THE CAMARADERIE OF GOLF
February 1986
Golf camaraderie, like that of astronauts and Antarctic explorers, is based on a common experience of transcendence; fat or thin, scratch or duffer, we have been somewhere together where nongolfers never go.
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NEVER TO SLEEP, ALWAYS TO DREAM
March 2001
One is never tired while playing golf. Afterward, yes, and beforehand, very possibly, but while the score is mounting and the tees and fairways and greens are passing underfoot, fatigue is magically held at bay. I have flown overnight to London, taken the morning commuter plane from Heathrow up to Edinburgh, and driven several hours through a winding chain of villages to a golf course, delirious with jet lag. But once I stepped with my group of groggy Yanks onto the springy turf of the first tee, a rejuvenating exhilaration set in, dissipating fatigue as does the sun the mists of morning. We frisked around like a pack of schoolboys, and only after the 18th hole, in the creaking leather armchairs of the clubhouse bar, partaking of lulling liquors, did we feel our years again.
And in this country, too, the after-effects of a short night's sleep and a premature arising are suspended during play. How can this be? The answer can only be that golf is so entertaining and various in its challenges that the life-giving spirit is wholly engaged; weariness finds no cranny whereby to enter.
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MY INNERMOST SWING THOUGHTS
February 1984
The difficulty is, all swing thoughts decay, like radium. What burned up the course on Wednesday has turned to lead on Sunday. Yet it does not do to have a blank mind: The terrible hugeness of the course will rush into the vacuum, and the ball will spray like a thing berserk. A swing thought is the golfer's equivalent of the rock climber's Don't look down. With it, we reduce the huge circumambient room for error to a manageable somatic circumference. The score, the stakes, the beer in the clubhouse should all be ousted by some swing thought -- which is a swing thought in itself.
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IS LIFE TOO SHORT FOR GOLF?
November 1991
How much of my life had I spent playing golf, and could I now estimate, as my life draws near to its final accounting, whether this fraction had been ill spent? Compared with many golfers, of course, I have not spent much time at it at all. For my first 25 years, when many a country-club lad and lassie were honing their skills and toasting their noses on a sun-drenched links from March to November, I invested not a minute in the pastime, instead spending long hours failing to guess the murderer in mystery novels, learning how to draw with pen and ink without smudging, and mastering the nuances, in the company of other adolescent idlers, of such unprofitable sports as box hockey, roof ball, pinball and single-basket basketball. At the age of 25, I took up golf, figuring that, now that I was a freelance writer, I should do something with my afternoons.
My afternoons, back then, seemed freer than now, though the time I spent trying to cover blank paper is much the same -- about three hours a day. But in those days there was less mail to answer, the phone rang less often, there were no speaking engagements to fulfill, fewer proofs to ponder, fewer favor-seekers to placate -- much less marginalia, that is, to the text of my vocation. I had small children and worked at home and needed now and then to get out of the house. Golf was a sport one could play alone and practice alone. My once-or-twice-a-week golf games have been islands of bliss in my life, and my golfing companions, whose growing numbers now include a number of the dead, more dear to me than I can unembarrassedly say. Somehow, it is hard to dislike a man once you have played a round of golf with him.
For the hours and days it has taken from me, golf has given back what Ralph Waldo Emerson would call a new me, a life enhanced, lengthened into a new dimension.
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