Bunker Mulligan "Let us endeavor so to live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry." ~Mark Twain

Okay, I have the answer for why Tiger is having so much difficulty (we should all be so unfortunate) on the Tour.

Listen, Tiger. You are working too hard on your mechanics. Your swing is no longer the finest example of fluidity in the golfing world. You are starting to look like the rest of us trying to get the clubhead in the right position at the right time.

You don’t need a swing coach right now. You don’t need friends or television analysts telling you what to do differently. You need to clear your mind and let the power flow as you once did.

(I normally don’t accept personal checks, but I think yours will clear easily enough.)

I got a new copy of The Cosmic Laws of Golf (and everything else) and finished it last night. I recommend it highly.

This is a typical mind-over-matter text, but is a quick read, and doesn’t spend a lot of time with esoterica that means little. Its focus really is meditation, and putting a golf focus on that meditation. I felt comfortable with the exercises the author recommended, and only got a little perturbed when he began trying to turn putting into pornography. I’ll let you figure that one out yourself.

Anyway, it is always tough to keep a focus when playing golf with frineds, but I did accomplish it a couple of times today with my negihbor. Especially on the last hole. My second finished pin-high to the left, just off the green, I could visualize my chip shot hitting just on the green and rolling into the hole, and that’s just what it did. I seldom birdie that hole, so it was a special bonus. What was interesting to me was that I had no conscious thought of visualizing the shot, it just popped into my mind.

It was my only birdie of the day.

I checked my scores and put some pressure on myself for tomorrow. I have to shoot an 81 or less to keep my handicap from going back up. The trend must remain downward!

I better do some meditating tonight.

Some time ago I wrote about Maslow’s Heirarchy of Needs as it relates to where we stand after 9/11 in a political sense. Yesterday on the golf course, Maslow came up once again.

Some researcher has spent a lot of time and money (federal money I would guess) to determine that human beings have three basic drives: food, sex, and love. I made the comment that Maslow came up with that years ago, and another of my playing partners made a much more prescient comment. I’ll call it Clary’s Correlary:

Food, Sex, Belonging, and Scratch Golf.

From MSNBC:

KREMMLING, Colo. – Survivors of a lightning strike that knocked out 19 golfers over the weekend told NBC’s “Today” show Tuesday that the lightning arced from man to man as they emerged from their cars thinking the storm had passed.

John Reyes said that when he came to he first felt “totally paralyzed” and then felt a surge of pain and heat. “I thought I was on fire,” he told Today.

As Lee Trevino said, “When I’m on a golf course and it starts to rain and lightning, I hold up my one iron, ’cause I know even God can’t hit a one iron.” Lee was struck by lightning once I’m sure of, and I believe he was hit again later.

I was on a course once when a single dark cloud rolled in quickly. I felt uneasy, and dropped to the ground for reasons I still don’t understand. Just about that time, lightning crackled across the entire sky, something I could both feel and smell. I play in all kinds of weather, but when the sparks fly, so do I.

I intended to finish reading The Cosmic Laws of Golf (and everything else) last night. I had begun reading the “application” section last time, and started at a new chapter, “Being the Ball.” With visions of Chevy Chase, I grinned to myself. Five pages into it, the topic became “Birthday Parties, Gifts, Etc.”, which I assumed to be the author’s sense of humor kicking in, and this was the “everything else” referred to in the title. The next heading was “Electronic Devices at Work.” I stopped, and perused the remainder of the book. The page numbers had changed from being at the bottom of the page to the top, and the page header was now Things You Need to be Told. The typeface was a little different, but not a significant change.

Hmmm.

It seems the last 70 pages of my book belong to a text written by the Etiquette Grrls (I guess they’re mad).

Who are they, you ask, to be writing such a book? The Etiquette Grrls are graduates of New England Preparatory Schools and Prestigious Colleges; they are throwers of Great Parties; they can hold their liquor; their expertise on fashion and makeup and-especially Subversive Nail Polish colors-knows no bounds; they wear Doc Martens with their cashmere twin sets; and, most important, they know what they’re talking about.

Not what I really wanted to read. I’m rude, crude, and socially unacceptable, and intend to stay that way.

So I go to the Berkley Books web site to find out how I can contact someone to replace this copy.

We apologize for any errors which occured during the printing process. For severe defects such as missing pages or improper binding, return the book to the store where you purchased it and they will replace the copy.

