Tag Archives: Golf

Straight Down The Middle

I love golf.  And today I was loving golf in Cambridge, where the top women professionals are playing this week.  I’m at the Travelodge tonight and will be heading back to the course tomorrow morning.

I especially love women’s golf.  Why, you may ask?  It’s not just because they’re pretty (but that is a factor).  The best, however, is that many of them smile and have fun with the gallery. I want famous people to be friendly, to be nice human beings, folks that I’d enjoy having a coffee with.

Today I followed a 17-year-old Canadian girl – Brooke Henderson.  You should have seen her after the round, signing autographs for kids and other human beings.  She smiled and made eye contact.  Lovely.

I think that a good golf swing is a thing of beauty, especially the full follow through after the club contacts the ball.  Many times today, with Brooke and other women, I was close by as they teed off.  I was so taken with the pose at the end of the swing that I usually didn’t even watch where the ball was going.  Power and grace.  And one example of full self-expression.

In other moments, the flight of the ball held me.  When I hit a ball, it’s always coming down by the time I lift my head on the follow though.  Not these women.  The ball climbs and climbs … touching Spirit on high.

Of course there’s the world of golf scores and who’s in first place and who gets to hoist the championship trophy.  That’s good, but it’s the moments that enthrall me, not the cumulative result.  Some of golf’s moments are ecstatic and some are devastating, but they’re all symbols for the roller coaster that each of us lives.

Another reality today was that I got really tired.  My feet and legs had enough of sidehill walking through fescue grass.  And despite my water bottle, I got dehydrated in the sun.  I told myself this morning that I’d walk 36 holes, but in fact I did 16.  I retreated to a tent housing some energy company, and the attendant there kindly allowed me to sit down for awhile in the shade.  We had a lovely talk and she was happy to take a copy of Jody’s book.

Tomorrow I’m into grass once more.  Sure I’d like to see Brooke play well and make the 36-hole cut but it’s far more important to see the balls fly and the mouths turn upwards.  The soul soars.

Moe Norman

How about reflecting on those of us who don’t fit in?  Many in society look at them and sneer.  They don’t talk right.  They don’t dress right.  They make some of us very uncomfortable.

Moe Norman was a Canadian professional golfer.  His constant chatter was punctuated with repeated phrases, such as “Not bad!  Not bad!”  At the same time, he was overwhelmingly shy in social situations.  His clothes were old and ragged.  He sometimes smelled bad.  He often slept in his car.  He stood on the tee with feet that looked impossibly far apart, and swung straight back and straight through – no classic turning of the body.  He’d walk up to his ball on the fairway or green, and just hit it – no waggle of the club, no studying the line of the putt.

Moe never made it to the big bucks of the PGA Tour.  During his few tournaments on the Tour, he was ostrasized by some of his competitors.  Moe went home.

And yet … golfers such as Tiger Woods say that he was one of the purest strikers of the golf ball who ever lived.  Moe hit it straight and true – over and over again.

Here are a few stories:

At an exhibition in Toronto, Sam Snead warned Norman that he couldn’t carry the creek 240 yards from the tee.  “I’m not trying to,” said Norman, who calmly stroked his drive across the walking bridge to the far side of the hazard.

Leading by three shots on the final hole of a tournament, safely on the green in regulation, Norman putted deliberately into a bunker, just to make things interesting. He got up and down to win by a stroke.

Norman died a week before the 2004 Canadian Open.  He’d had bypass surgery several years before, and upon waking from anaesthesia, he was asked if he knew where he was.  On the third green, he said, at the London Hunt and Golf Club.  Doctors were concerned, but in fact the hospital where he lay was built on the former site of that club.  The building that held his room was located where the third green used to be.

I need a world that makes room for Moe Norman, in fact a world that embraces him, and those who follow him down the streets and fairways of life.