PEBBLE BEACH - BLISS

I am standing on the 18th hole of the Pebble Beach Golf Links. It’s the most beautiful and awesome meeting of sea, shore and fairway greens in the world. The prevailing wind will accentuate my natural slice from left to right. I nail my drive. The ball sails over the bay, is blown to the right and lands in the middle of the fairway of this incredible par 5 finishing hole. My golf car like Elijah’s chariot carries me to my perfect lie. My ensuing three wood is straight and on line. My hopes soar. A seven or eight iron to the green. There’s hope for a birdie. I swing. I have duck-hooked it. The ball is somewhere under an incoming Pacific Ocean wave. I take my penalty, try again and end up with a double bogey seven. I regret the inability to convert promise into reality, but I do not mourn for long. I have been to golfer’s Mecca and it is paradise on earth.

When I grew up during the depression, the son of a rural parochial school teacher, golf was beyond even my wildest fantasy. Once an uncle “from the city” had given me a golf ball. I treasured it and hit it, fungo-like with a baseball bat, into the cow pasture. I sought till I found it and hit it again. Then I couldn’t find it and I assumed my golfing life was over.

But it wasn’t. I’ve ended up playing more golf than I ever fantasized about and in venues where I still have to pinch myself to be sure I’m actually there. Hundreds of rounds at Hong Kong Golf Club, Fan Ling (no longer The Royal Hong Kong Golf Club). I’ve worked my way around many of the most wonderful courses imaginable: Kapalua on Maui, Hawaii, Westchester Country Club in New York, The Palm and the Magnolia in Disney Land, Cog Hill in Illinois, Torrey Pines in California, Banff in Canada.

There are unique elements of the golfing experience understood only by those who’ve been there, done that. The anticipation that goes with opening a new sleeve of balls on the first tee. The posturing, complaining, negotiating that precedes the first swing. The downward spiral of feeling as a ball just catches a trap, lands beyond the white out-of-bounds stakes, lips out of a cup. The almost orgasmic sensation of a six iron that hooks around a tree and lands on the green, the 30-foot putt that drops. There are always the post-round autopsies over a few cold beers. Although we all know that no one (no one!) really cares about the final score of another golfer, we all rehearse selected agonies and ecstasies.

Yet, it is not unique. Every being that is still really alive is stirred by the anticipation of, achievement, is exhilarated by possibilities, disappointed in failure, and longs for the companionship of a shared experience. Golf is, as they say, a four-letter word. For me that four letter word is LIFE.