PASATIEMPO
Our 16-year Anniversary event at Pasatiempo on 08.21.08 was a wonderful day of golf played, as is par for the Society, on one of the world’s great courses, as well as in the hearts and minds of all the lucky members who journeyed to Santa Cruz this year. For, this year Fred Shoemaker, of Extraordinary Golf, offered up the keynote before we hit the links, and it was nothing less than “The Mystery of Golf Revealed.”
I first encountered Fred at my very first Shivas event up at Bandon Dunes in 2004 where, much to my amazement, I also found a group of people who shared the deep appreciation I had only recently rediscovered in my life for “the greatest gemme.” At a time in my life when the world seemed not only “too much with us,” but increasingly bent on pushing out all elements of grace, I suddenly found myself sitting in a circle of like-minded men and women that reminded me of the T-groups I’d participated in back in the day in Palo Alto and Ann Arbor when people were struggling to find a way to express connections to deeper feelings and yearnings that, when admitted, we all seemed to share a solitary internal relation to and dialogue with. And the truly amazing part was that each of us in that circle also seemed to find that the golf swing connected us to that inner dialogue even as it propelled us around the dunes of Bandon.
“What is this voice?” Steve Cohen asked with his great smile that anyone who’s ever encountered him knows makes the same smile appear on their own face.
And so my journey into The Shivas Irons Society began.
Fred not only posed the question again this year at Pasatiempo; he answered it.
“This voice” is the voice of our swing. And all we need do is listen to it.
Not dissect it. Not analyze it. Not deconstruct it. But listen to it. Be aware of it. And practice that awareness rather than struggle with the physics of all that goes into its sound.
The implications of this simple statement -- like most simple statements that seem to capture a firefly’s light in a bottle -- are enormous. And endless for golfers -- just as a game which is known as “a round” is, by definition, endless.
To tap into what we already know, as opposed to insisting that “knowledge” must be imposed upon us by the world outside.
And without doing anything more than find a way to swing a club in “a plane” that already exists around us.
To be able to duplicate that sound -- of connecting to that plane -- with our own voice, produced not by understanding with the mind all the physics of air being forced across our vocal chords and shaped into groupings of words that we mutually agree to call a “language” -- but rather, by listening to the sound itself, feeling where it comes from inside us, and shaping that sound as we shape notes in air with the musical instrument that is our natural voice.
Our golf clubs striking different notes, like hammers striking different strings inside a piano.
And then to practice our awareness of striking those notes so that we can “hear” or “see” when we’re “on” or “off.”
Sure, it can help to look at a video of a golf swing. (Especially if it’s the natural swing that Fred captures at his schools.) But the swing ultimately isn’t in the video. It’s in us. Better to be able to produce it from within than without.
As Fred says, he’s been finding that awareness with every swing of his for 40 years, and it never ceases to amaze him that it’s still there for the finding every time anyone lays hands on a club, feels the grip, and raises up into the swing.
* * *
At the end of the day, after all of us had circled ‘round Pasatiempo back to the place where we started -- all of us the same, but different -- and we’d shared some food and “sung the praises,” another remnant of my first Shivas “event” up in Bandon bubbled to the surface.
Unbeknown to those of us in the circle up at Bandon, Fred and Steve had placed a red wood rooster one day under one of the seats where we gathered each morning before the day’s round. After the usual morning talk had started, Fred said to all of us that we should look under our seats. There, beneath one of us, was The Rooster. And just as simple as that, one of us could now “hit a hole-in-one.”
We all laughed.
And though the person with the Rooster under his seat did not “have” a hole-in-one that day, we all experienced a change in our perception of what “could” happen when we went out to the first tee. We admitted this later. And that, of course, was Fred’s larger point…
And thus, The Order of The Rooster was born.
I read of the Rooster’s adventures the next year, when I couldn’t return to Bandon. Placed with it’s legs surrounding a cup on the practice green, putts were suddenly easier to “see,” easier to “make.” And not because the ball would funnel into the cup off the wider target of the rooster’s spread legs. No, the putts were dropping straight into the cup without touching the legs. The sound of the cup filling was suddenly all over the green.
Why?
Again, because of a change in perception, not “stroke.”
Again, “awareness,” not “knowledge.”
And now, years later, from a new perspective still, the Rooster was being auctioned after the 16th Anniversary dinner at Pasatiempo.
Bidding started slowly, but picked up, and I heard behind me that the winning bidder had an accent, that he was from The Isle of Wight.
I wanted that Rooster, but I also smiled at the thought of it crossing the ocean, flying closer to the place of our Society’s origin, the place of our gemme’s origin.
And I let it go.
And I’m glad.
Because the Rooster’s "over there" now, but still with me, and still with the Society -- the same as it has been since that circle up at Bandon became, for me, my first completed Shivas Irons round.