Coach's Corner

Looking back, I can't honestly say what started me down this Hell's Highway. Was it the sarcastic goading of the food critic? Was it because all my friends took afternoons off, so I was left by myself in an empty office (where I stayed busy answering the odd phone call) trying to convince myself I was the good one, working, while everyone else was off playing golf? When a duffer knows the jig is up, does he try to remember the one incident which started him down this perverse path? I guess it doesn't matter. I have my very own pro now; a man of unfailing good cheer. He starts a clinic with 15 minutes of good, positive thoughts. Common golf expressions such as "I suck" or "I can't hit it over that" are as abhorrent to him as eating Fido for dinner might be to you or me. He will not approve of what I'm about to say, but it's true. I'm a very bad golfer.

Let's define terms here. There are volumes of books, written in a humble, self- deprecating style common to golf writers, filled with tales documenting the trials and tribulations of this sick game, thought up long ago by an angry, anal/compulsive, Scottish sheepherder. Truth is, these stories are never written by really bad golfers, no matter how pathetic the writer sounds. They usually turn out to be 14 handicappers. A 14 won't get you on the tour, but it's a higher level of mediocrity than I, at 24, will ever get close to. These fellows don't know pain.

Of late, I've been racking up such astronomically high scores, I can't even maintain this quite modest number. I'm embarrassed to turn in my score, so I pretend I'm just a fun guy out for some walk and exercise. This is an egregious lie. A "good" 110 isn't fun. I'm not that fun a guy.

I've arrived at, I fear, the gloomy terminus in a long bus ride to Hell. In the five years I've been "playing" golf, I've surely spent hundreds of hours on the driving range, pounding away at tens of thousands of balls, cavalierly tossing away thousands of dollars on lessons, clinics, magazines, and books. All wasted, in the fruitless hope of hitting that filthy, despicable little ball.

Yet, sadly, after all this time, I don't look much different from the golfer I see in that first videotape of my swing five years ago. Picture the Tin Man from The Wizard of Oz setting up over a golf ball. My torso creaks in a gigantic effort at a microscopic shoulder turn. The club lurches along an uncertain path somewhere behind me. My arms -- stiff as a three day corpse -- pull the club upward. My right arm, when it finally ends its tortuous path at the top of something, let's loosely call it my "swing," flys akimbo. In order for the club to get down to where the ball is patiently waiting, I throw myself in the direction of the orb, rising on my tip toes like a ballerina, as all my weight stays, defying all physical laws, on my back foot. When gravity finally forces the club to earth, I've either smashed it into the ground (a foot behind the ball) or hit the very tip-top dimple of the ball, producing a wildly hopping worm burner, an ineffective shot at best, a disaster if an obstacle, say a small creek, is in the way.

I've had better days. This summer, so long ago, I posted six straight sub-100 rounds. Friends patted me on the back. The air was pure. The game easy. Those bad, old days of 110 were long behind me. I, you see, was a golfer now.

It started slipping away slowly. 96s became 100s. 100s ballooned, with hot putting, to lucky 104s. Highly attuned to my inner workings, I sensed something amiss. I went back to my pro. With him standing behind me, smiling benignly beneath his straw hat, I quickly became the Good Coach. 7-irons flew straight and true, with just a hint of a draw. 3-woods arched high into the blue sky. The next day, with all those good swing thoughts still fresh in my mind ("Throw the ball over your shoulder. Clip the grass."), it went away. Far away.

An embarrassed basket case, I called my pro again. "Look, Andy," (Did I detect a hint of pity?) "Come on out. Let's take a look. No charge this time." I accepted this unprecedented offer. Following my now firmly entrenched pattern, within five minutes, despite overwhelming fear and trepidation, the ball flew high and, more or less, straight. I took a few days off before going to the driving range, to rediscover my game, as it were. It was a disaster. A casual observer might have nodded in sympathy for the first-time golfer. I'd come face to face with the blackest hole in a duffer's worst nightmare. The innermost ring of Dante's inferno, where the worst people go, to suffer intolerable pain for eternity. Every ball was a shank. Each club, from the driver to the wedge, produced the terrible, horizontal shank.

I don't want to play any more. I find any excuse not to have to play golf. My arm hurts. I'm sick. I have to work. Anything but having to face that massive, endless, green acreage, filled with sand, water, and canyons, all placed to further destroy my already shaky psyche. Before Thanksgiving, I e-mailed my pro, asking him if he wanted to buy my clubs, passing along a truncated version of this tale. I can only imagine how upsetting my message must have sounded to this man, who sincerely believes there's no such thing as a bad shot and certainly not a bad golfer.

I'm thankful for the cold and rain. Distressingly, I'm thankful for the flu I caught last weekend, allowing me to weasel out of a golf game. I think I may have discovered a flaw in my grip. Once, this might have filled me with hope, but now, deep down, I'm happy it's raining, so I don't have to go out and discover any change of grip was irrelevant.

For now, my clubs poke balefully over the rim of their bag -- like a nest of alert cobras -- out in my car trunk. I give a wide berth when passing them in the garage. A malevolent evil lurks in that colorful bag. We're at a crossroads, my clubs and I. As in a faltering relationship, perhaps it's best we don't speak or touch just now.

I'm taking things day by day. This spate of good weather is bad. I tell people I'm working on my tennis game. Soon, the year will end. I'm hopeful the passing of '97 will somehow make a difference. If nobody buys my clubs by Christmas, maybe, maybe I'll try it again.