Tiger Woods, the Shivas Irons Society, and me...
by Steve Cohen
“Our relationship to paradox is a barometer of our enlightenment.” — a saying from Shivas’s journal.
Okay, this article has much more to do with the Shivas Irons Society and me than it has to do with Tiger Woods. Actually, it has nothing directly to do with Tiger Woods, but, if using his name in the title got you here, I’m glad. I do hope you’ll stay. (I’ll leave it up to you to consider if this has any deeper meaning, or perhaps it can be a topic for discussion at another time.)
I am actually writing to share with you some personal thoughts concerning the Society and its future that have emerged in response to an “incident” that happened on our website several weeks ago.
Getting up to Date
In mid-December we posted a column on our website concerning the Tiger Woods situation and its potential negative effect, or lack thereof, on the game of golf. The column dealt with several issues related to the Woods “scandal” and included a controversial opinion about what were then some emerging allegations of the misuse of performance enhancement drugs.
For the next few days the column received a lot of attention (a good thing) and more than our usual number of comments (also a good thing), including some from several members seriously questioning the integrity and direction of the Society (not so pleasant, but as I’ll clarify soon, a good thing too). Eventually the author, as was his prerogative, decided to remove the column and its commentary to avoid what he feared was a potentially negative impact to the Society from what had been primarily an expression of his personal opinion.
Although I respected and appreciated his reasons for doing so, I did not necessarily agree with the decision to remove the column. One reason is, that for those of you who never read the column or the associated comments, its removal has added an unnecessary level of abstraction to what I want to talk to you about — which, as I stated above, has nothing directly to do with Tiger Woods.
Although the column had been removed it seemed to me as if a genie was out of the bottle. For a few days a job that I usually enjoyed and loved just wasn’t being much fun… And in the end, I felt that a few important questions about the content of our website had been raised and remained unanswered. Perhaps it’s my tendency to hear criticism much louder than I hear praise, but I found myself in a place that was emotionally uncomfortable and intellectually confused. I decided that I needed some time for reflection.
An Opportunity for Learning
In seeking counsel, a trusted friend reminded me of something I have been teaching others for more than thirty years. It is in the recognition of one’s mistakes that learning takes place… “you can learn more from your bad shots than your good ones if you’re aware...” was how he put it.
This was the exact advice I needed. It felt like what I imagine a student of Zen might experience with a whack on the head from the Master. At any rate, I gave up trying to “understand” what was going on and accepted that, at some level, my discomfort was telling me that the Society (and by extension me) has had a bad shot — something in the way we have been exchanging ideas with the world may be lacking — and it became easy to recognize the further wisdom (from the same friend) that “...this is a great opportunity to reaffirm what the Society stands for in all its communication.”
It is on that note that the process of reaffirmation has begun...
I (we) will be reviewing not only the content that lives on our website, but the process by which it gets there. The goal is for the site to reflect, as best we can, the Society’s mission of providing “opportunities for community, discovery and transformation through golf.” You may already notice some changes, (i.e. this message from me is appearing in its own space separate from that of other columnists or bloggers) and more changes are to come. As always, your active participation is invited and encouraged… In fact, without input and support from our membership the implementation of meaningful change will be very difficult at best.
The President’s Role
On a more personal level, and to gain my own deeper perspective, I decided to explore the Society’s roots in several ways:
- To look again at Golf in the Kingdom, the work that inspired me to start the Society. This actually is an ongoing process for me, but what happened in December has drawn me to some specific passages. See, for example, the brief chapter “On Keeping Score” (from which the quotation at the top of this article is taken) or the chapter titled, “Humans Have Two Sides, or Dualism Is All Right”.
- To return to my original “Statement of Purpose” for the Society and review its evolution into our current mission statement. An evolution that is the result of the input and energy of more volunteers than I can name.
I also wanted to look at some of my own words and the words of others that have been published in print form by the Society over the years. I began with the Society Newsletter, which we started publishing in 1993.
In the premier issue I found the first “Message from the President” that I had addressed to what was then a small but growing community. It’s been seventeen years since I wrote this message, but reading it brought me back to a place of joy and passion that I am happy to recapture.
There is nothing I could say today that could better express what are still my feelings, hopes and dreams for the future of the Shivas Irons Society.
I am pleased to reprint it here: |