by Terry Fallis
“Ready.”
She reached for one of the clubs.
“This is a nine-iron, arguably the easiest club to hit.”
“Why is it the easiest club to hit?”
“Bravo, Mr. Coryell. I like a curious mind,” she said. “Two reasons. The length of the shaft from the grip to the club head is quite short, making it easier to control. And, there’s considerable loft on the club head, and that makes it easier to make contact with the ball and lift it into the air.”
“Makes sense,” I replied.
“Now, this is the interlocking grip, the most common and easily taught golf grip. The game really cannot be played well without a sound grip.”
She showed me how to position my hands with the index finger of my upper hand interlacing with the pinky of my lower hand to form a solid two-handed hold on the club.
“How does that feel?” she asked.
“To be honest, it feels weird,” I replied. “I think it would feel more comfortable and secure if I grabbed it like I do a baseball bat.”
“Bite your tongue, Mr. Coryell. There’ll be no baseball grip on my watch,” she said. “Fear not. The interlocking grip always feels strange at first, but it gives you infinitely more control over the club during the swing. The more you use it, the more comfortable it will become. In time, you won’t be able to hold a club any other way. Trust me on that.”
She looked closely at my newly minted interlocking grip and turned the club slightly in my hands so that when the club head rested on the ground in front of me, its face was straight.
“That looks good. Now, don’t try to strangle the club. Your left hand should have a reasonably solid hold on the club, with your right hand snug but really just along for the ride. Understand?”
I nodded and relaxed my grip so my knuckles changed colour from white to a light pink.
“Feet just a little wider than shoulder width apart, knees slightly bent, back straight, and just hold the club so that it rests on the ground. The club is designed so your hands are positioned a little forward of the ball.”
I did as she instructed. I didn’t feel very comfortable in that position.
“All right. Now we just need to summon the spirit of Professor Gunnarsson, because I’d like you to empty your mind and close your eyes.”
“Okay, I’m not sure my mind is completely empty, but my eyes are closed.”
“Try not to think about anything except how your body feels, how your arms and legs feel. Relax your limbs but still keep that grip on the club secure but not strangulating.”
“Okay.”
“We’re not quite ready to involve the golf ball yet. So don’t worry about that,” she said. “But right now, without thinking, I want you to let your body draw the club up and back over your head, and then let it swing back down, following through so that it’s back up high around your head at the end. In other words, I want you to attempt a rudimentary golf swing without hitting the ground, yourself, or me with the club.”
“Okay.”
“But don’t plan it. Don’t think about it. Think about your next fountain pen acquisition if you have to, or the story you’re composing in Writer’s Craft. While you’re doing that, just let your body tell you how to swing the club.”
I took a breath, kept my eyes closed, and swung the club up and back around.
When I finished, Ms. Davenport was silent. I waited with my eyes still closed and the club up around my head where I’d finished my swing. I took a chance and opened one eye just slightly. Ms. Davenport stood there bug-eyed but her mouth was closed.
“What’s wrong?” I said. “You looked, um, startled. Was it that bad?”
A few beats later, she seemed to regain her faculties.
“Mr. Coryell, I must insist that you be truthful with me, and I’m now uncertain that you have been.”
“What do you mean? I’ve been completely honest with you,” I protested.
“Let’s go over it again. You told me you’d never swung a club in your life.”
“No, I said I’d never even held a club in my hand, let alone swung one.”
“And you stand by that statement. You’re telling me to my face that never in your days on this earth have you done what you just did with that nine-iron.”
“Of course! Why would I lie about something like that? What’s in it for me to be anything but honest? I hate people who lie.”
“Okay, okay, calm yourself. I’m just trying to understand what I’m seeing. Your very first swing looks a lot like Rickie Fowler’s.”
“Who’s he? And is that good?”
“He’s a star on the PGA Tour who has spent nearly his entire life perfecting his beautiful and efficient golf swing. You just achieved a reasonable facsimile thereof on your inaugural attempt.”
“Beginner’s luck, maybe?”
“Too early to tell. But please swing the club in the same way again, without thought, without planning. Just feel the swing.”
I swung the club a second time.
“Again.”
I did it again, and then four more times after that.
“Extraordinary,” she said to herself. “Does it feel natural when you swing the club?”
“No, not at all. How could it feel natural? I’ve never done this before. So it feels like a new experience, each time.”
“One more time, please, eyes closed, but wait when you get into position, and then I’ll tell you when to swing.”
I placed the club head back on the ground so it was straight. Then I shut my eyes, lightly gripped the club, and bent my knees a bit until it felt right—not necessarily natural, but right.
A few seconds later, Ms. Davenport spoke.
“Now.”
I swung again but felt my club hit something about halfway through the swing. I hoped it wasn’t Ms. Davenport.
I opened my eyes to see her watching a golf ball flying off to our right.
“Hey, did I hit that ball?” I asked.
“Well, let’s say you shanked it.”
“That doesn’t sound good.”
“It just means you mis-hit the ball and it spun off to the right. A very common occurrence.”
“Let me try it again with my eyes open. Isn’t that the way most golfers shoot?”
