LETTERS FROM HOME: GUYS AND DOLLS ON THE PHONE AND ON THE GREENS

Aug. 1, 1996

Dear Leslie

Nieces are in town this week from Neosho and nephews from San Diego. We met them in St. Louis, where we saw "Guys and Dolls" at an outdoor theater. The best part was when it rained and they had to stop the show.

Everybody donned a piece of plastic to ward off the soft rain. As a diversion, the girls started to play Telephone, the party game of passing a whispered message from neighbor to neighbor until it reaches the final person, who inevitably blurts out the astonishing truth that we do hear what we want to hear. See what we expect to see.

Despite an abundance of ladies and golfers among them, the nieces and nephews chose to go to a science museum the next day instead of accompanying me to the Ladies Professional Golf Association tournament. They weren't even getting extra credit for it.

I must tell you that some guys still roll their eyes at the idea of women golfers, maybe because women generally don't swing as viciously as men do and sometimes play with pink balls. But not being able to hit behemoth John Daly drives is one thing I have in common with women golfers. Women pros figure to have learned to play the game with finesse. I went to the tournament hoping to learn something.

At the driving range, a beautiful black woman named Sugg chatted animatedly with someone between 250-yard drives straight as can be hit. An older man I guess was her father, nattily accessorized with a beret and a silver-handled cane, silently watched her.

I saw the care the golfers gave to the placement of their hands on the club, the attention they paid to the flight of the ball they'd just hit, the almost palpable air of concentration around most of them.

The story was the same on the course. Intensity. Iron shots like lasers snapping to a halt 3 feet from the pin. Everything was done with so much more precision than in the game I have been playing so far.

There's a saying in golf: If you aim at nothing, that's what you'll hit.

I'm always drawing larger lessons from the time I spend on the course.

The nephews and nieces are good teachers as well. Darcy, the precocious 11-year-old, knows where the alleged dirty parts are in all the Disney movies. Turn the sound on "Aladdin" up "REAL LOUD," she swears, and at one point the main character says, "Good teen-agers take off their clothes."

Telephone, anyone?

I played some golf this week with my 16-year-old nephew, Derek, who took up the game only months ago and already strikes the ball beautifully. But like everyone else, he wants to make birdies and pars on every hole. Sometimes that requires a bit of amnesia about the ball that flew into the lake or a nudge that rescues a ball from a divot.

Another saying: Golf is a game of managing your mistakes.

More than that, golf is a game of forgiving yourself for the mistakes you'll inevitably make.

Remember the male golf commentator who said women golfers are handicapped by their breasts?

The day before I went to the tournament, a golfer named Vicki Fergon set the course record with a round of 63, nine strokes under par and two breasts on her chest.

Love, Sam

~Sam Blackwell is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.