Screams of uninhibited happiness drifted up the stairway from the basement to the kitchen where Roy and Dale were carefully placing coins of pepperoni on an extra large pizza that would be the penultimate culinary delight of their son's ninth birthday party.
"I hope he likes his gift," Roy said, slipping a slice of sausage into his mouth as he deftly scattered the pieces across the pizza like a Las Vegas dealer delivering a fateful hand of cards.
"Of course, he will," said Dale, who wore her motherhood like a 1940's apron around her pudgy waist.
Roy and Dale had been named by their respective parents after the singing cowboy couple who to them represented clean-cut values and style. Somehow they had found each other and had given in to what fate had ordained.
Dale was replacing a pitcher of Cool-Aid in the refrigerator when she stopped cold with the door half open. "What's that sound?" she said aloud.
"That's no sound," Roy answered. "That's silence."
Slightly relieved of the burden of pride and joy, they descended the basement stairs cautiously. There, they beheld the children in a game of golf, using the plastic clubs and balls that had come with the set Roy had thought of giving his son Simon as a special gift. Simon was a nerd in the making, and his sport-loving father wanted to influence that direction as early as possible by providing both incentive and equipment.
They watched as Simon putted the ball halfway around the basement floor that pitched toward the center drain like a roulette wheel spinning luck and disaster in all directions. The ball made an unexpected turn at the last minute and dropped into the hole in the top of the slanted "green" that had come with the golf set. The children gushed a collective and rather depressed, "Oh."
"What's happening here?" Roy asked Simon's freckled, red-haired friend Daisy
.
"He keeps making holes-in-one," she said sadly. "The rest of us can't get under six," she pouted.
"Can it be that he's good at something physical?" Roy queried the universe.
Dale and Roy watched for twenty minutes while Simon made one hole-in-one after another and all of his friends tried hard to break ten.
"Let me try that," Roy finally said. He had been a golfer since he was six and played an average of twice a week with a handicap of twelve. He grabbed the short plastic putter as though it were a real one and sighted the hole from several angles. Then he made his skillful shot. It missed by several inches and shot toward the basement wall on the far side of the room. Roy settled for eleven.
He handed the putter to Simon, who made yet another spectacular hole-in-one, bouncing off first the furnace and then a bicycle tire.
"Let's go upstairs for cake," Dale said, relieving the new tension created by the father and son competition.
The next day Roy took Simon to a nearby miniature golf course, where Simon shot eighteen on the eighteen-hole course. Gushing waterfalls and moving windmills seemed not to fluster him. The father went home with a less noteworthy score of fifty-six.
"Where did you get this talent?' Roy asked his son in the car on the way home.
"I didn't know about it until my birthday," Simon said. "It just feels completely natural."
"We'll have to try it out on a real golf course," said Roy. "Are you up for that?"
"I'll give it a try," Simon answered, "but, being as I never played golf before, I can't promise anything."
The next day father and son went to the nearest course, which was a short one, mostly par threes and a few par fours. Simon did the nine-hole course in nine, while his father managed a skillful forty-four.
"Can you show me your swing?" his father asked Simon.
"I don't know what to show you. I aim for the hole on the green. Isn't that how you do it?" Simon showed no cockiness but spoke with utter innocence.
"That's what I do, too," said the father. "But I don't get the ball in the hole every time."
They decided to play another nine holes on the small course, and this time Roy asked his friend and sometime golf partner Fred to join them. On the fourth hole Fred muttered something that sounded like an obscenity and walked off the course. Later, he told Roy that his son must be cheating somehow.
"How could he cheat?" Roy responded. "He's using my old clubs, the ones I find too wayward to take out of the basement. He never gets in the rough or a bunker, so there's no way he can break the rules or do anything we can't plainly see."
"He has to be cheating," Fred said. "There's no other explanation short of the theological."
"I know this kid," Roy answered. "There's nothing theological about him."
Simon became a celebrity at the miniature golf centers and grew up with a considerable amount of local fame. When he was fourteen Roy went to talk to the pro at the local country club about him. Lorenzo had once been on the professional circuit and knew more about golf than anyone in the vicinity. Roy explained the phenomenon of his son and golf. Lorenzo laughed.
