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Play It Where It Lies: A Sermon on Golf
Reverend Brian J. Kiely, Unitarian Church of
Edmonton, May 29, 2005
There are many old jokes that cross religion with golf. One goes
like this. One Sunday morning Father O’Malley awoke to find
a glittering day, the kind of day that simply should be spent on
the golf course. He called his parish assistant and begged off saying
Mass that day, pretending that he was ill. Grabbing his clubs he
was out the door before you knew it.
Well, as it happened Jesus was looking down on Father O’Malley
that day and was a little disturbed. First the priest had sinned
by lying to his junior. Next he was sinning by skipping Mass and
finally he was skipping to play golf on the Sabbath. The more he
thought about it the more angry Jesus became.
He went to his Father – you know …God, and ratted out
poor Fr. O’Malley. “Dad”, he said, “Don’t
you think he should be punished?” “Oh yes,” said
God, “Just you watch!”
Now while Father O’Malley was an avid golfer, he wasn’t
actually a very good one. But like all golfers, he lived in hope.
He teed up on the first hole and smacked a monster drive right down
the middle and soon followed it up with three wonderful –
if uncharacteristic – shots making a nice par on the first
hole, a very rare occurrence for the good priest.
As the morning wore on, his game got even better. Quite simply
he was shooting the round of his life. Jesus looked on with consternation,
wondering when God was going to visit his divine wrath on the wayward
cleric. This wonderful round just wasn’t making any sense
to the Saviour. Finally the priest got to the 17th hole, a beautiful
par three. The priest teed it up and hit a gorgeous shot that landed
10 yards short of the hole, bounced twice and rolled straight in
for a hole in one.
Jesus wept. In frustration he yelled out, “What? The best
round of his life and now a hole in one? What kind of punishment
is that?” to be honest he was wondering if the old man was
finally losing it after all those millenia. “It’s a
perfect punishment” said God, “For who is he going to
tell?”
Indeed, it was the perfect punishment, for the only thing a golfer
enjoys as much as the game itself, is talking about the rounds they
had and the great shots they made.
And I am no different, so I’m rather grateful to Jan McMillan
for coming to me a few weeks ago and telling me that the choir was
debuting a song written by Gordon Ritchie in honour of Nancy Collinge.
She told me I had to talk about golf today, and how can I refuse
Jan anything? So, I’m making the sacrifice…but at least
I AM here and not out playing golf!
I started playing at a very young age. Well, mostly it was putting
a ball around my friend Wayne’s backyard in our own version
of mini-golf. For his 10th birthday Wayne’s Dad took us all
to a par 3 golf course. That’s a course where all the holes
are short and you only play with 2 or 3 clubs. It was a great place
to learn, especially since no one in my family golfed. During High
School summers I played a lot near our country home on a real course,
but with no teacher I always played badly, even though I loved it
enough to hitchhike 10 miles each way every week day. I then gave
up the game for 15 years when the reality of having to actually
pay my own green fees reared it’s ugly head.
When I took up the game again, I was already a minister. I had
studied Zen Buddhism a little and Taoism and it’s offshoot
t’ai c’hi a lot. Somewhere during that first round,
I realized that golf had a great deal in common with those oriental
philosophies. It is a game of letting go, or practicing the movements
and then letting go. As Star War’s Master Yoda says, “Try
not! Do, or do not.”
Millions of words are written each year about golf. Television
techno- golf pros use fancy tools to break down swings into the
smallest parts for analysis. All of that is fine as far as it goes.
There is a time and place for looking at those details. But the
problem with over-analysis in golf, as in most things in life, is
that it makes us think too much, worry too much and lose sight of
the core. You can’t swing a golf club while referring to index
cards describing what to do and what not to do. No one in the history
of the game has ever ‘thought’ the ball into the hole.
You can’t live life that way either. Sooner or later you just
have to let go.
The best golf shots come when you forget all that you have learned
and practiced, and simply trust that your body will know what to
do. It is a game of letting go of thought and simply doing.
Compared to most sports, with the possible exception of baseball
and curling, golf is a leisurely game. There is time between shots
to chat, to think about life and to muse on the game itself. Perhaps
that’s why the sport has generated so many down home philosophers
over time, and so many teachers who ‘get’ the keys of
Zen practice without ever having even heard of it.
One of the most celebrated is Harvey Pennick, a teacher and coach
in Austin, Texas from 1923-1973, whose legend grew even greater
after he retired. He coached some of the best golfers the men’s
and women’s games have ever known including Tom Kite, for
years golf’s leading money winner until Tiger Woods came along.
Pennick carefully noted observations about the game and often about
life in an old scribbler, but he never showed it to anyone.
“More than 60 years ago, I began writing notes and observations
in what I came to call my Little Red Book. Until recently I never
let anyone read my Little Red Book except my son, Tinsley. My wife,
Helen, could have read it, of course, but a lifetime spent living
with a grown-up caddie like me provided Helen with all the information
about golf that she cares to know…
“What made my Little Red Book special was not that what was
written in it had never been said before. It was that what it says
about playing golf has stood the test of time.”
