THAT DOG’LL HUNT
Great article by a favorite writer of mine, Tom McGuane, in last weekend’s “Outdoors” column of The Wall Street Journal. It’s about the author’s dedication to going out hunting in his native Montana countryside with his beloved dogs.
The connection between McGuane’s feelings about hunting and my feelings about golf became apparent in an early paragraph when McGuane writes, “I pull the hunting pants from their hanger… Let others withstand the elliptical trainer, the rowing machine, and the Nordic Track… I can tell myself that I take my dogs afield because they want to go and yet when the hunt is on, its urgency spreads from them to me… I am tugged along in a state of rising alertness and renewed addiction.”
Not a bad description of the way I feel when I go to my closet and pull out the shirt and pants I’m going to wear for a day’s round, with the same sense of urgency spreading through me in direct proportion to the shrinking of space between me and the first tee, and then bumped up further by the lacing up of spikes once the bag comes out of the car at the day’s course.
McGuane goes on, “Bird dogs plead with you to imagine the great things you could be doing together. Their delight is a lesson in the bliss of living.” I once had a dog named Sara Lees who was part Border Collie and part Springer Spaniel, and I felt this exactly when I’d take her to Balboa Park here in LA any afternoon for the game of Frisbee that she loved with the same quivering anticipation of her “hunt.” The feeling that I knew she had the very first time her teeth clamped on that Frisbee in mid-air five feet off the ground after running nearly the length of a football field was, I’m certain, not unlike the joy I feel when my first shot jumps off the face of my driver and the ball hangs in the air in front of me in completely stopped time.
“All vigorous pursuits bring real change,” McGuane continues. “As I keep track of my dogs in broken country I notice that my memory improves, particularly short term memory…”
You could see this in Tiger’s eyes as he walked up the 18th fairway last weekend at Bay Hill. It was the sense memory of closing in for “the kill.” Not an “oh, I remember this situation” kind of thing -- but the real thing -- when the senses take over and you know you’re someplace you’ve been before that once tingled, and you have a shot at the tingling again.
“The hills that at the beginning of the season seemed so laborious,” McGuane writes, “now roll beneath me. One does not set about doing these things as a salute to the Protestant Ethic, but rather by noticing the land, the weather, and the dogs, and by allowing a sympathetic chord to rise to the hunt.”
By noticing.
By allowing.
A sympathetic chord to rise.
That’s about as close as I think one can get to describing “the zone.”
You know, the one all seek out there in the hills, fairways, bunkers, and rough of a round.
Yeah, that dog’ll hunt.
If we listen to it “pleading with us to imagine the great things we could be doing together.”