Fore! Play

by Bill Giest

  16

  What’s Your Handicap?

  Okay, so I can’t beat really mediocre men or little, middle-aged women or seemingly anybody really. But, maybe I could beat someone who’s totally blind.

  I read an astonishing newspaper article on blind golfers—What?—that went on to tell of a big Blind Golf Association tournament scheduled nearby. Sure. And next week there’s a blind NASCAR drivers race. C’mon. This had to be a joke, probably a hoax some prankster concocted and sent to a clueless newspaper editor.

  Yet, when I called the country club where the tourney was supposedly taking place, instead of laughing, they confirmed it. Elaborate hoax.

  Being the naturally competitive type, unafraid of any challenge life throws at me, I tossed my (wife’s) clubs in the car, and raced over. But, wait! Should I take a cane? Stop by and pick up my friend’s dog? I found some sunglasses in the glove compartment and slipped them on.

  Pulling into the Mt. Kisco Country Club, I had no idea what to expect, really, maybe a bunch of goof-offs in blindfolds having their idea of a wacky golf outing. I did give the other cars wide berth, however, just in case these were truly blind golfers driving in for the tournament.

  What I found was unbelievable, an announcer heralding the opening of the annual Ken Venturi Guiding Eyes Golf Classic featuring sixteen of the world’s best blind golfers! (Fifteen of these male oxymorons and one woman.) The announcer didn’t seem to be kidding, either.

  But … how could this possibly be?

  The gallery intently observed as the first golfer, Keith Melick, who the announcer said had won the previous two of these Corcoran Cup competitions, stepped to the tee. Each golfer has a coach, in this case Keith’s wife, Jean, who points him in precisely the right direction and helps adjust his stance and his distance from the ball. The coach also gives the golfer the same information any caddie might, such as distance to the green, positions of hazards, and so forth. Some coaches crouch and place the clubhead directly behind the ball. And, when everything is perfectly aligned, the coach gives a “yep,” or a word to that effect, and the golfer swings.

  Let the clich豠fall where they may, I watched in absolute stunned disbelief as Keith’s opening drive took off like a shot, straight and true, two hundred yards down the fairway. I don’t know what I expected, but not this! Was he, you know, peeking? The gallery applauded.

  David Meador, Keith’s partner at this “Masters of Blind Golf” classic, stepped up and did the same thing! So did the next guy, Pat Browne, who had a 1 handicap before going blind and who’s won this tournament seventeen times. At this point, it wouldn’t have surprised me to see them jump in their carts and drive off.

  I finally came to my senses, and tagged along with the fourth twosome, Andy Stewart from Alabama and Ron Tomlinson from England. (They had a little trouble understanding each other at first.) Andy, thirty-three, suddenly—in the course of just forty-eight hours—went completely blind nine years ago from a neuropathic disease. He was operating at even more of a disadvantage this day, having suffered spinal injuries from swinging his golf clubs too hard, and now walking around with two rods, two plates, and eight screws in his back. Other than that (and a torn ligament), he was perfectly fine. “I can’t complain,” he said with a smile. I almost broke into tears when he said that, and might have, except the guy plays golf better than I do.

  Andy routinely drove the ball well over two hundred yards. And, oh yeah, straight. He’d hit the ball, then ask where it went. I told him that I do the very same thing. It just doesn’t take him as long to find his. He doesn’t slice it like I do, probably because he’s not lifting his head up too soon—a common fault among slicers—to see where it went. He has certain advantages.

  Andy says he’s been playing golf for six years, having learned the game after he went blind, has driven a ball 265 yards, has scored an 83 for 18 holes and a 38 on a 9-hole course.

  “Bull!” I say.

  “There were witnesses,” replied Andy’s coach, his nephew David Witt.

  In this tournament, they do play winter rules, which means they can roll a ball over if it’s in a divot, but other than that it’s all fair and square. They don’t hit from the ladies’ tees, nothing like that. And unlike my rules, whiffs count and there are no gimmees.