This does not please me. Yes, it is easier for me than returning the book to the publisher, but now Barnes & Noble has to deal with a problem not of their doing. Why should B&N have to take the hit for shipping a defective book back to New York? No big deal to me. I go to the store on a regular basis.

But I wonder how many copies like mine ended up on bookshelves in stores, and must now be removed, packaged, and returned to Berkley. What is the cost involved, and how much will now go into an increase in book prices? The returned book has no value, so any money spent in its handling is money wasted. Why not simply send me a replacement and eliminate the expense?

Since I can’t email anyone at Berkley, I’ll spend a little time on the phone attempting to talk with someone who can reason and make decisions. What do you think the odds are of doing that through customer service?

I think there is such a thing as “the Force” in our universe. Too often I’ve seen examples of people knowing what is about to happen, or sensing something going on miles away. I’ve felt them myself. It is the mental connection between two people, someone staring, and the one being stared at. A sixth sense. I don’t know if we’ll ever be able to define things such as ESP, but I believe they exist.

That is the essence of the book I just finished, Golf in the Kingdom, by Michael Murphy. It is considered by some to be a classic golf book, the story told in first person about a man headed to India to study mysticism who stops in Scotland for some golf. He links up with Shivas Irons, a local golf instructor and philosopher.

I enjoyed the book, as it is well-written. But it suffers. Like a detective novel that drops dozens of clues and red herrings for the reader to piece together, this one has oddities and actions described in great detail. Then they are never explained. In fact, the narrative ends abruptly just as the climax seems to approach. After a night of exploring the course and Shivas’ collection of books and writings, Murphy, all of a sudden, must immediately leave to meet someone in London, and the story ends. All questions left unanswered.

Murphy tries to make amends by building an epilogue filled with musings about the things he saw, but it does little to answer the questions left lingering. It goes into mysticism as a world phenomenon, dropping such philosophical questions as “Before your parents were, what was your original face?” As long as people interested in mind and body connections continue to say things like that, no progress will ever come of it.

The theme running throughout is “true gravity”, which is Murphy’s phrase for “the Force”. Yet he did little to really explain the concept he has of it. Perhaps the work he does at the Shivas Irons Society will finally answer those questions. I doubt it. But the Society does enough good work that I may join to help support it.

One thing that does stick in my mind from the book is the concept of golf in a larger context. The thought that golf has the smallest goal in all of sport, and is played over the largest field was something I’d not considered before. Perhaps it is that essence which appeals to me. It is much like engineering, collecting information from a broad range of knowledge and sources to finally arrive at a solution. And you get to do that eighteen times in a round. And I know that when I visualize a shot I am about to make, and do it in the calmness of a meditative state, I generally make the ball do just what I imagined. The tough part is establishing that focus at any given time.

Anyway, I began reading the sequel, and it begins well. I hope Murphy was able to sustain that level of quality better than in this one.

Okay. I’m now officially sick and tired of Tiger Woods.

He has always impressed me, and I’m not tired of him personally. I hope he plays well, and displays his talent as he has in the past. But the first thing on the US Open coverage today was an interview with Butch Harmon, Tiger’s former coach, about him. It is as if the network has something at stake in how well he plays. Everybody wants to dissect his swing, and explain to him what he’s doing wrong.

Golfers don’t take advice well, regardless of their ability. Someone with Tiger’s skills is sure to be upset that people of lesser talent presume to tell him how to swing a golf club.

The next issue is with Steve Williams, Tiger’s caddy. He is an arrogant ass. Today, again, he walked into the gallery to take a camera away from someone. The photographer had the nerve to take a picture while Tiger was taking a practice swing! If Williams were to try that with me, he would immediately be looking for something to stop the blood from running out his nose. The PGA officials make excuses for him, and allow him to keep acting like the camera sheriff wherever he goes.

Tiger needs to get rid of Williams. He has convinced Tiger to make bad shot selections on several occasions, and exudes arrogance toward all around as if he were the talent in the pair. It ain’t helping Tiger’s karma!

And the networks need to quit trying to solve his problems from a distance. I get annoyed when every interview with any player ends up with questions about Tiger. I think if I were a tour player and someone always asked me Tiger questions, I’d end the interview abruptly.

Professional athletes in every sport collect straphangers. Tiger needs to make a clean break from some of his before they drag him down so far he can’t recover.