"All right," he said. "Why the joke at your son's expense?"
"It's no joke," said Roy. "Look, why don't you play with us on the country club course."
"No," said Lorenzo, "you know as well as I do that you have to be almost professional to break ninety on this course. You'll only discourage the kid."
"You don't understand," said Roy. "I've never seen Simon miss a shot yet."
"All right," said Lorenzo, "but if it goes bad, I'll want to cut the game before it's finished. Deal?"
"Deal," said Roy.
The next day the three showed up for an early morning tee-time. Lorenzo shook Simon's hand and wished him luck. "If things don't go well, no worries," he said. "We'll stop the game and try another time."
"I don't know," said Simon. "I've never played on a real course. I think I should take some lessons."
"You should be giving the lessons," said Roy with a wink.
Lorenzo teed off first and hit his ball about two hundred seventy-five yards. The ball started low and then rose into the sky and arced down on a trajectory fairly in line with the green. It was a great shot.
Roy went next. He waddled rather excessively when he addressed the ball, exhibiting his nervousness‹he had never played with Lorenzo before. The ball popped up high and short and landed in the middle of the fairway about a hundred yards on.
Then it was Simon's turn. He stood up at the tee and swung the heavy driver in practice as though it were a ball and chain. "Where's the green?" he asked, looking worried.
"It doglegs to the right and sits up right behind that grove of trees. You can't see it from here," his father answered, as though it were the most obvious and ordinary information he could offer.
"I can't hit the ball if I can't see the green," said Simon.
"In golf you can't always see the green from the teebox," said Lorenzo.
"Just hit the ball and curve it behind those trees," said Roy.
Simon swung clumsily at the ball, topped it, and watched it spin like a World War II spitfire that had received enemy ammo up its tail. It went about fifteen yards. He proceeded to hit the ball in a series of fifteen-yard advances until he reached the green in twenty-five strokes. His father was red in the face.
"Are we here for a lesson?" Lorenzo asked.
"Let's try the next hole," his father said. "Maybe Simon's nervous."
The next hole was a par three, one hundred seventy-five yards. Lorenzo's ball veered to the left and landed in a sand trap in front of the green. Roy's veered to the right and landed in the other trap. Simon let loose a swing the grace of which Lorenzo had never had the pleasure to see in his entire life. The ball bounced a foot in front of the green and rolled into the hole.
"I've never heard of a hole-in-one on this hole," said Lorenzo. "Congratulations, Simon." He shook Simon's hand. "What a stroke of luck!"
"Just wait," said Roy. "This isn't about luck."
Simon and Lorenzo each holed out for three on the hole and then walked to the next tee, a par four, three-hundred fifty yards. Lorenzo grabbed Simon by the shoulders and pointed toward the green.
"See that big round maple tree on the right? Aim for that and you'll avoid the water that is hidden from view here."
Simon shrugged.
Lorenzo hit his ball awry with a massive swing and spun it far left into the neighboring fairway. Roy hit his up into the sky again about fifty yards. Simon stood at the tee, wishing for a good shot.
"Is that the green?" he asked, pointing straight ahead.
"That's it," said Lorenzo. "Don't try too hard. It will be great if you get on in four."
Simon stood at the ball and created another magnificently smooth and graceful swing that sent the ball on a perfectly straight path toward the green. At first, it looked as though the ball would stay low and hit the maple tree. But then it soared and disappeared from sight.
"Good hit," shouted Lorenzo.
It took a while for Lorenzo to find his ball. He hit his second shot just short of the green, while Roy got on in two. When all three arrived at the green Lorenzo began looking for Simon's ball.
"You hit that thing a mile," he said, "and I don't know how you did it. Smoothest damn swing I've ever seen. But it must have faded. I don't see it anywhere."
"Look in the hole," said Roy.
"No," said Lorenzo, but he looked anyway and pulled the ball out, noting carefully Simon's signature three dot triangle on the ball. "But. . . ," he said.
Simon took lessons for the long holes with doglegs where he couldn't see the green from the tree. The invisibility of the green was his Achilles' heel. If it weren't for this single problem, he would be winning golf tournaments everywhere. As it was, he hit numerous holes-in-one in every game he played, but his score rarely drew him even close to winning.
