaming through my skull. P wondered aloud what it must be like to live in my head. It was time to go home.

And, in fact, maybe it's time to take a break from relaxing on the golf course. The truth is, I've never been very coordinated---I'm the kid who had an archery mishap in middle school and shot an arrow through his hand. There was never any contemplation of placing me in a skill position when I played football, and I seemed to perennially play each season with a couple fingers or toes taped together after breaking them in one clumsy mishap or another. I could go to the batting cages, drop in my four quarters, and spend the next ten minutes whiffing past each pitch, over and over.

My flying career? That was an anomaly, but I can tell you that flying a complex fighter has a lot more to do with processing a torrent of inputs very quickly and appropriately than the subtlety of one's stick and rudder work.

Golf, in a way, is almost by design a vehicle for bringing the gangly, insecure, fourteen-year-old version of me out of the shadows of consciousness and giving him a megaphone to remind me at the top of his lungs of everything I'm not, and some things I actually am. Whatever success I've achieved in life came from telling that pimply nabob of negativity to sit down and shut up while I made my way through some difficult moments over the years. Now here he is back again.

It occurs to me that I probably need a silent retreat more than a week of golf lessons at Sea Island, to get a handle on this thing that has made the last few days miserable. That and the death of a beloved mentor and father-figure in my life has cast a pall over the new year, and driven P away in the process because she's sick of dealing with it, and contending with her own crushing family loss in recent days. For the good of everyone, perhaps it's best that the clubs go back into the barn for another decade or two, until I forget again why they landed there in the first place.