Bad Golf...

Fred Shoemaker, my golf coach for the next three days, hands me a five iron and turns on his camera.

“Whenever you’re ready,” he says offhandedly, “hit a ball.”

It would be easier, I think to myself, for me to hit the ball with his camera.  That’s the kind of golfer I am, which is why, I guess, I’ve come to his three-day golf school in beautiful Carmel Valley, California.  I have come because when it comes to golf – and maybe a lot of other things, too – I am, to use the technical term, a mortifying incompetent.

But I grip the club with my standard white-knuckle death grip, hunch round-shouldered over the ball, tense up my forearms, lock my wrists, clench my jaw, and swing.

And during the entire second-and-a-half long action, I’m thinking: relax your body, be natural, smooth take away, remember where the club head is, fix your grip, rotate your hips, keep your head down, stay in your posture, where’s the club head again?, left arm straight, don’t rush, focus on the ball, keep your arms extended, where’s the club head?, don’t pop up, remember to shift your weight, follow through, here comes the release, and where’s the damn club head?

The ball skitters off to the left – I didn’t hit it so much as graze it – and it races awkwardly along the ground for a moment until it finally crashes into the bushes.  It looks like what it was trying to do was to get the hell away from me.

“Great!” Fred says.  “How did that feel?”

“Ummmm, well, I guess I kind of topped it,” I say.

“I meant how did it feel to you, to your body, when you took that swing?”

I think for a moment.  “It felt like a shameful and emotionally painful event.”

“Great!” Fred says, and he hands me a old, rusty club.  “Now, do me a favor and give this one a swing, but when you do, let it go.”

“Let it go?”

“Yeah.  Just throw it as far and as straight as you can.  Don’t hit a ball.  Just throw the club.”  

He clicks on his camera again.  I grab the club, swing it, and let it go.  It whooshes away, cartwheeling in the sun, and lands with a thump.

“Great!” Fred says.

After lunch, we go back to the clubhouse to watch the videos.  There are about ten of us doing the workshop – at all levels of competence.  There are low-handicappers, like my friend Tim, who is the one who introduced me to golf a few years ago, and there are high handicappers.  And there is me, for whom the entire concept of the handicap is irrelevant until I learn how to hit a golf ball farther than I can kick it.

Fred, along with his fellow coaches Garry Lester and Ed Hipp, call their school “Extraordinary Golf” – Fred wrote a book by the same name in 1996 – and have tasked themselves with nothing less than changing the entire culture of golf, from one of “tips, techniques, formulas, and answers,” as they put it in their mission statement, to one of “exploration, discovery, and freedom.”

Whatever.  It’s all very California, I think to myself.  I just want to stop being humiliated by a tiny white ball that just sits there, motionless and smug, as I twist my body around it.

Fred and his team do a great job creating a friendly, warm, and supportive atmosphere, but watching myself hit a golf ball on video makes me want to grind into dust in my chair.  It’s all wrong: my hands, my head, my arms, my weight shift – everything.  

Then he clicks on the video of me just throwing the club, without a ball.  I swing the club and it’s…beautiful.  That swing could be in a magazine.  The class oohs and ahhs over my weight shift, my smooth swing, my tempo.  I’m watching myself do something that I simply cannot do, but there I am, doing it.  I’m slack-jawed with surprise.

Fred, Garry, and Ed smile.  They see this reaction a lot.  

“So, I mean, ummmm, why can’t I do that?” I sputter, pointing to the screen.

“You can,” Fred says.  “You did.”

“But why can’t I swing a club like that when there’s a ball there?”

Fred shrugs.  “Maybe that’s something for us to explore over the next two days.”

And then I know I’m hooked.  I spend the next two days trying to swing freely, without the chatter in my head.  I try to stay attentive to what my body is doing without judging it, or trying to fix it.  Just “be present,” Fred tells me, and I give it my best shot.

Later, relaxing in my hotel room, I start wondering about all the other things in my life that may also be governed by fear and anxiety.  Can I swing more freely, take more risks, and stop worrying so much about being embarrassed in, say, business?  Or relationships?

Whatever.  It’s all very California.  But the next day, out on the course, I step up to the ball with a smile on my face, and swing with freedom and joy.  

“How did that feel?” Fred asks.

“Great!” I say.  And it did, too.

And then we hear the screech of tires, and I see that the ball has gone way, way out of bounds, bounced along the road, and narrowly missed a car, which screeched and swerved violently to avoid the ball.

Fred smiles and shrugs.  I smile and shrug.  For the first time, I’m playing golf and I’m having fun.  I’m not playing well, of course — golf continually eludes me — but it’s one less thing in my life that I’m embarrassed by. One fewer helping of the I am inadequate sandwich I like to feed myself.

The rest of the round was high-scoring, ball-topping fun. Everyone, in fact, had fun that day. Except for whoever was driving that car.