Coming Out of the Rough

 

By Terence Loose

 

H

ello.  My name is Terence Loose. . .and I’m a golfoholic. I haven’t taken a putt in almost nine months, but every day is still a struggle; a 230-yard par three over water, you might say. I wake up in cold sweats, hyperventilating after nightmares of slicing into the Pacific from the 13th tee at Pelican Hill’s Ocean Course. I shake with excitement when I envision the plush fairways that will grace the upcoming Oak Creek Golf Club; and each year when the Toshiba Senior Classic comes to the upscale Newport Beach Country Club, I have to leave town.

There was a time, of course, when I only golfed socially, on Sundays with a few friends.   If the sun went down after 14 holes, I could walk away. Soon, however, I was turning down party invitations so I could putt late into the night. I started golfing alone, and eventually, I was even golfing in the morning.

I’d roll out of bed at five a.m. and by six I’d have a driver in my hand.  It began to affect my job.  I’d go out to long, three-bucket lunches at the driving range. I started hanging around other golf addicts. We’d call in sick to work at least once a week and spend all day on the greens—putting, chipping, working on our slices.  We’d wear crazy clothes and drive out to Palm Desert by dawn, in the middle of 120-degree summer heat, and play 72 holes a day, pouring ice water over our heads to keep from passing out. At work, I’d think only of golf. A framed picture of Jack Nicklaus replaced the one of my fiancée atop my desk and my bottom drawer was filled with golf balls, golf magazines and a fold-up putter for when the boss wasn’t around.

Finally, he came to me. “Terry, your golfing is becoming a problem; you need help,” he said, and fired me. Two hours later I was at the nearest driving range, working my way through a jumbo bucket and telling the guy wearing an “Arnie Palmer for President” T-shirt in the next stall how I hadn’t had a good lie since I was a kid.

The bottom fell out six months later when I had gone through my entire savings and become indebted to every golfer I knew. Welcome at no courses, public or private, I couldn’t even get someone to spot me a free range ball.  After I got busted a few times for sneaking on to the back nine of a certain rich, private club, I decided it was time to go straight. I went through golf withdrawal, complete detox. I burned my score cards and twisted all my clubs into shiny pretzels (which actually felt pretty good). Soon, I had stopped practicing golf swings in movie or grocery store lines and was dressing better. Now, I’m trying to find where my passion became obsession; just how I lost myself in the bottom of a golf bag.

My story isn’t surprising to Mark Simmons. He didn’t take up golf until the age of 30 and actually kicked his habit for almost five years. But, like most, it drew him back in. “Golf isn’t a game; it’s not something you go out to play and then forget about,” he tells me while puffing on a cigarette and working his hand into a leather golf glove. “It’s an addiction.” He is standing on the first tee of the Costa Mesa Golf Course at 5:38 a.m., waiting for the sun to come up so he can see well enough to take his first shot of the day. While his friend, Terry Robinson, has the day off, Simmons will be at the office by 10, another 18 under his belt.

Now here, I think to myself, is a man who can sympathize. He knows where I’ve been; he knows how thick the rough is and how easy it is to lose one’s way. “You wouldn’t happen to keep a putter in your office would you?” I ask him. Simmons puts out his cigarette and moves toward me, his right hand clinched around his driver. “Have you been talking to my wife?”

A few minutes later he is gone; a few hundred yards down the dew-heavy fairway, searching for his ball in the dim morning light.

Simmons and his group are the first ones out this morning and mark the end to the best time at the golf course before the golfers arrive. The feeling is tranquil, the only sounds are sprinklers spray and waking birds; thick trees and gently rolling hills surround and the great long history of the game invades. Then, the golfers arrive. They begin the march well before light, fueled by large coffees, their shiny spikes crunching on the pavement as talk turns to the new wood or stance or back swing that will finally give total satisfaction and a lower handicap. Usually, by the end of the first hole they realize that this will not be that victorious day, and that now, the best they can hope for is to avoid throwing their clubs in the nearest water hazard.

Balboa Island’s Ginger Zimmerman, for instance, is out with her husband Art on this summer day. They play in the early morning to beat the crowd and spend time together. They say they like it because it is a peaceful start to their day, but Ginger admits it can turn out to be anything but. “Today, I promised myself that I’d keep my cool. That I wouldn’t act like a two year old,” she says.

Even dawn patrol sessions, however, can be bested. Take Newport Beach’s Marc Kelly, a Principal with Spectrum Management. When he and good friend Anthony Bishop were contemplating how to spend their 40th birthdays, it was a short debate—golf. No distractions, no excuse. If they could, they’d inject Titlists into their veins. They thought about traveling to Pebble Beach or Pinehurst, but finally decided that this should be their trip to Golf Mecca. So the 40th birthday-day of golf turned into a nine-day, 10 round golf binge to Scotland. Their golfing safari included stops at Prestwick, Turnberry, Royal Troon and St. Andrews. “Once you start playing, a couple of birthdays, Father’s Days and Christmases go by where everyone gets you golf stuff, and you’re hooked,” he says.

