Discouragement

After a couple of weeks of practice in my yard, the one-arm drill and hitting Callaway Hx Soft Flight Practice Balls and "Almost Golf" balls with a full swing, I went to the range early this morning, eager to try out my improving swing.

At first, I hit the ball well, starting with the 9-iron, which I've been using exclusively in my yard. Nice and easy and smooth, hitting balls real high and around 120 yards. Looked good. Then I went down through my irons, all pretty good. Not great, but good for not hitting them in a long time.

Trouble began with the utility 4 and 3. I hit a couple of decent shots, but, for the rest, I topped them or shanked them, all kinds of bad swings. Then, in a display of utter perversity, I tried the driver, too. How bad could it be? I thought. Really bad. As Lily Tomlin says, things are going to get worse before they get worse. Couldn't hit it to save my life. Anticipating that it would be a disaster, I took only four balls with me to the next mat with a driver tee in it. So bad, I had to laugh. Black humor.

Then, trying to regroup, I went back to the nine, which was awful, even worse than before. So bad I took a few one-arm swings to try to get my tempo and path and bowed wrist back again. I was able to hit a couple of balls OK, pulled hooks left, but at least they were airborne, vaguely resembling a golf shot. I couldn't wait to get to the last of the 100 balls in my bucket.

On the way home, I surveyed the debacle, the wreckage of my swing. No more forecasting breaking 80. I'll be lucky to break 100, or worse. I may spend another season going to the course only occasionally and spending my time practicing instead. I'm not panicking, since the same thing happened the last time I visited the range. From that experience, I knew that transferring a swing with practice balls to a swing with real balls is hardly automatic. With real balls, the desire to get the distances you think you should have destroys your relaxed, smooth swing with lightweight balls.

Back home now and ready to go outside and begin the one-arm drill again, I'm hoping that, at some point, I'll be able to maintain my swing, first at the range, and then on the course. But the greatest lesson is that a golf swing is like Mt. Everest. If you want to learn the swing or climb the mountain, you cannot expect to do it on your terms. Just as you have to cling to the mountain take the right path and make the right steps, you have to let yourself go and immerse yourself in the swing. You must become the swing. As an old Russian piano teacher once adjured me (and I didn't know what she was talking about), "The music is in you!" It's a hard thing to get over the concept of yourself as an individual, as a being or entity, and give yourself over to something else—a belief, music, motion and transcend the self. But that is what golf demands. Probably all sports do. Become the music, become the tennis serve, become the baseball swing, become the Zen archer, become the golf swing. Just think of those lines from Yeats' "Among School Children."

Labour is blossoming or dancing where
The body is not bruised to pleasure soul.
Nor beauty born out of its own despair,
Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.
O chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?

Or the familiar image from Zen in the Art of Archery.

"(...) The archer ceases to be conscious of himself as the one who is engaged in hitting the bull's-eye which confronts him. This state of unconscious is realized only when, completely empty and rid of the self, he becomes one with the perfecting of his technical skill, though there is in it something of a quite different order which cannot be attained by any progressive study of the art (...)"

At some point, you have to lose yourself. When you're making a golf swing, you're not you any more.