His blind game improved and his sighted game lost none of its magic. People came to watch him play and learned to skip the holes where he couldn't see the green.
He was twenty-one and headed for a career in engineering when one day on a golf course, surrounded by a curious and antagonistic crowd, a young woman tugged at his sleeve. She was beautiful the way a magazine ad is beautiful. She looked airbrushed, and she wore the pastel colors of commercial purity. Her teeth were white and perfectly formed, so that when she smiled dark corners in any room became lit.
"I think I can help you," she said. "With the doglegs."
"Talk to me when the game is over," Simon said patiently. The game ended quickly and Simon came in with a score of 123 for eighteen. He never did learn how not to top the ball on doglegs.
They sat at a perfect table set in a white picket fence in a corner of the garden outside the clubhouse.
"I'm in charge of a-v in my sorority house," she said with enthusiasm and authority. "I've watched your career."
"Or the lack thereof," said Simon.
"And I think I have a solution."
"As you can imagine," said Simon, "I've been offered thousands of solutions. None of them has worked."
"Have you tried a video camera set up at the green feeding back pictures of the green to a screen at the tee?"
"Is it legal?"
"I have found no references to such a set-up in the book of rules."
"Which was written before video cameras existed," added Simon.
"So?"
"All right. Let's give it a try."
The girl's name was Gloria and she was glorious indeed. The apparatus worked on the first try. Simon looked into a small screen on a compact video camera receiving an image from another camera at the green. He kept his eye on the screen as he swung back his driver, and the smooth arc returned to his swing. The ball launched like a moon rocket and curved at the appropriate places and landed on the green and then dropped into the hole.
"Gloria," Simon said that first day after the success. "How can I repay you?"
"You can marry me," Gloria said.
And Simon agreed.
They married and had twins and made a lot of money on the golf tour.
One day in the seventh year of their marriage Simon said to Gloria, "I'm not happy with the video set-up. It's artificial. I'm manufacturing my swing. I'm no longer a natural."
"You know, Simon," Gloria replied. "The camera and I were a team from the very beginning. No camera, no glory."
So they got divorced. Incidentally, the twins did not have the gift.
Simon went back to losing tournaments and being happy. He was still making holes-in-one at the majority of holes but his score on the other holes, the doglegs, was so high that he never won tournaments. The crowds following him went back to skipping the doglegs or booing him mercilessly. Something about the booing satisfied Simon.
Then one day, just after he hit one of his spitfires fifty yards from the tee and the crowd comforted him with some unusually fervent boos, a woman tugged at his sleeve.
"I think I can help you," she said.
At lunch after the game in the garden of the club house, she said the magic word: Visualization.
"You can visualize the green, and when you learnt to visualize as though you physical eyes were in play, you will be able to hit your magic balls. I'll teach you."
Simon was ready to return to glory without artificiality, and Mona's visualization idea seemed natural to him.
"What do you want in return?" he asked cautiously.
They were married within a month, and every day Mona gave Simon lessons in visualization. She taught him how to imagine the invisible green so sensuously and vividly that it impressed itself panoramically on his retina, albeit virtually, and he could commence his jello-smooth swing and find the hole on every dogleg. "I'm back," he said to the world.
His next year on the tour he played ten games in one hundred eighty strokes. No other golfer came close to him. He won millions of dollars, a feat that made him many enemies and drew crackpots to him like flies to molasses.
"Tell me the scam," a particularly sleazy fan said to him one late night as he was locking his car in front of his twenty thousand square foot home.
"Scam?" howled Simon. "Scam? How can this be a scam? Does the ball not go in the hole? Am I using magnetic clubs? Are there mirrors set in the traps directing the ball to the hole? Scam? There is no scam."
"What's the secret?" a local sports announcer asked him, again late at night in front of his house. "How do you do it?"
Simon told the announcer that he did it with a camera embedded in his occipital lobe, and the announcer believed him, writing about it in the newspaper's weekend edition. Golfers the world over began petitioning surgeons to give them a photomechanical insert, but the doctors only disabused the public of their wishful demands with threats of brain injury.
