The Game: Chronicles of a Golfer Not Yet Finished

By Jeffrey Thoreson

Finally, a book about the game of golf as you play it. This book is not about great professional players past or present. It is not about the world's great courses. It makes no claims that you will be a better player after reading it. This book is about you and the game as you play it. In this whimsical collection of essays, author Jeffrey Thoreson writes about his 30-year journey through the game and does so in a way that relates to anyone who has ever taken up golf.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Dec 9, 2013
• ISBN: 9781483514024

Book preview

2013

PART I:

THE GRIND

CHAPTER ONE

THE CHORE OF PUTTING

My friend Ice Pick says putting is fun. I suppose it is, if you broaden your definition of fun. So now I consider it fun to stub my pinky toe on the coffee table leg. The next time I have to cross an asphalt parking lot in bare feet on a hot August day, I’ll savor the pleasure. When the check for the house payment bounces, I’ll just have to laugh. And when my wife says she’s really had it and is moving to the Caribbean with a guy she’s been seeing on the side for years, well, that will be my new definition of merriment and gaiety.

Putting is fun? What’s wrong with this guy? He must love to clean his toilets, burn his dinner and scratch the paint on his car. If this guy thinks putting is fun, he must be the guy out there cutting his grass at 7:30 every Saturday morning. Putting is fun; give me a break. Actually, don’t give me a break. The straight putts are the only ones I feel I have chance to make.

Putting is not fun. It’s a chore, no different from taking out the garbage, painting the trim in the living room or cleaning out the gutters. The only difference is you can make your kids take out the garbage, you can hire a painter to do the trim or you can go to Home Depot and buy gutter guards. Putting you have to do yourself. If you think about it, no endeavor can last four-plus hours without having a component of pain to it. You could go sailing, but you have to hoist the sails, scrub the barnacles and do whatever sailors must do. You can take the family to Disney World, but you still have to stand in line.

I can see how putting could be fun. If I had a chance to make every thirty-footer like the guys on television, I’m sure putting would be a blast. If every six-footer went in, I would use this chapter to eulogize putting. If three-putts were less common than Big Bang Theory reruns, I’d rank rolling the ball on the short grass right up there with sex, Guinness and scratching off an instant lottery winner. But the fact is most of my thirty-footers then require a six-footer, which I miss, resulting in another three-putt. So rather than extolling the art of putting, I curse the sheepherder who first knocked a rock into a rabbit hole with a stick and decided to make a game of it.

I love striking the ball, and I am somewhat competent at it. I love the purity of the feeling. I love the accomplishment of executing an athletic endeavor far more difficult than it looks. I love the result: the ball taking off violently then flying softly, gracefully, and in the end, landing near the intended target with a gentle thump and a nice little roll out.

So why is putting is such a problem? If the full golf swing is such a complicated process and I can do it with reasonable success, putting should be a breeze. If the full swing is Chopin’s Fourth Symphony in E minor, the putting stroke is Chopsticks. If the full swing is rocket science, the putting stroke is a bottle rocket.

You’d think that because the putting stroke requires so little athletic ability – really so little ability of any kind – that everyone would be able to do it reasonably competently. Ice Pick (his stab at the ball is more likely to scar the green than threaten the hole) says putting is fun, but he can’t putt. It’s just that he’s such a terrible ball striker that when he finally reaches the green, he realizes he won’t have to chase it into the woods or the sand or the backyard near the tee box any longer so he enjoys putting. Three or four stabs at it from fifty feet is pure enjoyment compared to seven or eight strokes from four hundred twenty five yards. Switchbacking around the hole a couple of times is fun compared to crossing the fairway three times on a cart-path-only day. You can’t step in any mud on the green, the snakes have no place to hide and as bad as Pick is, he has yet to lose a ball on the green. So yeah, I get it. I see where he’s coming from.

IP understands the psychology of putting. He actually gets all that Bob Rotella stuff, and he uses it. Not well, but he uses it. And he imparts it on me. Like the thing about tossing a beanbag to the hole. Let’s say you’re looking at a reasonably straight thirty-footer. If you tossed a beanbag underhanded to the hole, you’d probably get it close every time. So why can’t you roll your thirty-footer close every time? Sounds reasonable. I’ve tried the beanbag toss. I can do it. But put a shaft and a flat-faced club head between my hand and the object I’m trying to get to the hole, and I wield it with the clumsiness of a drunken jouster.

