We gather like day laborers waiting for the truck. Murmured conversations, cold coffee, an occasional burst of laughter, and every once in a while a silent pause to watch the latest group go off, their triumphs and failures viewed from a distance, like anonymous surfers viewed from the beach. The man with the clipboard, the […]
The Golfer at Play
When Sean teed up his ball on the second hole his mind was still back on the first green. Once again he watched his long putt pause briefly at the crest of a downslope before sweeping left then right with just enough speed to drop in the cup. In the perfect quiet of that moment […]
The G spot may be controversial in sex but not in golf. Elusive but unmistakable, it is the bodily sensation of perfect peace heralded by a sound, followed by a vision, a vision of a ball propelled in space by Apollo, suspended, uncanny, out of time, in silence, in harmony, a doper’s quiet nodding high, […]
Bill was never one for the analogies, metaphors, or Life Lessons of golf. Bobby Jones’s alleged quote and extraordinary moment of dignity in the face of an invaliding illness, “I’ll play it as it lays.”, struck him as morbid. Bagger Vance and Christian parables struck him as cloying. Worse were the faux-philosophical golf homilies–even a […]
On the fifth hole, a dogleg right, Phillip’s tee shot hooked far and left. It lay trapped maybe forty yards behind some tall pine trees. On the other side of the trees a hundred yards of water stretched to an isthmus of fairway that climbed another fifty yards to an elevated green. He would have […]
Michael approached the sixth green with time to spare. The other golfers were scattered, looking for their wayward approaches. He had time to study the break and speed of his putt and to remind himself to notice the typically neglected green beyond the hole. It was not just a question of locating the hole in […]
