Fore! Play (20 page)

Then, we play those messages over and over and over for what Dr. Lee refers to as “the magic hour,” which is the time psychologists
say we need to spend with our demons (be they snakes, spiders, or critics of our golf games) until we “turn off the anxiety/panic
faucet” and no longer fear them.

Dr. Lee also offers a “cognitive” approach to dealing with those “Flash Golf Thoughts,” which is to identify them and correct
the ones that are unreasonable. That is, if your anxiety level about hitting the ball into the water is 80 percent, but the
probability is really only 20 percent, you are overanxious and producing chemicals that will hurt your chances of actually
avoiding the water.

He calls these “land mine thoughts,” and through this cognitive approach tries to reduce them to simple mathematical probability
problems.

In my case the probability is—quite probably—80 percent that I
will
hit the ball into the water. Indeed, like Babe Ruth once did before hitting a home run, I’ve pointed to the water and accurately
predicted exactly where my tee shot would land.

So, my ball still goes into the water, but using Dr. Lee’s cognitive approach I am no longer anxious about it.

Thank you, Dr. Lee.

H
erewith a collection of some tips I’m picking up:

Always keep your own score. Remember, your best wood is your pencil.

If you slice right 45 degrees all the time, cancel that lesson with the club pro, and face left 45 degrees.

Remove those little knit booties from woods before using.

Don’t bend over to tee up your ball with bag full of clubs over your shoulder or they’ll spill out and make you look like
Jerry Lewis.

It takes alotta balls to play like we do. Drop by the driving range and get a basketful from the machine before heading out
to play 18 holes. That’s about fifty balls, but you can always go back for more.

Don’t be afraid to hit out of the club swimming pool. Kids will scurry pronto when they see you wading in with a golf club,
don’t you worry.

Always drive the cart, so you can get to the scene first to “find” your ball in a favorable position.

Don’t shout “You da man!” after someone hits, or sooner or later someone will kick your butt—and rightfully so.

Say “Shhhh” loudly while others putt—or alternatively, rattle change in your pocket, drop the flagstick, or break wind.

Have a designated driver. No, someone good to hit your drives for you.

Try to throw your ball underhand—more discreet.

Likewise, kick your ball as part of a natural, strolling motion.

Toss ball out of sand trap with a handful of sand for authenticity.

Carry orange traffic cones in your bag to stop traffic while you hit back across major thoroughfares.

When you mark your ball on the green put it back a lot closer to hole.

Never get your hopes up, no matter how great that last shot was.

Carry one cheap, old garage sale club to throw or break over your knee during temper tantrums.

Do not buy a $2,000 set of clubs. Shooting a 125 with those only makes matters worse—and besides: Do you really want high-tech
clubs to make your balls go that much farther into the woods?

Don’t be embarrassed about your 40–45 handicap. The worse you are in golf the better your chance of winning—or something like
that.

Use tees on every shot. Not putts, you’ll never get away with it.

Every so often, skip a hole—still the fastest way we know to take 8 to 10 strokes off your game.

The number on the club does not necessarily mean that’s the club you use all the time on that numbered hole.

Carry a paper bag in your golf bag big enough to fit over your head.

Lay flag on green behind hole to halt runaway putts.

Play with golfers of your own caliber, but wear a helmet.

Ask for a cart equipped with all-terrain vehicle tires. You’ll be going where no golfer has gone before.

Similarly, pack a handheld global positioning system.

Take along a little something to eat, e.g., beef jerky, McDonald’s fries, or other nonperishable foods.

Carry camping equipment—some holes give ground grudgingly and you might have to continue that assault on 14 in the morning.

And remember: Play your first 18 on the summer solstice, otherwise you’ll run out of time.

G
olf, they say, is a tie that binds: golfers and friends, golfers and wives, golfers and clients, golfers and absolute strangers.

Golfers and psychiatrists, golfers and bartenders, golfers and lending institutions, golfers and divorce lawyers.

Golfers and Sons. Now that would be a nice, heartwarming book in itself, wouldn’t it? But that would not be this book. This
book contains just this one, grisly chapter on this golfer and his son.

