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Golf And The Male Ego
Lou Fishman, of Golf Digest once said, “If there is a faster way to turn a Jekyll into a Hyde than by handing a man a driver, we don’t know of it.”
When I first started in the game of golf as a caddie, all we had were wooden shafted clubs. All of the shafts were different and one you would hook with, while another would slice. Just trying to keep the ball on the golf course was the first order of business. One year, when I won the Club Caddie Championship my prize was not only a cup, but also a steel shafted driver. The boy I beat in the finals, also received a driver. The shafts in those drivers were like buggy whips. (very flexible to you young folks) When you timed them just right you would “sling shot” the ball a hundred yards past where we were hitting our wooden shafted drivers.
This boy, Eddie, was a High School drop out, and in the winter he chopped wood for a living. He was left-handed and could consistently hit it over 300 yards. Many years have passed and the statute of limitations has run out, but Eddie is the one who knocked the window out of the Catholic Church with one of his wild drives. We were in the next county before the last pane of glass hit the ground. I almost destroyed my swing by trying to keep up with him, and my back swing could compare with John Daly’s.
It is the male ego that makes us try to kill the ball, and it is not until some guy, who can’t hit it out of his shadow, takes enough of your money, will you smarten up. I have taken my most humiliating defeats by short hitters who didn’t know there was such a thing as rough.
When I was in High School, a small carnival would come to our home-town for a week in August. This was the highlight of the summer. The boys would get all spiffed up and go to the carnival. Even back in those days, girls were very important, so we used to try to impress them with our physical ability. We tried to do this by winning dolls throwing baseballs. There would be three rows of cloth dolls lined up on shelves. You could probably blow on them and knock them down. If you knocked 3 down with 3 balls, you would win a doll. Those stupid little dolls were only 6 feet away, but that little booth was set up for suckers like us. We would drop back another 10 feet and try to blast those dolls right out of the back of the tent. Sometimes we would hit the wood below the dolls and the ball would ricochet back and almost hit us. After blowing our money, and not winning anything, some 90-pound weakling would come up and throw three balls underhanded and win the doll.
This is very similar to the approach to golf by many. To my knowledge there is not a scorecard with a description column, just little square boxes for small numbers. The golf industry thrives on the male ego. A person will not buy too many sets of clubs, but he will go for the advertised longest hitting driver and the longest ball.
When I was a young assistant at a Club up in Connecticut, we had a Pro Tournament one summer. One of the pros absolutely fascinated me. Not only did he have a great swing, but he did it with a pipe in his mouth. That pipe would slide over his left shoulder on the way back and over his right shoulder as he hit the ball. Now that was “cool,” and became one of my first real goals in golf. I did not smoke, but bought a pipe for a dollar and started taking practice swings with the pipe in my mouth. It was great until I put the ball in front of me and bit the stem off of the pipe. I went through five dollars worth of pipes before I stopped biting the stems off. Some year later I became addicted to the pipe and looked like a train going down the fairway, but finally decided that it was governing me and I quit cold turkey. If someone comes into a room smoking a pipe, I will follow him all around the room.
I had a young man taking lessons from me now who could hit it 300 yards, but apparently was going for 400. His facial expression is a dead give-away that he is trying to kill the ball. I have told him that his expression at impact would make him a candidate for a horror movie. I took movies of his swing and let him see his facial expression at impact. If he concentrates on his facial expression, he will eventually overcome his problem.
There is nothing more beautiful in golf than a golfer with a smooth tempo, without apparent effort. One time I had a portion of a college golf team living in the clubhouse of a course I owned. Fall classes had just started and a new group of golfers were hitting balls on the range. One of this group just fascinated me, and I went up to him and asked him who taught him how to swing like that. He said, “I taught myself.” I told him not to change teachers. The young man was Joe Durant
Joe has won millions on the Tour, and I had him working my snack bar for minimum wage.
An elderly man once approached Sam Snead and requested a lesson in order to get more distance on his drives, because his girlfriend was out driving him. A couple of weeks later he came back complaining that she was still out driving him. “What else can I do?” he asked. Snead replied, “Get an older girlfriend.”
©2004 Fred Larsen All rights Reserved