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Sunset at St. Andrews

Zen and the Art of Divot Replacement

by James Boles

  

Golf is a powerful metaphor in my life and a complicated relationship. More than a game, sport or competition—at my best it is a meditation, but more often it devolves into a confrontation with my mental affliction—the wedge: scooping, decelerating short game.

The best driver of the ball you have ever seen…a streaky putter…but the short game is an affliction…Can you hold one thought, one swing, one shot in your mind from waggle to impact? Or will you succumb to the impact zone yips, the fatal chase move...but we are not discussing my swing flaw, or rather, my scoring flaw…

I have come to believe in the four noble truths;

and I play golf as a metaphor—a means to teach

an unmasterable game— enlightenment

The grounds for gauf

The rules of gauf

The true match

One swing, one shot

My teacher, a master of zen,

put it more eloquently when he told me,

“one shot to test your understanding,

and eighteen holes to polish the soul.”

I took up the game of golf faster than some, earlier than most but not all. It was the summer of my ninth year, when a friend up the street started taking golf lessons at the Dallas Country Club. He invited me out to the grounds of Dover Elementary School to demonstrate what he had learned, and together we fashioned a two-hole course between the baseball diamonds on the playing fields. My re-collection, is that I beat my friend with his own clubs, first time out­­ over that makeshift layout. The friendship did not survive that first match, but my passion for the game did.

Soon thereafter my family left Richardson, Texas, and moved overseas when my father accepted a European assignment with the Department of Army. Our family spent the next three years in Italy, just outside Livorno, port city to Florence and then two more in Heidelberg, Germany, headquarters of NATO High Command. Most of my summer weekends I spent on the golf course, either caddying for my father on one of his golfing trips to Punta Alla in Italy; or caddying for the generals in Heidelberg—lessons in how not to play the game.

When we got overseas, my father also took up golf. My father was not a very good golfer. He was a leftie, and so played the game from the other side of the ball at a time when there was only one lefty in the pros. When he was on he could drive the ball with power, but seldom did he have the accuracy to match his length. His touch around the greens could be quite abysmal as well, but he keep fidelity with the rules. He counted every stroke and never improved his lie.

It was an important lesson to me.

When I reached my middle years, a phase my wife claims began shortly after my 37^th birthdate and continued without cessation until the end of my fiftieth year, golf became a weekend obsession…an escape from the pressures of the job or lack of one, and tension in the family unit.

I was also trying to re-activate a writing career that had laid dormant too long. A novel had sprung into my head about the story of a half-black, Shinnecock caddie by the name of Jobe ‘one shot’ Shipman who carried the bag for eighteen Open winners.