"Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm."
-Winston Churchill
A rare Saturday entry, making up for the fact that when I ordinarily would have been pecking at a keyboard yesterday morning I was lying on my side in a drug induced coma with a tube snaked up my backside.
The results of all that, by the way, were amazingly good. Pattern of precancerous colonization along the alimentary highway reversed, no doubt by this regimen of sticks and twigs Peg has imposed these last several years. "I've been saved by a woman," as Ray LaMontagne observes in one of his songs. In more ways than one, in my case.
Feeling celebratory and in need of a distraction with her in New York and a fraught trip looming large in my future, I headed after hours to the Perry Country Club for a quick nine holes. Thinking positive thoughts and recalling all I'd figured out over the last five years or so duffing around that course, I stepped into the Number Five teebox for my practice hole before picking up on Six.
The first drive dribbled up to the forward tees. The second shanked into the snaky swamp beyond the rough on the right.
And it got only marginally better from there.
Which, as is often the case, led me to give up after six holes with thoughts of selling or giving away my clubs. Why do I do this to myself?
This, in turn, led to a meditation on all the other times I've failed in life, and whether there are lessons in those. I've surely come up short before, over and over.
In high school I began as one of the worst football players ever, stepping into the organized game for the first time in the 9th grade. While I never became what anyone would characterize as a good ballplayer, I lettered the last two years of high school. How did that happen? What changed?
This one had to do with what was happening off the field. I walked onto the team because my parents were getting divorced, and were too distracted to impose their prior rule that their precious little boy wasn't going to get bashed playing such a violent sport. I was small, uncoordinated, and came home to crisis most days as we moved out of the house and started a new life as a rump family. Then I moved to California to live with my grandparents, had three squares a day and a strict daily routine imposed by The Colonel, and suddenly I was playing on a conference champion football team, albeit not as a starter. And my grades shot up, as well.
What's going on at home gets carried onto the field and into the classroom, whether we like it or not. Life is experienced between our ears.
That last sentence provides a takeaway for the golf course. When I'm not playing with a quiet mind, things spiral into disaster.
Later in college I almost flunked out as a freshman, came home in May of 1983 thinking I'd try to get my job back doing construction in the desert. Then USC gave me a second chance, encouraged me to do better, and I returned to finish as a distinguished graduate from ROTC three years later, with a decent GPA to boot.
The difference between the first year and the last three had to do with another period of chaos at home, which ended with folks moving away, and finding a tribe and a goal as an Air Force cadet. For the first time in my life I knew what I wanted to do and to be, and leaned into a fixed set of milestones to get there, both in the classroom and on the parade ground. And it worked.
Plus, I changed majors from something I hated but thought would get me an ROTC scholarship, to something I loved. The scholarship came anyway, and I never dreaded any facet of my academic life after that.
Not sure of the takeaway there, except again I don't do good work when things aren't good at home. I barely survived professionally the double whammy of divorce and Category Five hurricane a few years ago. But knowing that doesn't speak to my golf woes, really, except that I'm not exactly loving the game when the feedback from the game itself tends to be so negative.
Pilot training. A tale of triumph, right? Well, it didn't start that way. I was a chronic puker, placed on meds and warned that if I couldn't keep my breakfast down I'd be invited to seek another vocation. I couldn't bear the thought, couldn't bear the image of Bowman's Grandson ending the family legacy of military aviation in a scalding defeat. So I took my pills, carefully watched what I ate, and determined to outwork everyone around me. Ten months later I was walking the stage to get my wings and go to F-15 school.
How does that apply to golf? I do play a little better when someone is watching, although I don't much enjoy it. The shame hormone tends to focus me. I also will never get better dallying, and unlike in the AF I've not been taught by the best instructors in the world with a syllabus carefully developed over decades, but by the worst instructor imaginable--myself.
Did I ever tell you I got off on the wrong foot at law school? During my 1L year, the only class during the first semester that actually counted toward cumulative GPA was criminal law. I thought I wanted to be a U.S. Attorney back then and go into politics (my how the world changes!), and worked my ass off for a good grade. I received a C+. Confused and humiliated, I tried to figure out what went wrong before finals in the other classes in May might spell doom to this law school adventure. It surely wasn't that I'd failed to study--I knew this whole exercise in leaving a sure thing in the AF to become a lawyer was a massive risk, and never worked as hard as I did that first year. Now I was on a path to professional mediocrity in a contest where the only thing that mattered was GPA.
Then one day I saw on the SBA bulletin board a flyer for a seminar being held in a conference room a the Ramada Inn in downtown Atlanta. This guy with a funny name promised to help attendees break the code of the law school final exam. Maybe he was a huckster, but I could use all the help I could get as finals loomed.
The seminar changed my life. I spent most of that day thinking, "Oh, so that's what I was doing wrong!" I applied what I learned there in finals a couple weeks later, and by the following August when we returned to Athens my grades were bumping against the top 10% of my class and I'd made law review. The career doors flew wide open at that point, and I was one of the lucky few being invited to practice in posh suites doing big things and making real money. And all because of a Saturday spent in a cigarette smoke scented conference room.
Well, it wasn't that simple, was it? I continued to work hard, but now I had the secret, had someone let me in on what I needed to focus upon to succeed with all that work. One without the other wouldn't have cut it. There were classmates at the same seminar who didn't experience the same results. They had more fun at law school than I did.
So, maybe the lesson there is work, but work toward a goal with a professional guide. I knew a guy in the Air Force who made the AF golf team and went from a mediocre officer to a rising star carrying some general's briefcase, all because he could golf. He got there not just with lessons (and a measure of athletic talent I'll never have), but by going to the driving range every single day and hitting exactly 100 golf balls. Every day. I set the clubs down for weeks at a time, step into the tee box with no prep and no instructor except an inner voice that looks like this guy,
then wonder why things go sideways.
Peg says I should just relax and enjoy the beautiful course and the company, but let's face it---I've always been too competitive for that. So what needs to happen, if I keep going back (an open question still), is to treat it like every other thing that's almost mastered me. Put in the effort to get better. Let someone who's broken the code serve as a guide, and apply what they teach until muscle memory finally overcomes a half century of bad habits.
Off to apply what a whole village of great instructors taught me, flying the Columbia to Texas this morning for its annual inspection and to go see the folks. That last part promises to be pretty tough, first with Dad in such decline and then touching that little door in the columbarium with Mom's ashes on the other side. Duty calls.
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