Authors: Bill Giest
On our outing, we left the house in the morning and didn’t return until early evening, the great length of time owing to the
number of strokes I required as well as to the vast amount of time I spent hunting for my ball.
I have tried to block out memories of that golf outing, but I do occasionally have flashbacks. Frankly, I prefer the flashbacks
to ‘Nam. I was in a kind of Jerry Lewis mode that day and there were a lot of laughs, all at my expense.
I recall having a golf bag slung over my shoulder, not like you’re supposed to, with the clubs low and by your side, but rather
with the clubs riding high behind my right shoulder like soldiers carry rifles. At any rate, when I bent forward to tee up
my ball, all of the clubs fell out, cascading over the top of my head. That one had them rolling on the fairways.
I also recall stroking a ball and having a golf cart whir up behind me with a man shouting: “Hey, you just hit my ball!”
“No,” I said, “I think I’ve been playing the Jim Jeffries brand ball all along.”
“I
am
Jim Jeffries,” he replied. I was unaware golfers sometimes had their names stamped on their balls.
It was on this day, too, that I performed a truly miraculous golf feat that defies both belief and the fundamental laws of
physics. Let’s just say if Jesus had done it (at Bethlehem Hills Country Club) they’d be teaching the tale in Sunday School.
I teed up the ball, and of course everyone in my group was staring at me, because they didn’t want to miss something good.
What they saw they will likely never see again.
I took a healthy backswing, whipped the driver through, and did manage to strike the ball, rather than pounding the turf behind
it or going over the top and completely whiffing as is so often the case. My partners gazed down-range, but could not pick
up the flight of the ball. About two seconds after my swing there was a dull thud as it came to earth not more than twenty
feet from the tee.
Behind
the tee! I had hit my drive backward, apparently stroking it almost straight up but with so much backspin that it landed
behind me. This time my friends did not immediately laugh. They were dumbstruck … aghast … awed at that to which they had
borne witness.
That was in the early 1970s. Since then I have continued to amuse others by playing my own quixotic brand of golf in which
I keep striving to reach the unreachable par. For fifty years I have played pretty much Par Free Golf.
T
en people scurry around the small gym, chasing little plastic balls bouncing off the walls. It sort of resembles handball
… a little bit … maybe team handball … played with big teams … and golf clubs … and lots of little hollow balls with holes
in them. And mayhem. It closely resembles mayhem.
The little game begins with ten people lined up in the middle, five of them facing one wall and five facing the opposite wall.
They stroke the plastic balls at the walls with 9-irons, then scramble all over the place trying to retrieve the rebounds
careening this way and that. When the balls ricochet straight back, the players look like hockey goalies trying to make saves.
What
is
this? This is bizarre, that’s what. This is my golf class. On a Monday night in February, with the temperature 28 degrees
outside, here we are trying to learn to play golf inside an elementary school gym in New Jersey.
Can this actually
happen?
I’ve signed up for a community school night class, which is not exactly a week at Pebble Beach in the Jack Nicklaus Golf Academy,
but it’s a start. And, it’s sixty-nine bucks! For six lessons. And that includes your own personal carpet swatch, which you
place on the floor to hit the balls from—although sometimes my particular carpet sample travels farther than the ball.
“Whoa!” exclaims the instructor, Liz Kloak, when the bad golf genie makes my little rug fly. “Watch it there.”
All the students are saying their “I’m sorry”s as they run in front of each other chasing their balls. Or their “Oh! I’m Really
Sorry!”s as their mis-struck balls strike fellow students. It could be worse. The balls could be real. Liz says a student
in a previous class didn’t quite “get it,” and hit a real ball that came back and struck another student in the foot. Luckily,
the victim worked for Johnson & Johnson and had bandages in her car.
Our motley group is clearly not ready for hoity-toity golf schools anyway, and is better off by far in the capable, compassionate
hands of Liz, who loves golf as it was gently taught to her by her kindly father. She’s a great golfer, but as a mother of
three who’s six months pregnant (“my stomach is costing me fifteen yards on my drive”), she has some perspective, always saying
reasonable, comforting words to us like “It’s just a game” and “So, don’t keep score.”
