Saturday at the course with Arnie

Aug. 5, 2004

Dear Pat,

In the movie "Tin Cup," driving range proprietor/golf hustler Roy McAvoy realizes every golfer's dream by qualifying for the U.S. Open. Opens are the most democratic of tournaments in a sport that can be elitist. That elitism is one of the reasons people dislike golf. It's also expensive to play and boring to watch, they say.

Boring on TV maybe, but I was a very excited boy Saturday to be one of the 45,000 people at the U.S. Senior Open in St. Louis.

Roars erupted around the golf course after every good shot, and there were many.

Many of the golfers were unknown to me. They were the Roy McAvoys. But people were talking about Arnold Palmer before he even got to the driving range. "Arnie's up by the clubhouse," some poor guy's helpful wife yelled. Heads turned slightly. Golfers are as starstruck as anybody but don't like to let on.

Golf fans don't ordinarily clap when professional golfers arrive to hit practice balls. They did when Arnie showed up.

At 74, Arnie hit the ball the way he always has, like nothing else in the world mattered.

A huge crowd gathered around the first tee box and engulfed Arnie as he prepared to begin his round. Thousands followed him around the golf course. The applause did, too.

I followed around Stuart Ginn, a shaggy Australian who lives in Malaysia. I like his swing: Flowing, compact and perfectly balanced. He looks the way Jerry Garcia might have if he'd become a college professor instead of a rock 'n' roll guitarist. An erudite Deadhead who's a wizard on the golf course.

That's one of the appeals of golf for me, it's wizardry. Making a tiny dimpled sphere turn left or right, fly high or low and finally disappear into a hole hundreds of yards away by striking it with a shiny blade is a feat fit for Harry Potter.

The Christmas my parents gave me my first set of golf clubs was one of the happiest days of my boyhood. The bag was black and smelled the way new leather does. The chrome clubs looked good in it.

I dug a hole in the narrow yard beside our house and inserted a circle of pipe to serve as a cup. I tried to teach myself golf by reading books from the public library, for awhile mimicking Arnie's knock-kneed putting stance.

Forty years later, I still read instructional books and fool around with new techniques. Isaac Asimov: "The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' (I found it!) but 'That's funny ...'"

When golfers stand before a golf ball, hundreds of ideas about how best to hit it fight for control of our fickle minds. We don't know what to think, so we think them all. A traffic jam often results.

If watching Palmer and other very good golfers teaches me anything, it's that they swing a golf club the way the rest of us type -- without thinking. Then maybe hitting the golf ball can become the only thing in the world that matters.

Love, Sam

Sam Blackwell is managing editor of the Southeast Missourian.