Finally, a reporter from Newsweek got the idea to ask Simon's wife for the secret. After being guaranteed a certain income for life, she relented. "Vizualization," she said simply‹one of the most expensive words ever spoken.
So everyone began visualizing and offering seminars and master's classes on it. Mona became rich in her own right and divorced Simon, who realized that she had only married him for his money. He began to see his golf talent and lack thereof as a stain on his life. One day he took his clubs and tossed them in the pond he had had built behind his house. Golf had ruined him.
But as every serious golfer knows, golf is not a game; it's a psychological affliction. It tells you when it has had enough of you; you don't tell it. It's the eight hundred pound gorilla; you're the weak kid on the beach. It's a psychosis, and you're the patient.
Simon whistled in the dark for a year, pretending that golf had no claim on him. He tried to live as though he had never swung a seven iron before and had never felt the spring of moist bent grass under his feet. He persisted in this delusion until the emptiness in his life screamed like a banshee from hell.
He went to a psychiatrist who chatted with him meaninglessly for weeks before the golf complex emerged.
"I thought it had to be a woman," the psychiatrist moaned.
"No, it's golf," Simon confessed.
"Your father was an avid golfer."
"Yes, only, why are golfers always called avid?"
"And golf influenced your childhood."
"Defined it."
"And led to a marriage."
"Shotgunned me into two."
"But nothing in medical literature suggests anything psychoneurotic about golf."
"A simple lacuna," Simon observed.
"It's in the family of origin."
"You wouldn't say, ŚHe's an avid typist.'"
"There's only one thing to do. Go into it. Face the demon. Play golf."
Simon's return to golf cost him several hundred dollars a week with the psychiatrist, who assured Simon that it was worth every penny.
He went back to his unfortunate and unfulfilling pattern of holing-in-one all holes but doglegs. It was maddening, clinically. But then one day a distracted woman stood out in the crowd behind him. She didn't tug on his sleeve. He went up to her after the round.
"I couldn't help notice that you didn't do anything," he said unhelpfully. "You have nothing to offer me? No help? No advice?"
"Nothing," she said.
"What's your name?"
"Moon."
"Oh, God," Simon let slip.
"You don't like it, call me Luna. That how I was baptized."
"How about Night Object?" Simon offered.
"I find that acceptable," she smiled.
"Do you have any suggestions for my game?" he asked.
"No. You don't need any."
"But I lose all the time."
"So?"
"Do you want to get married?"
"No."
"Do you visualize?"
"What?"
"What would you do if you were me and were losing every game of golf in spite of hitting holes-in-one all over the place?"
"I'd hit the ball to the green even though I couldn't see it. Golf takes a little faith."
"Do you think faith takes a little golf?"
"That's why I'm here."
Simon and Maria got married one year later, after Simon's game improved to the point where he could hole doglegs.
One night a reporter approached him in front of his modest house and asked him the secret to his game. The reporter said he would not tell anyone and would never write about it.
"All right," Simon responded. "I trust you. Here's the secret. Hitting a golf ball is like putting a teaspoon into a cup of tea. You never miss the cup, do you?"
"As a matter of fact, no," the reporter said, writing madly in his tiny spiral notebook. "Can you expand on that?"
"There's nothing more to say. It's the secret to the whole thing. I've never uttered it before tonight. You have the exclusive claim on it. I will deny I ever said it, but you now know the whole story in sordid detail."
"I'm not sure what I know," the reporter said, hoping to egg Simon on.
But Simon was not to be egged.
"For the first time since I was a child I feel free," he said. "No more secret. I'm like everyone else. My gift is probably gone."
"Can you teach this to anyone else?" the reported persisted.
"Yes, it would take about three seconds."
"And then would your student be able to hole every hole?"
"A bit redundant, but yes. There's no reason why he wouldn't. He'd have my secret. The only thing is, he'd have to know it when he swung. Maybe that's where the skill comes in."
"Would you teach me?"
"I already have."
"How did you solve the problem of not seeing the green?"
"I learned how to put a spoon in a cup with my eyes closed. Easy. But it took me half a lifetime and three marriages to think of it. They say that golf is the game of life."
© 2008, Thomas Moore
