The bliss of golf dreams

Jan. 29, 2004

Dear Julie,

Ice gave way to snow this last week of January in Southeast Missouri. Temperatures have held hard to the 20s and 30s.

These are the days when golfers are likely to break things.

Few are crazed enough to go out and play golf at a time of year when obeying the axiom to hit down on the ball leaves you recoiling in pain when steel blade contacts frozen ground.

So we practice indoors, a mysterious practice indeed to those who don't play golf. After all, football or tennis players don't practice their sport in the living room. Golf is different. It consists of nothing more or less than a swing. No running, little sweating, no tackling, just a swing.

We practice our swings over and over and over in the futile attempt to perfect them, well knowing that some of the best golfers in the world have imperfect swings.

During the winter, the den becomes a miniature driving range. DC's ceramic figurines are in mortal danger.

On TV golfers watch professional golfers in Hawaii and California living out our fantasy. The Golf Channel runs old films of Ben Hogan, who came as close to perfecting the swing as anyone ever has. We hope to see a move we can borrow.

Hogan's swing was so good that a legend grew up around his "secret," the mysterious technique he was presumed to possess in order to play that well. The consensus now is that Hogan's real secret resided in the hours he spent doggedly hitting golf balls each day and in his steel-hard focus.

Hogan focused so hard he once didn't notice when a playing companion made a hole in one.

Waiting out the winter months until the next tee time, golfers read golf magazines filled with information about the best and newest golf clubs. I used to fantasize that some new club would transform the way I play. Over the years I discovered that practicing my swing and using my brains occasionally are much more important. That doesn't stop me from ogling the new clubs.

DC does the same with seed catalogs. She pores over them, earmarking the pages describing the seeds she plans to plant when spring comes. The rototiller waits, ready.

Like me looking at clubs, she rarely orders many of the seeds. She thinks it's more fun just to look at the pictures.

Golf books take some of the chill out of these wintry nights. In a story titled "The Bliss of Golf," John Updike enumerates that game's pleasures, including "the immensities of space" no other sport offers.

Of the swing he writes: "To concentrate, to take one's time, to move the weight across, to keep the elbow in, to save the wrist-cock for the hitting area, to keep one's head still, down, and as full of serenity as a Zen monk's: An ambitious program, but a basically spiritual one, which does not require the muscularity and shapeliness of youth. What other sport holds out hope of improvement to a man or a woman over fifty?"

Updike concludes: "... the room for improvement is so vast that three lifetimes could be spent roaming the fairways carving away at it, convinced that perfection lies just over the next rise. And that hope, perhaps, is the kindest bliss of all that golf bestows upon its devotees."

Love, Sam

Sam Blackwell is managing editor of the Southeast Missourian.