All this begs the question:  What is it about this game that keeps people coming back for more? Why, in other words, would someone choose a sport whose goal, according to Winston Churchill, is to “hit a very small ball into a very small hole, with weapons singularly ill designed for the purpose?” If it is the tranquil buzz that first attracts, then what is it that gets a person to step into the tee box after the fiftieth errant drive into the woods?

Kelly, a regular Thursday morning dawn patroller at Rancho San Joaquin Golf Course, insists that he actually does find the game relaxing, but he had to work at it. He never uses a golf cart and rarely worries about lowering his 18 handicap. “Sure, it can be a frustrating game, but I realize that I’m never going to be on the senior tour, so I try to keep things in perspective,” he says. “I don’t think I’m a true golf nut.” I decide not to remind him of the Scotland thing.

Louis Haggar, a six-foot man with a powerful shoulder turn I meet at approximately 5:52 a.m. at Costa Mesa’s Los Logos first tee, answers me with sighing and saying:  “We are not the men we used to be.” I have no idea what he means and before I can find out, he’s chasing his drive into the left rough. I chalk his statement up to the rantings of another hopeless golf junkie Jonesing for his early morning fix.

Since the answer obviously lies in the psychology of the game—or addiction—and I’m not going to find it by talking to those the game afflicts, I visit Pelican Hill Golf Club’s Dr. David F. Wright, Ph.D. in psychology, PGA Tour Instructor and author of the book Mind Under Par. For the last 12 years, he’s been helping everyone from the weekender to the tour professional not only play better golf, but, more importantly, be more relaxed and have more fun doing it. The answer to the golf bug is therefore not abstinence, but education:  Knowing how to play your best golf and letting it be the healthy satisfying experience you envisioned before you shanked that first drive through the club house window.

First, says Wright, intrinsic in the game of golf is its variable ratio schedule of success. That’s psycho-speak for the type of incentive that bought all the light bulbs in Vegas:  Random payback that doesn’t happen a whole hell of a lot. Consider the fact that the top few tennis players in the world spend 90% of their time losing.

So, why not make fairways paved half pipes leading directly to a 20-foot-wide cup and give bonus points for the longest golf bag throw? (After all, even Vegas gives you free drinks.) Because that would kill the allure of golf:  Its ever-changing aspects and constant challenges (can you say “euphemism?). It is the sport with the most variables—clubs, lies, grass, course conditions, weather, etc.—and no two courses are exactly the same (as in tennis or basketball, say). In this way, one of the world’s slowest sports is also its most dynamic. “I often tell businessmen whom I instruct: ‘If you want to see what kind of person you’re about to hire, play a round of golf with them.’” The golf course, Wright says, is a great analogy of life, offering a variety of challenges and providing a true reading on how a person deals with stress. “Do they constantly focus on the hazards or do they look past them to the target? Do they lose their temper quickly? Is the person confident and patient? Do they cheat? Do they put mistakes in perspective and move ahead or dwell on their misfortunes?”

This idea was taken to the extreme by therapist Steve Cohen and golf pro Fred Shoemaker in 1988. Together they opened a course at Big Sur’s Esalen Institute founded on the theories of Michael Murphy’s novel Golf in the Kingdom. The hero of Murphy’s book is Shivas Irons, sort of the Zen master of golf. Cohen and Shoemaker, along with Murphy and the fictional Irons, believe that golf is the surest way to your true inner self, who you are and how you relate to your world. It’s no coincidence that the book and the course have reached cult status.

In this same way, says Wright, how a person manages his or her off-course life can help or hurt the golf game—and vice versa. He teaches course management skills, which encompass everything from swing preparation to controlling frustration and anxiety after a bad shot to a healthy internal dialogue. A person must successfully manage his or her personal life to succeed on the golf course and by learning to manage emotions on the golf course, that person may improve his or her off-course life.

Glenn Deck, Wright’s peer and director of instruction at Pelican Hill and Irvine’s soon to open Oak Creek Golf Club, has personally benefited from Wright’s instruction and says the love-hate relationship of many golfers still fascinates him. “I once followed a foursome at La Quinta in which every player screamed and yelled from the first tee to the 18th. The first thing they did after finishing was go to the starter and ask when they could get on again,” he says with a laugh. “That’s crazy. You’ve got to realize that it’s not your mortgage payment you’re shooting for. As soon as you do that, you’ll not only have more fun, you’ll play better golf.”

By now, you know where all this is leading. . .back to the tee, of course. The good doctor has instilled in me the confidence that golf is a controllable addiction (if that makes any sense). It may even be helpful to my personal life. Make me more positive and strengthen my judgment. Get me a raise even. Yes, I see that now. Give me that tee time; hand me that driver. I’m playing through, damn it! Oh, and by the way, I’ll be a tad late for work today. . . . þ

 

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