Fore! Play (19 page)

Bob lost his sight and nearly his life stepping on a booby trap in Vietnam. He never balked for a moment at the idea of taking
up golf, a game he’d never played. “I’ve sailed and I was fairly good at Ping-Pong, too, because I had a great serve,” he
notes. “Same with tennis, but it was hell if the other guy returned it.” You’d have to be very lucky and carry a very big
racket.

My fourth shot is fabulous, for me, a 6-iron that goes well over a hundred yards, and bounces on the green. Okay, it bounces
off the other side of the green, too, but this ain’t the friggin’ Masters, now is it?

Maybe I
can
beat a blind golfer. Maybe I can. I would pray for victory but that would be wrong. Very wrong. Like, “Author–Bad Golfer
Struck By Lightning"—that kind of wrong.

Bob’s third shot is a perfectly executed bump and run that lands on the green about twenty feet from the hole. At this point,
I start watching closely for signs that Bob can actually see. “Hey Bob!” I yell, pointing to the sky. “Look at that!” But
he doesn’t look. Shrewd guy.

I hit an 8-iron from some high grass five feet off the green, clear across the green to five feet on the other side. A nice
shot, I figure, having improved my lie to shorter grass. I next hit onto the green and then begin my long-term putting project:
one, two, three putts—for an 8 (not counting the toss and the kick).

Meanwhile, Bob, allegedly blind, is putting for par!

Tina hasn’t told him a thing about the break of the green. Didn’t tell me anything either. “I read the greens with my feet,”
he says, “by walking across them.”

Word comes that Keith Melick has won the tournament for a third straight year with a score of 113—a bit disappointing to him
because he shot a 103 here last year.

Tina pulls a blindfold from the golf bag and has me put it on. I see nothing, complete darkness, and my thoughts darken. How
do people live like this, let alone play golf? They’re so skillful you forget how disabled they really are. I am totally disoriented,
of course, and off-balance. Tina lines me up with a ball she’s dropped. I bend my knees, but then don’t know how far I am
from the ground. I get some sort of reading by touching my club to the ground, but it’s not precise enough. I take a quarter
swing and hit behind the ball, then hit it on top. It seems impossible.

Is there satisfaction to playing golf when you can’t see the green grass and the beautiful flight of a well-struck ball?

“Absolutely,” says Bob. “You’re out with great people, you feel the sun, smell the grass and the fresh air, and hear and feel
those great shots.” And he doesn’t have to watch the ugly ones.

After ten minutes of flailing at golf balls, I’m frustrated, I’ve had enough. I remove the blindfold. And see Bob. My heart
sinks. How quickly and easily my precious sight has completely returned, just by ripping off the blindfold.

He misses his twenty-foot putt, as golfers do, leaving himself with a tap-in for a 5, on this par-4 hole. I had an illegitimate
8, but he didn’t have those shadows on the green bothering him when he was putting.

I walk away shaking my head. And to think I wanted to put some money on this.

I
’m shooting about a 120 these days. But how do I
feel
about that?

Maybe I need to, you know,
see
someone about my golf game. A golf instructor, to be sure, but also maybe a … therapist. A shrink. A golf psychiatrist.

And, yes, of course there
are
golf psychiatrists. Have to be. People are
nuts
about golf. Noted golf psychiatrist Phil Lee was in my hometown hawking his book,
Shrink Your Handicap
, so I stopped by to see him, hoping for a free session, hoping he could take some strokes off my game.

Psychiatrists are MDs, of course. This means that Dr. Lee went to med school for years and years, and probably had to dissect
a cadaver, suffer through his residency, and all the rest, only to wind up treating patients suffering not from cancer or
broken arms or even psychoses, but rather from putting disorders.

I mean I could almost see it if Dr. Lee was trying to cure people of their golf addictions (golf as avoidance mechanism, etc.),
but he’s trying to help them improve their scores. This is because he’s One Of Them—a golf fiend.

“What about people who are addicted to golf,” I ask, “people who play five times a week and in the snow and who neglect their
jobs and their wives and kids to play golf?”

“And the problem with that is … ?” he smiles. He doesn’t consider that to be a disorder, and if it is, “better to be addicted
to golf than crack,” he maintains. I don’t know enough about crack to argue the point, but I doubt that it could be any more
expensive or addictive or all-consuming than golf. Yet we have youth golf clinics to hook kids.