My father didn’t teach me to play golf. He referred to golf as “pasture pool,” a foolish waste of time to his way of thinking,
and one for which God could not possibly have put us here on earth. A plausible argument, certainly, except Dad apparently
did
believe God intended us to instead be mowing the lawn properly and washing the car. It’s possible. You know what they say
about cleanliness.

He didn’t approve of golf and he certainly didn’t approve of the country club where the game was played. He didn’t approve
of drinking alcoholic beverages either, and those were the two predominant club activities offered to club members. Oh, they
did play cards there, too, which Father referred to as “mental masturbation.”

Now, this should not be just about fathers and sons playing golf together. I have a wonderful daughter, Libby, but she smartly
limits her athletic activities with me. She was captain of her high school tennis team and she still plays, but not with me—probably
for some of the same reasons I refuse to play with the cats: They can’t return my shots and can’t even hold their rackets
correctly. She and I can’t jog together because I don’t. Or ski, because I don’t ski, I tumble. Snow tumbling. Watch for it
on ESPN2. And with regard to fishing together, Libby caught a blue-fish while angling with her brother last summer and couldn’t
stop shrieking: “Ewwwwww!”

My son, Willie, was a high school football and basketball star, but minor sports have always posed problems—for both of us,
especially when we’re together. Fishing comes to mind. We rose at dawn to fish the hot spots in Canada and never caught a
thing. We went fly-casting in Montana for eight hours with a guide and caught one trout—at a cost of about $275 a pound. We
used to go out before dawn to surf-cast in Nantucket and not catch ’em. We’d keep coming home fishless, explaining: “Catch
and release.”

A defining moment was seeing my son, who was probably about fourteen, one chill summer’s morn, standing fifty feet away in
the fog, knee-deep in the Atlantic, and casting, casting, casting … As he reeled in perhaps his hundredth fruitless try, he
called out to me over the sound of the surf:

“Hey, Dad!”

“Yes, son.”

“This reeeally sucks!”

“Yes, son. Yes it does.” Suck.

Our golfing partnership began in a small, miniature way on vacations at Lake George, Nantucket, the Outer Banks, and Myrtle
Beach, which is probably the miniature golf capital of the world. You want your children to see that. The game was a lot of
laughs, until he became a full-blown teenager, competitive, and a little surly when he missed “crucial” shots.

The first non–miniature golf we played together was when he was about eight years old, on a par-3 course adjacent to a bed-and-breakfast
in New Hampshire (or possibly that other one, Vermont). I don’t remember a whole lot about that golf game, but I do have disturbing
flashbacks to hitting a mean slice into the side of a lovely Victorian farmhouse: THWACK! And I remember creeping up to the
house and tiptoeing around on the porch looking for the ball, because we only had one ball each. I retrieved it from under
a wicker chair. Luckily nobody was home. Civil Defense personnel had probably evacuated the neighborhood after observing us
on the previous hole.

Willie was naturally a little embarrassed, but also highly amused. I remember laughing a lot during the ordeal, and discovering
that here I not only had this wonderful son, but at the same time was growing a good friend, a kindred spirit with a great,
albeit twisted, sense of humor.

He and I played a few times in Siasconset on Nantucket, which may sound a bit stuffy but was anything but. It was a public
course in the pure sense, played by golfers in inappropriately awful attire and with golf games to match. This was back when
Nantucket was still painfully unpretentious, when the smaller your whaler’s cottage, the older and more rusted-out your Jeep,
the more prestigious. Now the public course is adjacent to a new private golf club that costs more than $200,000 to join and
is played by golfers building gargantuan Marriott-sized homes or coming in for the round by private jet.

Back then, a round of golf at that public course cost—what?—twelve bucks, maybe, plus the cost of renting clubs. One did not
own clubs at our level. We rented what always seemed to be the last set they had. The guy in the little shack there where
you paid your money would kind of scrounge around in a little closet to come up with what was more or less a set of clubs
that was also painfully unpretentious. Prewar. Possibly the Great War, conceivably Spanish-American. The putter was deeply
scarred as if it might have been used to change truck tires. The driver was wooden, with screws sticking so far out of the
bottom that if you swung properly they could actually dig into the turf and bring the club to a complete stop before it struck
the ball. Almost like a restraint system. Best to bring some power tools to ready these rental units for play. But all in
all, the equipment was a pretty good match for our level of play.

