The highest achievement of the spiritual life is within the full embrace of the ordinary. Our appetite for the big experience--sudden insight, dazzling vision, heart-stopping ecstasy-- is what hides the true way from us." These words head the dust jacket description of Breakfast at the Victory,a memoir by James P. Carse, the director of religious studies at New York University.

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Golf, it seems, is a mystery school housed in a game, a pastime with a genius for evoking the supernatural. As Shivas Irons said, "golf has a mighty past and promises a greater future." Since Golf in the Kingdom was published in 1972, I have received many letters describing extraordinary events and experiences related to golf. One of my favorites is from the woman who dreamt that the gods practice the creation of universes by playing golf. In this dream, she had risen to the place where they do this, initiating a new universe with each golf shot! Bringing their superhuman consciousness to perfect focus, they compressed the ball into the tiny point from which each universe expands. Each poor shot, it seemed, made a universe that was somehow deformed, while each good shot made a beautiful one. The better the shot, the better the universe!

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One of the great pleasures of Golf in the Kingdom is that it's a work that rewards rereading. I've read it seven or eight times, and I always discover some fresh delight that Michael Murphy has salted in there, but that I was too dense to pick up before. In this piece I want to highlight--for those who, like me, may have overlooked some treasures--one of the great gems of the book. It's the chapter entitled "Singing the Praises of Golf."

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The following interview with Extraordinary Golf® founder and coach Fred Shoemaker took place in April 2006 in conjunction with the release of his latest book, Extraordinary Putting: Transforming the Whole Game (G. P. Putnam’s Sons), in collaboration with Jo Hardy. 

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Fred Shoemaker is a golf teacher of a rather different stripe. He isn’t so much into instructing on the mechanics of the swing, although that is certainly included in his schools, but in his students learning how to connect with their golfing soul, so to speak. Shoemaker’s method has a Socratic turn to it. He believes there must be a dialogue between the student and the coach, a term he prefers over teacher. He doesn’t want his students to simply listen and do as told, but to ask questions, question the answers, and in the final analysis become self-taught golfers who learn through their own experience, their own sense of self, and become their own best teacher. The concept has a celestial thrust, but on a practical level is a worthy goal if only because golfers must recognize when their swing or concentration is not going well and then have the wherewithal to correct the problems in the midst of a round.

In this interview we discover how Fred came to this method of instruction, but perhaps more importantly, why he embraces it.

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