The problem is, adding that third element – the putter – takes the natural athletic ability out of the equation. Other sports are based on one’s natural motions, instincts and actions refined and perfected over the millennia since human survival was directly correlated to man’s ability to swing a club (the non-golf variety), or throw a spear or a rock. Tell me what caveman ever teed up a rock and tried to launch it with a stick to bring down dinner?

When you’re throwing, you rely on instinct. It doesn’t matter how far you’re trying to throw something, you just throw it instinctively. You don’t have a million things running through your mind. You’re not worried about how far behind your ear the ball needs to be, or about how far you should follow through. You’re not thinking about how much of an arc you need to put on the ball or whether your form and alignment are correct. You just throw the ball like man has done since the beginning of time. Your natural instinct and athletic ability take over, and the ball arrives somewhere near the intended destination. It never winds up getting only halfway there, going a ridiculous distance past or missing the target by an embarrassing margin. Yet all those things happen when you putt, or at lest when I putt.

Other sports are read and react. Actions are made in an instant. Decisions can’t be thought and re-thought and analyzed to the point of paralysis. I have way too much time waiting for my turn on the green, so I analyze and overanalyze because I’m bored waiting for the others in my group to lag up to two feet and mark. By the time I finally stand over my putt, I’ve decided it will break left, changed my mind and decided it will break right, then reasoned my way to hitting it straight at the hole and letting whatever happens happen because in all honesty I can’t read greens any better than I can read Braille.

So I’ve taken the first step to solving my problem. I admit I have one: I can’t putt. There, I said it. Of the three important elements of putting – line, pace and quality of the strike – I usually get two of them wrong. When I do make a long putt, and sometimes even short ones, I don’t feel responsible. It’s a lie. Somehow I beat back the demons without knowing quite how I did it. I suspect many of my made putts are a case of two wrongs making a right – a miss-read and a miss-hit and the ball ends up in the hole.

Yeah, Ice Pick, putting is a freakin’ blast, you moron. I spent years searching for the pendulum of my stroke, seeking the perfect metronomic back and forth that would give me the right combination of line and speed. I looked for the fall line of my putts, tried to pick out the pinnacle of the break and somehow incorporate that into my line (as if I could actually hit the line I finally decide upon). I searched for the grain and tried to figure out what it meant. It all simmers to a conclusion of worthlessness. Forget all that crap. The secret to being a great putter, my fellow loss on the moss, is to believe you are a great putter. Embrace the mystery. Surrender to the perplexity and bemusement of this oh so simple task. Admit to yourself that putting is just guesswork and that sometimes it’s going to take you three guesses to get it right.

CHAPTER TWO

GOLF & SOCIALISM

I live on a small lake about an hour outside the city; far enough away that a murder is still front-page news in the nearest town with a daily newspaper, but not so far that I can’t drive into the city for dinner and a show without having to make overnight arrangements.

My lake is more than 1,000 miles from New Orleans, and eight years have passed since Katrina, but the winds of George W. Bush’s debacle of the aftermath of the storm are now rippling the water on my lake, which sits 308 feet above sea level and a four-hour drive from the nearest ocean. The water level of my two-hundred-nineteen-acre lake is controlled by a dam. My house sits thirteen feet above lake level when everything is peaceful. In a big summer storm the level of the lake rises a foot or so. When a petering hurricane moseys through from the south, the water rises maybe two feet. When Superstorm Sandy plowed through, the water rose about five feet – just enough to deposit a layer of slit on my dock and be a nuisance but still well below the foundation of my house, which sits thirty feet off the lake’s edge.

After the Katrina recovery debacle, Dubya sent the Federal Emergency Management Agency out to essentially widen every possible flood plain it could find. Of course, the man-power needed for such a project was well beyond even the scope of the federal government’s resources, so without so much as sending out an engineer, surveyor, or even an intern to gather actual data about the lake and my home’s relationship to it, FEMA declared my house and a couple of neighbors to be in a 100-year flood plain and told us we all had to go out and buy flood insurance.