Dr. Lee looks to me like a golf psychiatrist should, bespectacled, with a mustache, and wearing a golf shirt. And he says
things like: “You know how Freud said it was all about sex? Now it’s all about golf.” Frightening. He says it’s a mental game
of hope versus fear, a game where one part of our brain is saying “play it safe,” another part is saying “go for it!,” and
a third part is trying to balance the other two. (In addition some of us have a fourth brain part saying: “Run over your damned
clubs with the car.”)

I don’t lie down right here in the Bookends bookstore or anything, but start telling the psychiatrist that I
feel
that my golf game sucks. When I tell him I shoot 120, he gets this alarmed look, like he might try to have me hospitalized—or
outfit my golf cart with a couch.

He says I probably have mental problems, and he certainly wouldn’t have a problem getting a concurring second opinion on that.
He refers to my problem as: “a high mental handicap,” although it was nothing that kept me out of the army or qualified me
for an extra hour on my SATs.

The doctor says one can have “mental pars, mental birdies, or mental bogeys.” He says throwing your clubs in the lake, for
example, would be a “mental double bogey.” However, if you hook it into the trees but chip out and recover—focused and calm—you
can score a “mental eagle.”

“Your mental handicap,” Dr. Lee explains, “is the measure of the extent to which anxiety chemicals bring down your game. A
million years ago, cavemen would go outside and see a saber-toothed tiger and become anxious and have chemical reactions that
would make them better able to club the tiger or run away.” He looks at me to see if I’m getting the picture. I give him a
blank look that lets him know I’m not.

“Today,” he continues, “when you see a water hazard on the golf course, you become anxious and your body releases small amounts
of those same fight-or-flight chemicals that are poison to your golf game. Your muscles tighten, you breathe faster, your
heart pounds harder, and your mind produces anxiety, anger, and fear.”

Geez, what wimps we’ve become! How dull our existence, when we take small, decorative ponds on golf courses for saber-toothed
tigers. I’m a little embarrassed for my species, frankly.

“You need to set up defenses to reduce those feelings of threat,” he says. “We need to down-regulate our receptors and decrease
our production of the chemicals that cause panic and anxiety.” Would cocktails help?

He has another theory that our real golf game is never as good as our “range game"—which is the way we play on the driving
range or alone when no one’s watching. This one I’m not so sure about, Doc. My range game sucks, too. And I’m pretty awful
when no one’s around. I admit it. I’m not one of those people who claim his parakeet can recite the Gettysburg Address except
when people are around.

I tell Dr. Lee that I have a lot of trouble on the first tee, and I think it’s because there are always people there watching.

Ah, yes, First Tee Anxiety Syndrome. “The first tee is the lair of the saber-toothed tiger,” he says. This is a combination
of Stranger Anxiety (fear of strangers), Subliminal Expectations (our friends won’t accept us if we’re bad), Generalization
(we’ve been bad here before, we will be again), Superstition (start poorly and it will ruin the entire round), and Competitive
Comfort Level (you’re being judged by one shot because you haven’t had the chance to make offsetting good shots).

Not to mention Generalized Tee Anxiety, in which “the golfer, flooded by chemicals from a million years ago, is diverted from
his normal swing into a swing that is more primitive, more muscled, and more suited to clubbing an animal than to hitting
a ball.” We try to kill it. He recommends we loosen our grip and calm down.

When those fear chemicals are released, all of our senses become more acute and we are easily distracted. For this Dr. Lee
advises we all get cassette recorders with headsets, record ourselves clapping, and add in some “Way to go!"s. Then, we listen
to it when we’re playing golf, listen to it over and over until it is no longer a distraction.

This is behavioral therapy teaching us not to be distracted. What about giving golfers a kernel of corn for a good shot and
an electric shock for a bad one?

This cassette recorder therapy might replace, say, yelling at another foursome making a lot of noise while you’re putting.
“Hey a—holes! Shut up!” Or words to that effect. Then blaming them when you miss the putt.

Blame is bad, Dr. Lee says. Whenever we blame we are angry and that means more of those chemicals. Blame is bad and blame
is complicated. In figuring out why we hook and slice and miss easy putts, he goes all the way back to unresolved conflicts
in our childhood, when we spilled juice on the rug and Mommy scolded and blamed us. Yikes!