“Actually, I think the shank was my fault. I didn’t place the ball in quite the right position.”
She helped me line up again and checked my grip. Then she put another ball on the grass in front of me.
“Okay, you can keep your eyes open this time, but remember, do not—I repeat, do not—think about anything. Don’t worry about the ball. Just make your swing the way your body tells you to. Let it do the work. Wipe your mind clean. And don’t be trying to knock the cover off the ball. You can swing hard, but don’t try to kill it or your swing will probably go off the rails.”
“Wow, there’s so much to remember.”
“Ah, ah, ah,” she scolded. “My mistake. Don’t try to remember anything. Just swing.”
I closed my eyes to try to relax. When I opened them, I looked at the little white dimpled ball on the turf. A big black stripe and the word Range stared back at me. Then I swung. When the club hit the ball, the impact was much softer than I expected. The ball left the clubface in a very big hurry and flew straight and high. I didn’t wait for it to land before I looked at Ms. Davenport. Her wide eyes followed the ball. Her mouth was agape. That’s a writerly word I’d recently discovered meaning “wide open.” I liked words.
“Um, Ms. Davenport? Your mouth is open but there’s no sound coming out. Is everything okay?”
She closed her mouth but kept her eyes on the ball.
“Was that good?” I asked. I had no idea what had just happened and I couldn’t tell from looking at Ms. D.
She held up her hand for me to wait. She watched until the ball rolled to a stop. She reached into her pocket and pulled out a notepad and what I instantly recognized as a blue Kaweco Sport fountain pen. S
he took a note and then grabbed the club from my hands and stared at the number nine etched along the bottom.
“Extraordinary!”
“Yes, I love the Kaweco Sport, too. Very nice for a pocket pen.”
“While I do love this pen, it is not what triggered my exclamation.”
“Oh.”
“Mr. Coryell, if my eyes do not deceive me, you just hit a nine-iron, dead straight and very high, more than 195 yards.”
“Is that good? Because it didn’t really feel like I’d hit anything at all. I think if I swung a little harder, I could knock it much further.”
“First of all, you know you’ve hit the ball perfectly when it feels like you haven’t hit anything at all. Remember that feeling. And secondly, the top PGA Tour pros hit a nine-iron 165 yards, 175 tops, on a very good day. You just beat that by twenty yards on your first swing with your eyes open.”
“Oh. So I guess that’s pretty good then.”
I didn’t feel any real satisfaction from making what was apparently a very good shot. It was as if someone else had made the shot. No, not really someone else. Just my body. I wasn’t responsible. My body was. I just happened to be there, too.
I hit twenty more nine-iron shots under Ms. Davenport’s close supervision. Before each attempt she’d remind me to empty my brain and just swing. Each shot landed within a few feet of the previous one, just shy of the two-hundred-yard marker. They were all straight. Finally, I decided to swing as hard as I could to see if I could hit the ball even further. I clenched the club in a death grip and swung really hard. Once again it felt like I hadn’t hit anything at all. I scanned the horizon for my supersonic ball on its suborbital flight path, but couldn’t find it. Then I noticed it was still sitting on the turf below me. I’d missed it completely.
“Oh, well, that explains why it felt like I hadn’t hit anything at all.”
“Okay, this is important. What happened on that swing? What did you do differently that time? What changed?” she asked.
“My fault. I was thinking too much about the shot. I consciously wanted to hit it harder and further, so I focused on swinging as fast as I could and holding the club as tightly as I could. I wanted to knock the crap out of that ball. I swung so hard, I think I almost came out of my shoes.”
“And let that be a lesson to us both. It seems Professor Gunnarsson was right. Don’t consciously do anything. Don’t think. Don’t plan. Don’t adjust. Just let your body swing the club naturally at the speed it wants to. Do not let your mind have any control, or any influence, over the shot. That is Gunnarsson’s critical principle, and you just proved it by abrogating it.”
“Abrogating. A nice, shiny new word for me.”
My next ten empty-headed, natural swings produced ten more apparently stunning nine-iron shots that behaved more like a Tour pro’s seven-iron shots.
We then spent about half an hour on the five-iron as the twilight descended. The shaft on a five-iron is quite a bit longer than on the nine-iron, but that just meant I stood slightly further away from the ball. Ms. Davenport positioned the ball a little further up in my stance, more towards the level of my front foot. Then she set me up properly and stepped aside.
I relaxed, thought about absolutely nothing, and swung.
I hit it, but the ball didn’t go nearly as high. I thought I’d messed up. But Ms. Davenport’s long, low whistle as she followed the ball suggested otherwise.
“You just overshot the range,” she said. “That carried just over 260 yards.”
“It seemed kind of low,” I said. “Am I supposed to be hitting it 260 yards with a five-iron?”
“No, son, you are not. Your first ever five-iron shot would be considered a perfect three-wood shot for most professional players. Your performance simply beggars belief.”
“I don’t know what a three-wood is and I have no idea what ‘beggars belief’ means, but I assume it’s positive.”
“It’s positive all right, Mr. Coryell,” she replied. “I think there might just be a Nobel Prize in Professor Gunnarsson’s future, and a Masters championship in yours.”