  Andy won’t have scores that good here. This is a tough course. Sometimes I think he’s better off not being able to see some of the downright diabolical holes. Hole 6, for example, features a tiny green precariously perched atop a veritable beach of sand that surrounds it like a moat. Par-4. Andy bogeys the hole. The man can flat-out pitch.

  “I really don’t tell him about all the traps,” David says. On hole 8, he doesn’t tell him about the two TV news camera crews either. Too much pressure. He tells him after he’s played the hole. Andy is chagrined because he hasn’t played it well, but finally says: “Oh well, I don’t watch much TV myself.”

  To judge distance, the golfers pace off their chip shots and putts. On one hole, David and Andy measure thirteen and a half paces, but David tells him to hit “about a five and a half or a five and three fourths” because of the downhill slope. Andy is on the green in 3, but 3-putts for a 6.

  Andy blames David for misreading the green, just like any other golfer would blame a caddie or a helpful partner. He complains that the slow play of the twosome ahead of them is holding them up, just like other golfers. And he carries on constant banter like other golfers do: “Boy, Ron, you hit that one completely out of sight!”

  At the end of 9 holes in the tournament, there is a cut. Andy makes it, but this time Ron does not. Surprisingly, neither does Bob Andrews, who’s finished second here twice. Bob is president of the United States Blind Golf Association, which currently sports about a hundred members who must be totally blind and prove that they’ve shot at least a legitimate 125 for 18 holes on three occasions. (Were it not for the “blind” and “legitimate” parts, I could join.) He says there’s a whole worldwide tour for blind golfers.

  Figuring Bob is having an off day, and that he’s totally blind, I challenge him to play a hole.

  “What’s your handicap?” I ask, “if you’ll pardon the expression.”

  “Twenty-nine,” he says, informing me that one blind golfer plays to a 14 or 15 handicap. (A blind golfer once shot a 77, and one of the golfers here has shot a hole-in-one!) He says some of his sighted friends won’t play golf with him because they figure it’s a lose-lose situation. “It sure is fun to beat them when they do,” he says. Hmmm.

  He tells me the tale of the legendary blind golfer Charley Boswell challenging Jack Nicklaus (some versions have it Arnold Palmer or Bob Hope) to a round. Nicklaus accepts the challenge, and Boswell tells Nicklaus to meet him at the first tee—at midnight.

  Bob’s wife, Tina, is his coach. They have three sons. Tina doesn’t put his ball down for him, and doesn’t adjust his club. “I’m not gonna spend my life bowing down before my husband,” she says. In soft, one-word directions, she has him move up or back, away from or toward the ball, and tells him to open or close his stance and his club-face. “It’s very much a team sport,” Bob says.

  Later, Tina and Bob have me try to coach, something that proves most difficult. I have him facing this way and that, his club practically upside down and backward. It’s like telling my cat to be a Seeing Eye dog.

  But how do these golfers do it?

  “You don’t really need to see the ball,” Bob explains. “The pros tell every golfer that they’re just learning a good mechanical swing, and that the ball just gets in the way of that.” It’s muscle memory to the nth degree.

  Bob tees off. His drive is another miracle to behold, quite long, although it does fade a bit to the right and lands a foot inside the rough. “I pretty much know where it is,” Bob says, “by the sound and the feel.”

  The truth is, I need Tina to help line me up properly, but she won’t. This is competition. So, my tee shot chops off short and to the left, landing at t
he ladies’ tee. Sure Bob’s blind, but I have some excuses, too: We’re playing with his clubs and I don’t have on golf shoes and I have a lot of junk in my pants pockets and a slight hangover. Even?

  Bob and Tina take the cart on up ahead and I decide that for my second shot, I really need to throw the ball about twenty yards to get it out of there, and I go ahead and do that, and rather effectively if I do say so myself.

  My second shot (the throw is not technically a shot) is an iron that is somewhere between a shank and a slice, but in any event doesn’t reach his opening drive and so it’s Still My Turn. My fourth advancement of the ball is a hard kick from the rough to the fairway, followed by my third shot, which carries past his first shot and—finally!—it’s his turn. He hits it thin, frankly, but it rolls very, very far.

