Wonder Land

A reindeer dinner with friends.

Vuollerim is where he is most at home, though. This tiny village is a remarkable example of how citizens can work together for the common good. In myriad ways, in fact, it is a model for the larger society we would surely all like to live in. As many as 40 clubs and associations flourish among the 800 or so population where teamwork and togetherness is the prevailing ethos.

Take the village hotel. Owned by 91 locals, including Karlsson, it is run largely by volunteers. At various times Vuollerim's only Ryder Cup player is employed as a dishwasher, floor sweeper and bartender. It is not uncommon for him to be last to leave at 3 a.m., his cleaning duties finally completed.

Another feature of the village is what is known as "house jumping" dinners, where the various courses are eaten in different locations. During Golf World's three-day stay, one took place. An appetizer of reindeer and the local beer were taken in a remote cabin once used by loggers working the nearby river. The main course was eaten in the Karlsson household, before dessert in the "summer" house—another cooperative owned and run by the villagers—on the edge of a lake a few miles outside Vuollerim. The only glimpse of near depravity came when a few of the local men followed a skinny dip with a refreshing sauna.

Through it all, Karlsson gave off an air of utter contentment. Far removed from the one-dimensional world of professional golf, he was merely one of the crowd. Clearly, he is a long way removed from the young man whose career was so nearly derailed by his intolerance of his imperfections.

"I was making myself unhappy by chasing happiness on the outside," he says. "But that is always a short-term thing. I had to let golf go, in a way. I needed to know what I wanted to achieve. I needed to know how I wanted to look upon myself on my deathbed. What is actually important? What would make me most happy and proud?

"It wasn't winning a major," says Karlsson. "It was, at the end of the day, me working through all my problems, playing a really bad round of golf and coming off really happy. That was my biggest goal."

Not at first, though. Only after a professional journey of many peaks and troughs has Karlsson arrived at his own nirvana. The son of a former car mechanic who became a greenkeeper, Karlsson lived as a child on the Katrineholm course two hours southwest of Stockholm, where his father, Bjorn, was employed until his retirement. It was there that Robert discovered the game, one in which he "didn't have to wait for teammates to go practice."

Karlsson turned pro at 20 in 1989 and finished 62nd on the European Order of Merit in 1991. Steady progress followed, but after winning in Spain early in 1995 and briefly topping the Order of Merit, Karlsson made "hardly a penny" between then and June 1996. It was the first hint that the young man was a stereotypically icy Swede. Underneath the stoic exterior lurked many demons.

"My driving was really bad," he remembers with a shudder. "And I was miserable off the course. I'd always been that way when things went badly. I had such high expectations, and it all got too much for me. I was trying to get the swing so perfect that it couldn't go wrong."

In 1996 Karlsson's search for improvement and personal discovery took him to see the late Dr. Bengt Stern, the man with "all the funny ideas," one of which was a ceremony where the participants pretend to emerge from their mother's womb. "My focus was to find out what was wrong," continues Karlsson. "A year before I had been in the top 30 in Europe. Now, suddenly, I could hardly play at all.

"I've never been afraid of looking outside the normal stuff. So with Dr. Stern we did that," he says. "We looked at my childhood, how I handled myself in certain situations. We looked at how I related to my parents. We did some role-playing. But I'm uncomfortable answering questions about that period of my life. It was really about understanding myself and who I was."

Not surprisingly, Karlsson's association with Stern wasn't something everyone around him agreed with.

"Robert's initial urge to go through this kind of in-depth internal examination stemmed from his inability to handle pressure on the course," says swing coach Simon Holmes, who worked with Karlsson from 1992 to 2002. "He used to have these famously massive collapses. In the early 1990s he had so many chances for success and converted none of them. The better he played, the more pressure he felt. And the more pressure he felt, the worse he felt. More effort equated to feeling worse. It was a weird cycle. His failings under pressure were rooted in his self-image," insists Holmes. "He did not see himself as a winner."