I hit fifteen more five-iron shots that were more or less identical. After a while, I was kind of bored with it all. Finally, while there was barely still enough light, Ms. Davenport stood behind me and used her iPhone to shoot video of one good shot with the nine-iron, and another with the five-iron.
“I’m not going to see those videos on YouTube later tonight, am I?” I asked.
“Tempting, but no. These are strictly for educational purposes.”
On the drive back to the clubhouse, she only told me to slow the golf cart down seven times and felt compelled to grab the wheel once. But we made it. At her direction, I dropped her off in the parking lot by her car, then drove the cart back to the shop to return the clubs and keys.
I parked perfectly in the front row of carts, on my fourth attempt. I handed over the clubs and cart key to Duke.
“Thanks, son. Did you hit ‘em straight and long?”
“Yes, I think I did,” I replied. Since there was no one else in the pro shop, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity. “Um, can I ask you a question, Mr. Worthy?”
“Fire when ready.”
“How good of a golfer was Ms. Davenport?”
“Just between us, she was one of the best I’ve ever seen. Full-ride scholarship to Stanford. Plenty of NCAA victories. Two Canadian Women’s Amateur Championships and two Canadian University Championships when she came back here for teacher’s college.”
“But her back just couldn’t take it?”
“She played right through her back until it was too late. A real shame she never made the Tour. But you didn’t hear any of that from me.”
I nodded as I thought through what he’d said. “Got it. Thanks.”
She picked me up out front, and we drove along the driveway to Yonge Street and headed back into the city.
“So you were obviously a great golfer when you were younger,” I opened.
She sighed. “So we’re back on this topic, are we? Well, I guess you could say I had a certain flair for the game. I loved it. Gadzooks, did I love it. The problem was, I loved it so much I ignored my body, specifically my back. I didn’t want to stop playing and winning, so I just pretended I didn’t see the warning signs.”
“Until it was too late,” I offered.
“Right,” she said, almost in a whisper. She shook her head before continuing. “So my back and my game just got worse and worse until I was no longer competitive. Even now, all these years later, I’m lucky to be able to string eighteen holes together without my lower back protesting and making me pay.”
“That’s so sad. I’m sorry,” I said. “I heard somewhere that you could have played on the Tour.”
“Duke is a great guy, but he sometimes talks a little too much,” she said wryly as she pulled up in front of my house. She turned to look at me. “Well, Mr. Coryell, if you’re at all interested, you appear to have boundless potential as a golfer, and I don’t just mean a weekend recreational player. I’ve been around the game a long time, and I’ve never seen anything like what you showed me today.”
“You mean what my body showed you. I was barely there.”
“There or not, there’s no need to make any important life decisions based on an hour at the driving range. But I hope we can keep exploring just how good you can be. Remember, Professor Gunnarsson has never heard of anyone with a score like yours. So I think we owe it to him, to science, and to you to see where this might go.”
“Sure, Ms. Davenport. I guess I’m up for that.”
“You don’t exactly sound like you’ve found your new calling,” she said.
“Well, this is all kind of sudden. And playing golf wasn’t really part of my plan for my final year at high school. I’m more focused on my writing and getting into university,” I explained.
“I see,” Ms. Davenport replied. “And I understand, even commend, your sensible priorities.�
�� Despite her words, she sounded a little disappointed.
“On the other hand,” I said, “I figure we should explore this golf thing a little more, just in case it’s real.” I didn’t want to let her down, but I was also curious about this little experiment.
“Marvellous. Can you come by my office after school tomorrow, say around four o’clock? I think I know what we should do next.”
“Sure. And thanks for taking me to the course. That was kind of fun. Especially driving the golf cart.”
“Well, you certainly drive the ball much better than you drive the cart, but we can work on that.”
I said hi to my folks and headed up to my room. I hadn’t told them what had gone down at the driving range. I was still processing it and wasn’t really sure what any of it really meant. Had I fully understood the implications, I might have thought more about it all.
* * *
—
THE NEXT DAY, Ms. Davenport was waiting for me in her tiny office just off the gym when I arrived there after my last class. She pulled a chair around from in front of her desk and positioned it right next to hers.
She must have noticed my puzzled look, because she explained, “This seating arrangement may seem odd but there’s a method to my madness.”
Skype was open on her laptop screen. Suddenly, it all made sense.
“We’re calling Professor Gunnarsson, aren’t we?” I asked, though I already knew the answer.
“You’re a bright boy,” she replied. “I think he deserves to know, don’t you?”
“Well, it’s a little premature, isn’t it? I mean, I only hit some balls. I’ve never even played on a course,” I said. “Shouldn’t we do some more, I don’t know, testing, more swinging of clubs, before we bother him?”
“Mr. Coryell, as a first-time golfer, you are not really in a position to understand and appreciate what you did on the driving range yesterday. And I think that might even help you. But please trust my knowledge of the game when I say that I don’t believe any golfer in recorded history has ever hit his or her first forty golf shots as consistently straight, long, and true as you did. I would never have believed it had I not been standing right there next to you.”