Sibling Assignment #191: It's All in My Head -- and Maybe My Torso

Christy gave the three of us siblings this assignment:

Write a tribute to a friend that is no longer with us.

Carol wrote a tribute to the family dog, Peaches. It's here. Christy paid tribute to one of her students, here.

I'm going to modify this assignment a little bit, because the friend I've lost and want to pay tribute to is still with us, could return to me, but is no longer with me at the present time.

Starting when I was thirteen years old and continuing on into my adulthood, off and on, I developed a friendship with the game of golf.

I will say, right off the top, that I was never very good at golf, especially when I stand my game up against any number of friends who played golf superbly.

The chief mistake I made as a teenager was never learning how to play golf properly. Mom and Dad bought me clubs and I relied on whatever natural abilities I had in the area of hand-eye coordination to strike the golf ball and get around the course.

Consequently, I never developed a reliable golf swing. The swing I did develop brought my club through the ball in such a way that I hit a huge slice, meaning my shots almost always started way off to the left and then curved back to the right. I couldn't do what really good golfers do. I couldn't shape a golf shot. My main concern, always, was to make contact. I was always inconsistent with this and so my golf game always featured an array of worm burners, rainmakers, shanks, and even the occasional whiff. When I did make contact, I sliced my shots nine out of ten times. Usually I had no idea where my ball would go once I struck it.

I also never sought out instruction in how to pitch or chip shots near the green nor did I have much of a sense of the difference between these short shots nor did I ever learn how to spin a shot.

Finally, in about 1977, I decided to take golf lessons and I sought out a greatly admired and venerable professional at Indian Canyon in Spokane, Bill Welch. He helped me restructure my swing so that I began to hit a draw (which sometimes devolved into a hook and, at other times, devolved more into a duck hook). For a couple of years, I played better golf than I ever had.  I enjoyed that.

But, I made another mistake. I never followed up on that set of six lessons I took from Bill Welch. As a result, I developed new bad habits. Then I started graduate school and I played less and less golf. When I did play, I tended to fall back on ways I swung the club when I was a teenager or I put some of the bad habits that developed after I took lessons from Bill Welch into practice.

I further damaged my game of golf by going to graduate school. Once I immersed myself in my studies, I rarely played golf, let alone ever practice. I lived in Spokane for two years back in 1982-84. I never played a single round in Spokane and, if I did play during that time, I played in Kellogg with Dad.

Still, I considered golf a great friend. I loved the experience of being on a golf course, the walking, the smell of fresh cut grass, the different ways different holes took shape, and the chances playing golf gave me to contemplate my life and think about ideas while I walked from one shot to another.

Even more, I enjoyed the comradery of playing golf with friends. Soon after the Deke and I got married in 1997, four of us Eugene made it a point to join up and play a different local golf course each month. One player in that group, Paul, and I played a lot on our own apart from our group and used to make trips to Florence or Corvallis or Junction City or Creswell or Cottage Grove or go up the McKenzie River and play different courses, as well as the ones in or near Eugene. Around this time, I took a series of lessons again, from another Texas native, Jim Dodd, and I played some decent rounds, but mostly I had a lot of fun playing different courses, having little competitions, and enjoy other people's company.

My friendship with playing the game of golf started to really decline in 2000 after I'd been hospitalized with bacterial meningitis. I remember Paul and I went out the following spring to play and I had to give up my round after sixteen holes from fatigue.

Now things get very fuzzy for me. I don't remember trying to play very often and I have memories of my lifelong difficulties with hitting the ball of the tee to start a hole getting worse and worse. In fact, I started to get afraid of teeing off. I had felt this anxiety when I was younger and I know from time to time I used to bail on tee shots, nearly jump away from the ball while swinging in a psychological effort not to have to face my failure to hit my tee shot well. When players develop this fear or anxiety over their putts, they are said to have the yips. I've never known of players -- well, maybe Charles Barkley -- to develop the yips when trying to tee off, but I had developed a psychological aversion to teeing off that I have decided to call the yips.

I played a round of golf in 2005 at Lincoln City with Kellogg friends and I hit one gorgeous tee shot that day and I nearly cried (don't tell my friends). But the rest of the time I scuffed, scalded, duck hooked, whiffed, bailed out, and generally made a terrible mess of shots off the tee. I doubt my friends thought much about it; no one teased me or anything. But I was embarrassed. I'd felt embarrassment many times before playing golf because of my problems off the tee. But, for me, this was worse.

Aside from a one or two trips to a par 3 course at Fiddler's Green near Eugene and another trip to a par three course that's part of the Riverview Complex, I have not played a regulation round of golf since that round in Lincoln City. At first, I thought maybe if I took a hiatus from golf I could return to it with a fresh mind and maybe my tee block demons would have gone away.

But I went to a driving range near Middleboro, MA back in 2015 with the Troxstar. Maybe it was all in my head. Maybe in was in my inflexible torso. Maybe I'd simply lost my hand-eye coordination as a result of aging. Whatever the cause, I know one thing: I could not hit a single golf shot on that range.

A year earlier, when we moved from Eugene to Greenbelt, I had given my golf clubs away, figuring my golfing days were over. My failure on the driving range in Middleboro confirmed that I was probably washed up.

Now I have thought about giving golf one last try. I had hoped when I moved to Kellogg that one of the courses in the county might have professional instruction available like they used to -- but, they don't. The closest instructors are in CdA.

So, for now, at least, I've lost a good friend. I miss that great feeling that hitting a great golf shot creates -- even if I only felt it once or twice a round. I miss the fun I had playing with friends. Golf was the one thing Dad and I could always count on enjoying together. I miss those friendly competitions from twenty years ago in the Eugene area when the guys and I would play scrambles together. I miss the sunshine, the wind, and even the rain. (I don't miss the heat, though.)

My only consolation in having lost this friend is that I can follow golf as a fan. If I'm in the right place at the right time, a golf tournament will be on television and I have never lost the thrill of seeing great shot making by the professionals, especially great shots executed under pressure. I also love reading about golf and one day I'll return again to the great golf writer Herbert Warren Wind and reread his accounts, written for The New Yorker, of tournaments I enjoyed when I was younger and we had a television in the house.

But, as far as playing golf, I could be wrong, but I think those days are over.