We spent a lot on balls, however, usually buying the family thirty-six-pack for 9 holes. No sense in buying too few. Willie
and I would walk outside and sit on the bench, waiting for the coast to clear. We refused to tee off if anyone was around
to watch. It didn’t hurt our game, it hurt our feelings. I recall both of us diving back to the bench once when a car drove
into the parking lot.

There was a sign over the bench reading “No Nuisance Golfers,” but luckily they didn’t post photographs the way they do at
the post office and no one knew we were offenders. Willie and I would always look at the sign, look at each other, and shrug.
I mean we weren’t intentionally nuisance golfers, certainly, and we weren’t nuisance golfers 100 percent of the time.

Sometimes we’d sit on that bench for quite a while before garnering enough courage to step to the first tee to smack our wretched
drives. We usually felt a lot better after watching a few others tee off ahead of us. This day a gentleman ahead of us shanked
one, as they say, hitting it to his right at an angle of about 45 degrees. His shot made it all the way to the green, a magnificent
shot, except it was not on the 1st green, but rather the 6th, I believe—and nearly a hole-in-one!

We laughed a little, couldn’t help ourselves, and were immediately punished by the godless golf gods. The guy in the shack
came out and said we had to double up and play with two other golfers,, our worst nightmare. This would ruin our whole day—not
to mention theirs. Yes, it takes pretty much the whole day for us to play 9 holes.

And a perfect little pair they were, too, a matched set: a handsome, well-scrubbed husband and wife in their early thirties,
tanned and fit, wearing nifty sun visors bearing the name of their country club back home—“You’ll-Never-Smell-It Hills,” or
something—dressed in coordinated tan and forest green outfits, wielding shiny new clubs (with little tan and green mittens
on the clubheads) nestled in buttery leather bags, and sporting snazzy golf shoes made from some endangered species.

“But, but …” I sputtered, “we don’t really know how to
play
. We’ll just hold you up.”

“No problem,” said the perfectly polite man, possibly Chad. “We don’t mind at all.”

I hate that! Good golfers are always deigning to spout that kind of good-sport, patronizing poppycock. Or do golfers actually
take fiendish enjoyment in watching others struggle more than they?

The best Willie and I could hope for was that they were all show–no go, or that at least the attractive young woman would
be somewhat awful. Or not wearing underwear. Something! Unfortunately this was the type of woman who probably wore two sets,
and moreover she went first and hit a long, looong, straight-straight, perfect-perfect drive, which her charming husband matched.
“Well done,” she remarked.

“Oh, shit,” I said, sotto voce, to my son, who I could tell wanted very badly to leave. I suppose I should have said something
genteel like “I’m sorry, my son has diarrhea,” and begged off. “I think it was the lobster fra diavolo.”

But in my state of shock I instead walked almost comatose to the tee, put down my ball, and looked calmly down the fairway,
for a moment thinking that maybe, just maybe, if I pretended to be one of them, I’d hit the ball as they had.

In sports it’s called “visualization” and it can work, sports psychologists agree. So I stepped up confidently, struck the
ball, and you know what? In baseball it would have been a nice line shot single over the shortstop’s head. Maybe things got
mixed up in the Visualization Department in my brain; maybe my visualization papers were filed under the wrong sport or something.
I mean, Jesus, the mind is a labyrinthine mumbo-jumbo of entangled wires and circuits. So, here, my line shot baseball hit
was a line shot golf hook into the bushes. And you know what? Willie matched my drive, too, just as the husband matched the
wife’s, which I found to be very considerate on his part. His drive was a bit farther at least, farther into the bushes.

We began beating the bushes with our clubs, but it was Chad who spotted our balls. We emerged from the thicket bowed and bleeding
and pleading with the lovely couple to play on without us. But they stayed with us for several holes, probably by the same
principle that you don’t just stay for five minutes when you do volunteer work at the old folks home. Finally they realized
that we might not finish before dark and bid us adieu. The way they hit the ball they were out of sight, at warp speed, in
seconds.