“Anything you are not supposed to do"—like hitting the ball into the woods!—"will lead to a scolding from Mommy,” he says.
“When we miss a shot in the presence of others, we attribute to them the disapproval we reflexively expect from others and
we make mistakes. Or we scold ourselves. We get mad because we know we can do better. We 3-putt a hole and we blow up.” Three-putting
is a “balloon flaw” that can cause the whole rest of our round to go up in smoke.

It gets complicated and it gets deep. According to Dr. Lee, we apparently have to stop blaming our parents when we hit the
ball into the sand. And I didn’t even know I was.

When I hit a ball into the sand I usually say: “Bill, you stupid bastard. You hit the ball into the sand again.” I never say:
“Thanks a lot,
Mom!”
Who does that? Although, come to think of it,
Mom
, if you hadn’t taught me to be so damned cautious all the time I might be all the way on the green instead of in the trap.
Conversely, I might have been hit by a truck when I was four.

Dr. Lee says the sand trap can often be your parents’ surrogate. You spill juice on the carpet, you hit the ball wrong, and
you’re punished and you’re angry because it was an accident. Wow.

“All obstacles on the course continue to represent the parent and the anger is unresolved,” the psychiatrist says. “To avoid
having this continue to retard golf improvement, one must resolve anger at the parent. Stop blaming your parents and their
surrogates: wind, water, and people who make noise when we putt. When we stop blaming our parents our golf game improves.”

This would be your insight-oriented defense. I tried to put it into practice my next time out on the golf course. On my backswing
I said out loud (because there are never any other golfers in the remote vicinities I play in): “Mom and Dad, if I hit this
into one of the three sand traps surrounding the hole, I want you to know it’s not your fault.” But the damned ball went into
the sand anyway. (For this I blame the course designer, who could more easily have placed one sand trap there, not three,
and made thousands of golfers feel better.)

So what Dr. Lee says about your game improving when you stop blaming your parents may not hold true in all cases. As I attempted
to hit out of the sand that third time, I thought I heard my long-departed father’s voice from above: “Thanks, son, but I
already realized it’s not
my
fault. I told you
not
to play golf, you stupid little bastard.”

Dr. Lee says an errant shot is not “wrong” and that we need to take “good” and “bad” out of our thinking. “To change the value
setting on the ‘bad’ shot,” he says, “we must reframe it as the ‘unexpected’ shot.” Except, Doctor, that in my case the “bad”
shot is not at all unexpected.

Dr. Lee wants us to regard the bad shot, rather the unexpected shot, as “a surprise.” Not another piece-of-crap shot, but
a lovely
surprise!
“Depending on your handicap,” he writes in his book, “you can reasonably expect to be surprised on a golf course some predictable
number of times per round.”

But again, Doctor, for me quite the opposite holds true. It is the good shot that is the unexpected surprise—and a couple
of times my unexpectedly good shots have nearly killed those playing ahead of me who never in their wildest dreams, or mine,
thought I could hit a ball more than 150 yards.

To “reset my chemicals” on the “pre-shot” and get into “the zone,” Dr. Lee tells me to practice by: lying down on my bed;
focusing on breathing; relaxing, tightening, and relaxing my hands, shoulders, face, abs, buttocks, and legs; then forming
my fingers in my customary grip on my golf club. This sounds very familiar, except one hand was always on a
Playboy
magazine. He suggests doing this for seven days in a row and using a real club. “Men Who Sleep With Their Golf Clubs"—next
on Jerry Springer!

I would blame myself for not understanding all these things, but Dr. Lee told me not to blame myself. And he doesn’t want
me blaming myself for blaming myself either.

Getting back to that cassette recorder behavioral therapy, the doctor further suggests we might next want to record the “flash
thoughts” that go through our minds as we address the ball, such as: “Stay clear of that water hazard"; “Don’t think about
all those idiots watching me"; “Why didn’t I play with a bag over my head?"; and the like. Plus, he suggests we record the
thoughts that we think are going through the minds of those who are watching us, for example: “He’ll probably blow this shot,
too"; “Why am I playing golf with this complete ass?"; “Bill probably has a short penis"—that type of thing.