She also has a great Boston—“Bahstan”—accent: “Do it this way and you’ll get mo-ah yahdage and a bettah chance at pah.” Students
occasionally ask for a translation.
“Look at the ball!” she bellows, but amiably, at a student whose carpet is scooting across the gym.
“Don’t try to kill it!” she hollers to a guy who has swung as hard as he can and has missed the ball entirely.
“Face the direction you want to hit it,” she admonishes a cockeyed student.
That would seem obvious, but this is your basic instruction. A class for rank beginners. “Say you’re a ‘novice,’ “ Liz suggests.
“It sounds better than ‘beginner’ and doesn’t scare the golfers around you as much.”
Students in her two back-to-back evening classes range in age from eleven years old to sixty-seven. Six men and five women
in the first seventy-five-minute class, nine women and one man in the second. There are couples taking up golf together, women
who want to take it up for business reasons, other women who want to be able to play golf with their husbands because that’s
the only way they’ll ever see them, still other women who think they might meet rich men on the golf course, men who are giving
up on more strenuous sports, and men and women alike who just think golf looks like fun. “I don’t take it too seriously,”
says Michelle, hitting one sideways. “I can be miserable at home.”
We don’t even know how to hold a club, so Liz starts with the grip. Unfortunately, four of us are out of town for that first
class. The next week she works on the swing. Unfortunately, the four of us have not been notified that the class has been
relocated, so we meet at the wrong location for Class No. 2 and shoot the breeze for twenty minutes before figuring out there’s
a problem and heading home. Now, we’ll only have four classes to learn golf.
“I told you we should have taken Tiger Schulmann’s karate class,” one of our estranged foursome says to her friend. These
two are taking the class together—to learn golf, yes, but also to get the hell out of the house one night a week. The friend
doesn’t seem to mind at all that she’s wasting time at the wrong location missing golf class, “just so I get home after the
kids are in bed. Let’s go over to Finnegan’s [bar] for a drink.”
At Class No. 3, Liz gives the four of us a quick course in the grip: “Your left hand is your rudder. Your thumb goes straight
down the shaft. Grip it firmly but don’t white-knuckle it. Your right hand can be rotated clockwise or counterclockwise slightly
to adjust your shot. Clockwise opens your grip to stop hooking … the opposite to stop slicing.” Got it? Okay.
She speeds ahead. “Now, in your stance your feet are shoulder width wide, your knees are bent, with all joints relaxed. Keep
your head down and swing slowly. Get over that kill thing. If you swing hard and fast you don’t hit it squarely. Hitting the
sweet spot generates power. That’s why 120-pound women can hit it three-hundred yards. Do not accelerate on the downswing.
For more distance just take it back farther. Same tempo up and back. Count 1–2-3 up and 1–2-3 down like a pendulum if you
have to.”
Slow down. Bring your left shoulder into your sight plane on the backswing, then bring your right shoulder into your sight
plane. My mother wears purple so she sees her shoulders. “And finish. Throw the club over your shoulder—no,
gently
, or you’ll break your neck—on your follow-through. And when it’s a good shot, stand there with that club over your shoulder
and admire it in a pose for a minute, like this, even if it annoys your partners. My husband always has to tell me ‘that’s
enough!’ ”
Okay-okay-okay-I’ve-just-heard-more-about-golf-in-five-minutes-than-I’ve-been-told-in-fifty-years. But how can you possibly
remember to do all those good things at once? Yogi Berra said “You can’t think and hit a baseball at the same time,” and for
once he made sense.
There’s a lot to learn when you’ve picked up your swing from watching highway maintenance crews cutting weeds along the interstate.
This will take time. More than I have left here on the firmament, unfortunately.
The four of us join the group and begin to hit our first balls. “Generate loft!” Liz instructs a student who is on his hands
and knees the whole class searching for the balls he’s firing under the pile of tumbling mats in the corner. “Launch, don’t
push.”
One student disappears for ten minutes and finally walks out from behind the curtain on the stage, where he’s lost a few balls.
I’m thinking that if we’re losing balls in this little gym it does not bode well for us in the great outdoors—which is quite
vast.