  Bob lost his sight and nearly his life stepping on a booby trap in Vietnam. He never balked for a moment at the idea of taking up golf, a game he’d never played. “I’ve sailed and I was fairly good at Ping-Pong, too, because I had a great serve,” he notes. “Same with tennis, but it was hell if the other guy returned it.” You’d have to be very lucky and carry a very big racket.

  My fourth shot is fabulous, for me, a 6-iron that goes well over a hundred yards, and bounces on the green. Okay, it bounces off the other side of the green, too, but this ain’t the friggin’ Masters, now is it?

  Maybe I can beat a blind golfer. Maybe I can. I would pray for victory but that would be wrong. Very wrong. Like, “Author–Bad Golfer Struck By Lightning"—that kind of wrong.

  Bob’s third shot is a perfectly executed bump and run that lands on the green about twenty feet from the hole. At this point, I start watching closely for signs that Bob can actually see. “Hey Bob!” I yell, pointing to the sky. “Look at that!” But he doesn’t look. Shrewd guy.

  I hit an 8-iron from some high grass five feet off the green, clear across the green to five feet on the other side. A nice shot, I figure, having improved my lie to shorter grass. I next hit onto the green and then begin my long-term putting project: one, two, three putts—for an 8 (not counting the toss and the kick).

  Meanwhile, Bob, allegedly blind, is putting for par!

  Tina hasn’t told him a thing about the break of the green. Didn’t tell me anything either. “I read the greens with my feet,” he says, “by walking across them.”

  Word comes that Keith Melick has won the tournament for a third straight year with a score of 113—a bit disappointing to him because he shot a 103 here last year.

  Tina pulls a blindfold from the golf bag and has me put it on. I see nothing, complete darkness, and my thoughts darken. How do people live like this, let alone play golf? They’re so skillful you forget how disabled they really are. I am totally disoriented, of course, and off-balance. Tina lines me up with a ball she’s dropped. I bend my knees, but then don’t know how far I am from the ground. I get some sort of reading by touching my club to the ground, but it’s not precise enough. I take a quarter swing and hit behind the ball, then hit it on top. It seems impossible.

  Is there satisfaction to playing golf when you can’t see the green grass and the beautiful flight of a well-struck ball?

  “Absolutely,” says Bob. “You’re out with great people, you feel the sun, smell the grass and the fresh air, and hear and feel those great shots.” And he doesn’t have to watch the ugly ones.

  After ten minutes of flailing at golf balls, I’m frustrated, I’ve had enough. I remove the blindfold. And see Bob. My heart sinks. How quickly and easily my precious sight has completely returned, just by ripping off the blindfold.

  He misses his twenty-foot putt, as golfers do, leaving himself with a tap-in for a 5, on this par-4 hole. I had an illegitimate 8, but he didn’t have those shadows on the green bothering him when he was putting.

  I walk away shaking my head. And to think I wanted to put some money on this.

  17

  Be the Ball

  I’m shooting about a 120 these days. But how do I feel about that?

  Maybe I need to, you know, see someone about my golf game. A golf instructor, to be sure, but also maybe a … therapist. A shrink. A golf psychiatrist.

  And, yes, of course there are golf psychiatrists. Have to be. People are nuts about golf. Noted golf psychiatrist Phil Lee was in my hometown hawking his book, Shrink Your Handicap, so I stopped by to see him, hoping for a free session, hoping he could take some strokes off my game.

  Psychiatrists are MDs, of course. This means that Dr. Lee went to med school for years and years, and probably had to dissect a cadaver, suffer through his residency, and all the rest, only to wind up treating patients suffering not from cancer or broken arms or even psychoses, but rather from putting disorders.

  I mean I could almost see it if Dr. Lee was trying to cure people of their golf addictions (golf as avoidance mechanism, etc.), but he’s trying to help them improve their scores. This is because he’s One Of Them—a golf fiend.

  “What about people who are addicted to golf,” I ask, “people who play five times a week and in the snow and who neglect their jobs and their wives and kids to play golf?”

