Taking a swing at the secret of life

May 5, 2005

Dear Patty,

Ever since becoming somewhat serious about the sport a decade ago, I have been searching for "the secret" of golf. I yearn to divine the technique, the attitude, the understanding, whatever it is that good golfers have and the rest of us don't.

The player who may have had more mastery over a golf ball than anyone before Tiger Woods came along claimed the secret was "in the dirt." By that Ben Hogan meant the secret is practice.

Another time he said the secret had to do with pronating and supinating his left wrist. Or was it the other way around?

A few years ago, a former Hogan caddie man claimed he revealed the secret to him, but only after securing his vow of silence. Now that Hogan has been playing on that golf course in the sky for a few years, the caddie has written a book divulging the secret. Here it is: Start the swing with your right knee turned in a bit toward the left. Sort of half pigeon-toed.

I tried it, and it sort of helps. But it's not the secret.

All of this is silly to my non-golfer friends. After all, couldn't I be searching for the secret of life instead of golf? Actually, I don't think they are mutually exclusive.

Two of the books that have beckoned in this quest, "Golf in the Kingdom" and "Zen in the Art of Archery," aren't really sports books at all. They're about trying to makes contact the mystical state of mind where creativity hides.

"Golf is a creative tool," says Shivas Irons, the golf guru in "Golf in the Kingdom." Talking about life as much as golf, he adds: "If you're not creating you're dying. Play a game that's worth playing."

When you're swinging a golf club, often part of your brain is thinking about how badly you want to hit the ball well while worrying about how badly you hit it the last time you swung. There's little brain left for the paradox I suspect is the primary secret: Not thinking at all.

Not thinking might be the hardest thing of all to do.

One day at a driving range in New Jersey, the author of the book I'm reading now hit two consecutive balls off a telephone pole 250 yards away and was left wondering how he'd done it. He recalled the golf club moving as if on its own. The monks in "Zen in the Art of Archery" taught that you don't release the arrow. It releases itself.

The author of this book is a sports psychologist now convinced there's a spiritual dimension to reaching "the zone" the best athletes talk about, and that mediation is one of the ways in. Meditation is not thinking.

My first set of clubs arrived on Christmas Day in my 12th year. The silver heads sparkled in their black bag that morning. They seemed like magical tools, each one tuned to the frequency of wizards.

Then I read a book about Arnold Palmer, the chief wizard of the day, and adopted his knock-kneed putting style. A friend chastised me, saying you can't learn to play golf from a book.

Maybe the secret of life is never give up.

Love, Sam

Sam Blackwell is managing editor of the Southeast Missourian.