At Home on the Range

My first experiences with golf were when I was a teenager and my Dad, Norman, (above) dragged me out to the course in a vain attempt to get me interested in the game. He tried, bless him, but it never did really catch on. I was the opposite of athletic when I was in high school, and I wasn't, if I'm honest, that enthusiastic about going out on the course with my old man, but it was in my interest to try and make him happy, so along I trotted, trying my very best to keep that left arm straight and my head down. My principal memories of those outings are once when Dad hit a chickadee with his tee shot on what is now the 16rh hole (it was eight in those days). We got a good guffaw at him getting a birdie. Ha ha. I also remember despising what was then the fourth hole, the present-day steep Mt. Mckinley 11th. I still despise that hole and have never scored well on it. Quite the opposite, it's often the disaster of my round. 

We played a few times since then, once we went to the Randolph Country Club and the nitwit of the club pro didn't want me to play because I didn't have a handicap, so I had to go to the range so I could prove I could, indeed, hit a golf ball and wouldn't ruffle the delicate sensibilities of the Members if I trod on their precious little golf course.    

Dad was the definition of an avid golfer. Like three or four times a week avid. When, after 30 years as a journalist, including stints covering world events for UPI (he was the head rewrite man in Paris, London and finally Washington, DC) and also as Managing Editor of the Brattleboro Reformer, he decided to embark on a second career as an Episcopal priest, of all things, he found a job at a tiny parish in Vermont, as rector of the St. Martin's Episcopal Church in Fairlee, VT. I'm convinced that 90% of the reason he took that post was that the church was located literally across the street from a golf course. Across the street.  Like, if the door was open while he was preaching he could see golfers toodling in their carts down the fifth fairway and hear the thwack of club striking ball. He'd found heaven. 

He played until his body betrayed him and his Parkinson's made it impossible to get around the course, even to walk without a walker. One day when I was visiting him in his home in Brookfield, VT (home of the famous floating bridge,) he suggested we go down the the driving range outside Randolph and hit a few. He couldn't hit any, at that point, but he thought it would be fun to watch me flail away for a spell. When we go there I settled him in his wheelchair behind the tees and got a bucket of balls. 

"Don't twist your body so much, you're swinging like a baseball swing, and it's not a baseball swing," he coached. "Keep your head down, Jeez," he chided when I whiffed on one. "There you go," he encouraged, when I actually connected with a couple. This was when I realized that a golf swing is a repeated physical motion, just like an up-bow or down-bow when playing the cello, which is what I do professionally (when I'm not greeting obnoxious guests at the Hampton Inn in Brattleboro.) Once I realized that, and started communicating with my body like i do when playing the cello,  I was able to reproduce the swing and control my muscles, and the balls started flying into the distance. Damn, I thought, that feels good! Fun! 

A year or so after that Dad truly accepted the fact that his body was a complete wreck and he was never going to play golf again, which must have been a very, very sad realization. He bequeathed me, then, his beloved golf clubs, several of which I still use. I think of him every single time I play, and I wonder if he ever had as much trouble as I do with that finicky 5-iron. Probably. 

Being busy, and a bit absent-minded, I didn't play with those clubs for a year or so, until I met my buddy Adam here at the hotel. I noticed a set of clubs in the back seat of his very sporty Mazda Miata, and I said, brightly, "Oh, you're a golfer? We should play sometime." To which he replied, "Sure, how about tomorrow?" And that was the beginning of my current golf journey. I'm awfully grateful to Adam; he was very patient with my bad-golfing, taught me a great deal and smiled despite all the smack-talk I dealt him. We had some fun rounds, including 18 holes in Bernardston in 95-degree summer weather. (That was the round where a goose ate my ball.)

All of which leads me to yesterday. I've played a couple of lousy rounds lately, lousy even by my questionable standards, so I decided it was time to practice a little. I'm a musician, and musicians love to practice. (It should be said that even when I was thick in my career I was never much of a practicer, but there you are.) There's an ad on TV for some golf product or another, and the woman narrating it, an LPGA pro, goes on about how she puts in two hours on the range, every day, and two hours on the putting green, every day. Every day. If I did that I could play on the LPGA tour too! So she's kind of an inspiration, and again, every time I play golf I channel my Pop, and remember that time in Randolph. 

With that in mind I got in my non-sporty little Nissan Sentra (I kept offering Adam the great chance to trade my Sentra for his Miata, straight-up, but for some reason he never took me up on it. And then he moved to Hawai'i. What a bum. I mean, who wouldn't want to drive a Sentra in the winter of Vermont instead of a glorious life in Hawai'i. Doesn't make sense to me. 

Had a pretty productive time at the range, though to be sure not every shot went where I wanted it to go. Had some good shots with my 4-hybrid, which is wonderful when it behaves but I don't trust it on the course. Had some bad shots with Dad's wood 3-wood. That's a funny club. Awfully heavy in the head, not easy to get a good reliable swing on it. I've noticed it behaves the best when I surprise it. I don't play it for almost a whole round, then on a whim I'll pick it up on the eighth hole and it performs wonderfully, with a satisfying wooden thwack at impact. But when I take it out on purpose to get a nice drive, it misbehaves and hooks badly, or it misses the ball completely, damn thing. Just a finicky club, I guess. My relationship with Dad was sometimes rocky and sometimes great, and it seems to be the same with his old wood 3-wood. I did hit a spectacular drive with his old metal 5-"wood," which is actually my favorite club off the tee. For some reason I get astonishing distance from it when I hit it right, like 200 yards, let's say. Seriously, it goes almost 200 yards. Boom. Had some good wedge shots, trying to build my confidence on approach shots with that club when a 9-iron is too much club. 

Then I went to the practice green, which is the old No.1 hole of the old course. I worked hard on that 60-degree wedge, which Calvin says I should just use out of the bunkers but I ignore him because I see the pros using it to pitch, so there. I was too tentative at first and it didn't go very far, but by the end of the session I was feeling much more confident giving it a good swing and watching it describe a lovely arc and bounce more or less where I wanted it to bounce. 

So, that was a good practice session. I practiced, so now I will be a good golfer. I'm pretty sure it just takes one practice session to go to being a good golfer from being a bad-golfer. I hope so.