As near as I can tell from local bureaucrats, someone at FEMA (probably trying to justify his job) looked at some old topographic maps (quite possibly created before the land for my relatively recently built lakeside community had been graded to its current configuration) and decided that if the Mother of All Storms ever swept through, the water could rise to a level that would endanger my house – ignoring the fact that long before it would get to that point it would just spill over the top of the dam and follow its natural course, which is what water does.

Well, maybe Superstorm Sandy wasn’t the Mother of All Storms (although it would be hard to convince many of my fellow Northeasterners of that) but the way it ripped through my inland town that night it had to be a close cousin, or maybe an in-law. So if the water dumped by mother-in-law of all storms couldn’t even get close to endangering my house, it stands to reason that even if it rained for forty days and forty nights (which I believe occurs a lot less frequently than every 100 years) my house would be in no danger. And at that point the world would have far greater concerns than whether I have flood insurance.

But the federal government knows what’s best for me, and Big Brother stepped in to protect me because it believes I am not capable of protecting myself.

So now the federal government – uh, the United States Golf Association – is telling me what’s best for my putting stroke. If golf is where we seek refuge and escape, why is someone tapping me on the shoulder and telling me what to do, just like the federal government?

The USGA and the Royal and Ancient Golf Association have mulled the anchored putting stroke for years. They combined their knowledge, wisdom, and vast experience and came up with a proposal not to outlaw the long putter and belly putter, but instead to tell us how we can and cannot use them. I am a traditionalist, but I have tried the long putter, even putted well with it for stretches. But like the water level of my lake, my putting always seems to find its natural mediocrity, so I gravitate back to the regular putter.

For the last couple of years, it seems the USGA has been hell-bent on doing something about what it perceives as the competitive advantage of the anchored putting stroke. It seems to me the correct course here is to define what constitutes a conforming putter, not legislate how we can use a piece of equipment the governing bodies deem legal. The game has never outlawed technological innovations (see gutta percha, steel shafts, titanium clubheads, etc.).

The worst rule the USGA ever implemented was to ban croquet-style putting. It’s the only rule that goes against the game’s underlying premise: Play the ball as it lies, play the course as you find it, and if you cannot do either, do what is fair. If Sam Snead figured out that putting between his legs was his best chance of getting the ball in the hole, who is the USGA to tell him he’s wrong?

The thing I love most about the game is that it lets you work your way around the course as you see fit. When my ball wanders into knee-high grass in a hazard, it may be my choice to drop within two club lengths of the red line, add a stroke and play on. Or, more likely in my case, I will attempt the heroic shot and ultimately take an X on the hole. But the rules of golf say I am free to exercise my stupidity as I see fit.

The USGA rightfully legislates equipment, just like any other sport’s governing body. But it doesn’t tell us how to swing our maximum 460cc driver, so why should it tell us how to swing our fifty-inch putter? If it’s legal, it’s legal. If it’s not, then ban it.

What bothers me about the USGA’s pending decision is the same thing that bothers me about the Snead decision and FEMA’s decision in my backyard – don’t presume to know what’s best for me. Let me live my life and putt my ball the way I want.

CHAPTER THREE

OPTIMISM OVER EXPERIENCE

The best view at my club is from the back terrace of the clubhouse tavern. There is better scenery on the course – mountains not too far in the distance, fairways that ebb and flow through the gathering foothills and a couple of drop-shot par threes that test one’s skill, tax one’s club selection but give you some eye candy from the elevated tees. There is an interstate highway delivering folks to and from the rat race of the nearby megalopolis, of which I strive to remain slightly west at all times, just to the left of the thirteenth fairway. When I play that hole I wonder where those folks might be headed, and I’m glad my biggest concern of the moment is whether I can reach the par five in two.

Those things considered, the truly revealing view at my club is from the tavern balcony. To the right are the day’s optimists, waiting, practice swinging and jibber-jabbering on the first tee while the group ahead clears the fairway. Soon they will – warmed up and properly prepared for the round or just out of the car, slap the clubs on the cart and go – try to fit a drive between a large bunker and a wooded hillside.

To my left is the eighteenth green, pushed up out of a low-lying wetlands area like a zombie digging out of the grave. There are bunkers to the left, impossibly thick underbrush to the right and a forced-carry over a marshy death. The whole scene is ample in the eyeful you get from the balcony thirty feet above, but truly frightening staring it down with a six-iron from fairway level.