  “And the problem with that is … ?” he smiles. He doesn’t consider that to be a disorder, and if it is, “better to be addicted to golf than crack,” he maintains. I don’t know enough about crack to argue the point, but I doubt that it could be any more expensive or addictive or all-consuming than golf. Yet we have youth golf clinics to hook kids.

  Dr. Lee looks to me like a golf psychiatrist should, bespectacled, with a mustache, and wearing a golf shirt. And he says things like: “You know how Freud said it was all about sex? Now it’s all about golf.” Frightening. He says it’s a mental game of hope versus fear, a game where one part of our brain is saying “play it safe,” another part is saying “go for it!,” and a third part is trying to balance the other two. (In addition some of us have a fourth brain part saying: “Run over your damned clubs with the car.”)

  I don’t lie down right here in the Bookends bookstore or anything, but start telling the psychiatrist that I feel that my golf game sucks. When I tell him I shoot 120, he gets this alarmed look, like he might try to have me hospitalized—or outfit my golf cart with a couch.

  He says I probably have mental problems, and he certainly wouldn’t have a problem getting a concurring second opinion on that. He refers to my problem as: “a high mental handicap,” although it was nothing that kept me out of the army or qualified me for an extra hour on my SATs.

  The doctor says one can have “mental pars, mental birdies, or mental bogeys.” He says throwing your clubs in the lake, for example, would be a “mental double bogey.” However, if you hook it into the trees but chip out and recover—focused and calm—you can score a “mental eagle.”

  “Your mental handicap,” Dr. Lee explains, “is the measure of the extent to which anxiety chemicals bring down your game. A million years ago, cavemen would go outside and see a saber-toothed tiger and become anxious and have chemical reactions that would make them better able to club the tiger or run away.” He looks at me to see if I’m getting the picture. I give him a blank look that lets him know I’m not.

  “Today,” he continues, “when you see a water hazard on the golf course, you become anxious and your body releases small amounts of those same fight-or-flight chemicals that are poison to your golf game. Your muscles tighten, you breathe faster, your heart pounds harder, and your mind produces anxiety, anger, and fear.”

  Geez, what wimps we’ve become! How dull our existence, when we take small, decorative ponds on golf courses for saber-toothed tigers. I’m a little embarrassed for my species, frankly.

  “You need to set up defenses to reduce those feelings of threat,” he says. “We need to down-regulate our receptors and decrease our production of the chemicals that cause panic and anxiety.” Would cocktails help?

  He has another theory that our real golf game is never as good as our “range game"—which is the way
we play on the driving range or alone when no one’s watching. This one I’m not so sure about, Doc. My range game sucks, too. And I’m pretty awful when no one’s around. I admit it. I’m not one of those people who claim his parakeet can recite the Gettysburg Address except when people are around.

  I tell Dr. Lee that I have a lot of trouble on the first tee, and I think it’s because there are always people there watching.

  Ah, yes, First Tee Anxiety Syndrome. “The first tee is the lair of the saber-toothed tiger,” he says. This is a combination of Stranger Anxiety (fear of strangers), Subliminal Expectations (our friends won’t accept us if we’re bad), Generalization (we’ve been bad here before, we will be again), Superstition (start poorly and it will ruin the entire round), and Competitive Comfort Level (you’re being judged by one shot because you haven’t had the chance to make offsetting good shots).

  Not to mention Generalized Tee Anxiety, in which “the golfer, flooded by chemicals from a million years ago, is diverted from his normal swing into a swing that is more primitive, more muscled, and more suited to clubbing an animal than to hitting a ball.” We try to kill it. He recommends we loosen our grip and calm down.

  When those fear chemicals are released, all of our senses become more acute and we are easily distracted. For this Dr. Lee advises we all get cassette recorders with headsets, record ourselves clapping, and add in some “Way to go!"s. Then, we listen to it when we’re playing golf, listen to it over and over until it is no longer a distraction.

  This is behavioral therapy teaching us not to be distracted. What about giving golfers a kernel of corn for a good shot and an electric shock for a bad one?

  This cassette recorder therapy might replace, say, yelling at another foursome making a lot of noise while you’re putting. “Hey a—holes! Shut up!” Or words to that effect. Then blaming them when you miss the putt.