Indeed, Liz cautions: “If you hook it or slice it here, you’re really going to hook it and slice it on the course.”
Halfway through the seventy-five-minute class, one woman has yet to hit the gym wall, which is a large target just twenty
feet away. On that wall hangs a poster of Cal Ripkin staring back at her. Below Cal’s picture in six-inch-high letters is
the word “Perseverance.”
“Remember, bad shots tell you more than good shots,” she says encouragingly as I hit a ball sideways. In my case I think they
might be telling me to leave.
“It should feel natural,” Liz says, standing behind a woman with her arms wrapped around her, going through the swinging motion.
“Nothing feels natural,” replies the woman, who unfortunately disappeared from class after two weeks.
“You’re grimacing,” Liz says to the next student. “Are you in pain? Golf is not meant to be physically painful. It is meant
to be emotionally painful.” All agree that it certainly is.
“How many went to the driving range over the weekend like I suggested?” Liz asks. “None? Well it’s a little cold. Remember,
at the range, don’t stand too near to the ones you love. Balls fly all over the place. And if the experience is a nightmare,
change clubs.”
A couple of students in the second class say they did go to the range, but with mixed results. The mother of the eleven-year-old
in class, Sean, says she went to the driving range and that she’s hitting the ball straighter now—but only fifty yards.
“With which club?” Liz asks.
“All of them” is the reply.
“Where’s Sean tonight?” the teacher asks.
“He had homework,” his mother replies.
“Tiger Woods never had homework,” comments another student.
“What if you’re missing the ball completely?” asks another.
“You’re probably swinging hard and fast and not looking at the ball and pulling your head up,” Liz answers.
One woman says she slices, and Liz tells her: “Women tend to slice more. We push the ball instead of striking it, and we don’t
follow through.” Women like myself. Liz tells me to make sure my thumbs are straight, then rotate my right hand counterclockwise,
close the clubface, and “finish!” Previously, my approach was to look at the hole, turn my body 45 degrees to the left, and
hit my normal slice. The trouble is that when you do it that way, the ball does what it’s never done before: goes straight.
Another student says her problem is that she hooks all the time. “As long as your bad shots still have names,” Liz says without
a trace of irony. “Slices and hooks we can try to deal with.”
The topic of the next class is: “The Pitch,” which I thought might be a lesson in how to cheat by pitching—i.e., throwing—the
golf ball baseball-style. When I attended the University of Missouri, a guy there set a world record that apparently still
stands for 18 holes played by throwing the golf ball, an 84.
“The pitch is used for shots less than a hundred yards,” Liz tells us. What I don’t tell her is that
all
my shots are less than a hundred yards. I can only
drive
the ball a hundred yards. “You’ll use your 9-iron or maybe the 8, or the one that says P for pitch on it.”
I wasn’t sure what those letters on the clubs stood for. Or the numbers either for that matter. I didn’t know the 1 was the
driver until a couple weeks ago. I thought the P might mean it was strictly for Poor or possibly Piss-Poor shots, which were
all I ever hit with it.
She demonstrates by hitting the ball perfectly, off the center of the basketball backboard. She once took an entire class
outside the school, where she demonstrated a 5-wood shot that was all too perfect, traveling over a house at the end of the
baseball field. A policeman returned the ball—the evidence. “The officer was impressed with the distance,” Liz says in all
modesty. “The truth is, I now know how far all my clubs will hit the ball.” Imagine. She even has an idea of what direction.
After her perfect backboard shot, we take over, hacking and thwacking the balls—and the little carpets—every which way. I
hear the young woman next to me complain “I can’t do this shot”—and she isn’t kidding. But when she repeats herself I realize
that, no, she isn’t saying “I can’t do this shot”; what she’s saying is “I can’t do this shit,” referring not simply to this
particular piddling little shot, but to “All This Shit,” meaning the entire game of golf.
Appropriately enough, our next lesson is on the S club. No, the S stands for sand wedge. “You will be in the sand a lot at
first,” Liz warns, but remains positive. “At least in a sand trap you can still see your ball. It’s not in the woods or underwater.”
She tells us that an S does not always come with a set of clubs, but to be sure to buy one because we’ll be needing it. Badly.