Pennick wasn’t your typical golf pro. He never gave group
lessons and he didn’t teach a system. Instead he believed
each golfer was unique. Before he would take on a new student, beginner
or expert, he would buy them a cup of coffee in the clubhouse. He
would try to find out what they wanted to accomplish in golf, but
would also try to learn a little about each one. “Golf tells
you much about character, “ he wrote, “Play a round
of golf with someone, and you know them more intimately than you
might from years of dinner parties.” He felt chatting with
new students allowed them to take his measure, gain confidence in
him as a teacher, and a well-placed confidence is the key to successful
golf… and successful living.
He was a great believer in a positive, but realistic approach.
“When I am teaching, I never say never and I don’t say
the word don’t if I can help it. (I write them), but I would
never say them…to a student on the range with club in hand
and a need to learn while under the stress of being watched and
mentally graded.
“I try to put everything in positive, constructive terms…the
point I am trying to get across…is that when you are hitting
a golf shot, a negative thought is pure poison… I want you
to believe with all your heart that the shot you are about to hit
will be a good one. I want you to have total confidence.
“This may sound ridiculous to the player who doesn’t
break 100. The difference is between confidence and optimism. Confidence
is when you have hit this particular shot many times in the past
with success and you know you are capable of doing it again…
Optimism would be if you had never hit this shot successfully in
your life, and are hoping this will be the first time.”
Now that’s as much of a life lesson as it is a golf lesson.
Most of us want to encourage friends and family as they try new
things and take risks. But Pennick’s words suggest that we
have to ask if they have done the work they need to do – the
practicing – before they try it. It would, for example, be
overly optimistic to encourage someone to start a bookkeeping firm
if they had no grasp of the principles of accounting. Like a pure
golf swing, living in the moment can be a beautiful thing, but getting
to the place where one can successfully live in the moment often
takes a lot of practice and reflection.
In the reading, I quoted Harvey Pennick’s passage called
Take Dead Aim. “For golfers who might not understand Texas
talk, let me put the advice… a different way: Once you address
the golf ball, hitting it has got to be the most important thing
in your life at that moment. Shut out all thoughts other than picking
out a target and taking dead aim at it…. Forget about how
your swing may look and concentrate instead on where you want the
ball to go. Pretty is as pretty does.”
If you tune in any of the golf tournaments you might find on TV
this afternoon, at some time in the broadcast I can pretty much
guarantee that you will hear at least one commentator offer the
21st century version of Pennick’s “Take Dead Aim”.
They will look at a golfer and say, “She (or he) has great
imagination.”
Great imagination? What does that mean? That in addition to playing
pretty well and making lots of money that they also make up great
bedtime stories for their kids? That like Jesper Parnevik and his
legendary outfits or his new Irish sartorial rival Darren Clarke
– they choose golfing fashions that positively hurt the eyes?
No. In golf ‘imagination’ refers to the ability to
see clearly a range of choices available for any given shot –
sometimes even discerning possibilities others cannot see. It’s
like the great sculptor who claimed that he never carved anything
out of the marble, but rather chipped away the extra bits that were
hiding the image he saw in his mind.
Next, golf imagination means standing by the bag and choosing –
no – ‘seeing’ what club to choose and what stance,
grip and swing to choose that will make that shot possible, even
probable.
Next imagination means standing over the ball in perfect stillness
with a full colour picture of the swing, ball strike, ball flight
and finish of the shot whole and complete.
And finally, imagination means, that in the moment of stillness
just before starting the backswing, they trust that the body has
the picture firmly in muscle memory. They forget the whole thing
and just swing, purely, cleanly and without conscious thought. Golf
is a game of letting go. On those shots where a golfer has good
imagination, they display a perfect, if fleeting – moment
of Zen-like transcendence where the only possibility is the shot
they imagined. The club goes back, pauses, descends in perfect arc.
The ball flies off the club like it has eyes…and the gallery
is wowed. The golfer walks on like it’s another day at the
office, even then starting to imagine the next shot.
But the image stays. Today, Jack Nicklaus, to name one legend,
can describe perfect shots from 30 years ago as he reviews long
ago rounds in startling detail. Of course, he also remembers the
disastrous failures too, and can tell you exactly what he did wrong
back then.
This beautiful notion of imagination is available to every golfer.
The only difference between me and a pro is that they will realize
the shots they imagine 50 or 60 times a round. On my best days it
might happen a dozen times for me…and most of those will be
two-foot putts.
This beautiful notion of imagination is available to everyone in
life as well. We each have the power to prepare for what’s
coming our way, whether it’s a new career, a cross country
move, a new baby or even the prospect of death. And by practicing
the art of living we can make ourselves ready. When the moment comes
we can simply let go of conscious thought and live our way through
the experience, taking all it has to offer. In the end we may or
may not hit the shot we imagined. As Pennick says, “In a roundabout
way I have somehow tried to teach each of my students that golf
and life are similar. There’s nothing guaranteed to be fair
in golf or life, and we shouldn’t expect it to be different.
You must accept your triumphs and disappointments equally.
“I played in a lot of tournaments, but I felt that I was
playing as much for what I could learn from my fellow pros as for
any chance of winning.”
In the end, in golf or life, all we can do is practice, tee it
up, and finally let go and swing.
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