Departing the eighteenth green are the dispirited and downtrodden souls who have fought the fight and now knock in their final putts, or perhaps just scrape away the last few feet and surrender. No mas. Subjugated, persecuted, repressed and even tyrannized by the course, they trudge up the hill to the clubhouse in search of comfort and relief from the tavern tap, driving right behind the first tee where just a few hours ago they were the optimists.

A journey of seven thousand yards around my course could be covered with a smooth wedge backwards off the first tee to the eighteenth green, and a lot of agony would be avoided. What happens after the optimists disappear over the crest of the first fairway and don’t return to view until they approach the eighteenth green? My course is hard, no question. But golf played anywhere is supposed to be fun, though you couldn’t judge so by the temperament of those muddling to the clubhouse after a round at my course.

A tour pro once told me he finds nothing sadder than a seven-handicap who takes the game seriously, meaning that unless you’re trying to make a living at the game, just enjoy it. Yet we can’t do that. I wonder what that pro would say about the twenty-handicapper who I just watched fat two shots into the marshland in front of the eighteenth green and slam his club into the ground repeatedly on his way back to the cart?

Sad, indeed.

Somewhere between the first tee and last green the game sucker punched this guy. And knowing my course, it probably hit him early, often and hard. My course scathes the best players. Its beauty hides a vitriolic soul.

It just doesn’t seem right that we enjoy this game so much when it just keeps knocking us down. We regularly swear off the game only to return to that same first tee a few days later as cheery optimists. Time may heal all wounds, but it apparently heals golf wounds in its most prompt and efficient manner. Maybe it’s the empathetic post-round beer(s) with the day’s other misfortunate souls, sharing similar stories of disaster and catastrophe. Or maybe it’s because golf wounds really aren’t very deep at all; a little scar to the ego, a scrape of the psyche – nothing that can’t be fixed right up on the drive home with a little anti-bacterial self-analysis that convinces us that the ninety-four we just shot really could have been a seventy-nine with a couple of favorable bounces and the tightening up of a couple loose swings. That thirty-footer that lipped out really should have gone in, the double bogey on seven never should have happened, and those four three-putts were just a package of stupidity. By the time you hoist the clubs from the trunk and put them in the garage, you’re cured and cued up for the next round. The game doesn’t leave any wound unattended for very long.

It beats us up, sure, but it also hides little morsels of not only competence but excellence along the way – little rarities that are such a surprising delight you continue forward in search of more – the forty-foot putt that drops like Tiger rolled it; the stuffed short iron that bounces once, checks and settles next to the hole for a tap-in birdie; the towering drive that clears the bunker you thought out of reach and guides itself to safety into the middle of the fairway. On some level we recognize these are merely the pearls in a career of oysters, but they truly are the shots that keep us coming back. I don’t care how bad you are or how horrendous your last round was, a player steps to the first tee draped in the optimism that today is the day because in golf, as in life, we remember our moments, and our psyche, especially our golf psyche, does quite an efficient job bandaging our ineffectuality.

I’ve come to the realization that Mark Twain nailed it. Golf absolutely is a good walk spoiled. What other explanation could there be for the contrariety between the first tee and the eighteenth green? And so I ask, what’s wrong with spoiling a good walk? We live for those few-and-far-between shots that reveal our best and hint at our inner virtuosity. As long as the game continues to hide those nuggets of greatness along the way, we’ll be happy to spoil a good walk every few days. And we’ll always show up with a smile on our face and optimism in our heart.

CHAPTER FOUR

SAVING THE GAME

My friend Jigsaw called one evening during this year’s long, hard, cold winter to let me know The Streak is alive. The Streak isn’t anything I lose sleep over, nor is it Ripken-esque. It’s just that Jig has indefatigably played at least one round every calendar month for almost twenty-five years, which for a Northeasterner is a task that requires advance planning, good fortune and a fair amount of testosterone.

The Streak started long before I met Jigsaw, and quite frankly I don’t have enough interest to have ever bothered to ask him how it got started. But his call got me thinking. It’s guys like Jig that keep the game thriving. It’s not the country clubbers who exist in their own few hundred acres of the golf world, often oblivious and uncaring about the Jigsaws of the game. It is certainly not the pros playing on television that keep the game moving along. In fact, I submit, all they do is slow the game down, perhaps even move it backwards, with their five-hour rounds in