Secretly in love with a golf ball

July 28, 2005

Dear Patty,

Much about the world remains as much a mystery to me as when I was born. How did I get here, who am I, what is my reason for being alive? And why can't I hit a golf ball where I want to hit it?

Golf remains one of life's greatest mysteries to me.

Visiting a bookstore I always check the golf section for new titles perhaps offering a new clue that will help me unlock this mystery. Imagine my elation recently at finding one with the ultimate title: "The Secret of Golf." It is a compendium of 47 different approaches to golf that are considered groundbreaking. These are the works of the Einsteins of golf.

The book contains a chapter written by Harry Vardon, who invented the way three-fourths of the world's 50 million golfers grip the club. If your grip is too tight, you squeeze out the possibility of being creative. Too loose and you lose control.

A cartoonist who thinks he has discovered how good golfers hit the ball so far and so straight had his eureka moment while studying the baseball swing of former St. Louis Cardinals slugger Mark McGwire.

One secret is that you need to learn how to throw your clubs -- not in anger, but because the motion you'd use in throwing a club is much like the movement in a good golf swing.

Another secret calls for hypnotizing yourself on the golf course. One in the same vein provides exercises meant to promote a state of "relaxed concentration," the kind of concentration that enables us to arrive at work without remembering the driving part.

One of the hardest feats in golf is to forget about the bad shot you just made and focusing on to the next shot. On the golf course and off, everybody makes mistakes. The secret is accepting that.

We golfers know our problems are all in our heads, but we keep that secret to ourselves. That's why we buy $500 drivers.

Some secrets seem to cancel each other out. The editor of the book claims that one true thing about golf is that everything doesn't work for everybody.

One secret that isn't in the book but should be is an odd piece of advice from some guru to learn to love the ball. That's right, start having a relationship with your golf ball.

Fear is the more common feeling golfers experience when we're standing over a golf ball with a club in our hands. We're afraid we're going to repeat the awful shot that occurred half an hour earlier, afraid we're going to embarrass ourselves in front of the foursome waiting to tee off behind us.

But it's hard to love the golf ball and be afraid of it at the same time.

That advice travels beyond the golf course. Learning to love something about anything or anyone changes for the better the way you relate to them.

You probably noticed that this book titled "The Secret of Golf" contains 47 different secrets. I'm convinced it's the infiniteness of the mysteries of golf and life that keep us walking out in the morning dew.

Love, Sam

Sam Blackwell is managing editor of the Southeast Missourian.