Reflections

by Michael Murphy

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!

Now, as she watched this vast spectacle, she noticed that a Scotsman had appeared, led there by an oppression he felt from Scotland's being overgrown with gorse. Having prayed that Scotland be relieved from all this gorse, he had suddenly been lifted to this golfing heaven. Observing the gods, he decided to bring the game to his native land so that the gorse would be cut back to make room for greens and fairways. Since golf was greater than any universe, he reasoned, it would be greater than any gorse.

This woman felt that her dream reflected the primordial and archetypal nature of golf, which transcends any human attempt to explain it. Golf is before the gods and all the worlds. Indeed, over-arching her golfing heaven there was a sign with the words "Golf in the Kingdom."

Many of these letters relate extraordinary experiences that actually occurred during the play of a round. Here are some of these experiences and categories into which they seem to fall:

• Extraordinary perceptions of the physical world, including visions in which land and playing partners are imbued with new beauty. One woman, for example, said that a familiar golf course, one that she had played dozens of times before, "shimmered in every detail," as if it had been "painted by Vermeer." A young man claimed that as he finished an exceptionally enjoyable round, the "world caught fire, and my friends looked like angels."

But golf can reveal unpleasant things, too. One man wrote that on certain days every hole "had a jagged, broken Cubist look," and another claimed that during a particularly difficult time in his life he frequently glimpsed a "loathsome toad" sitting on the cup whenever he lined up a putt. Both men, by the way, said that their experiences had led them to seek help (successfully) with psychological problems that they were having off the course.

• Perceptions of phantom figures, for example, "wee people" such as elves and leprechauns, "spirit guides," long-dead relatives, departed golf heroes, and shining apparitions! I simply report this, without making judgments about the objective reality of such phantoms. We can account for these experiences in part by supposing that golf sometimes produces a limited sensory deprivation, of the kind caused by meditation in floatation tanks or dark rooms. Such deprivation, conceivably, stimulates the dramatization of psychological issues, and upon rare occasions may provide an opening to supernatural entities.
• Metanormal movement abilities, including extraordinary buoyancy while walking, new elasticity of the golf swing, and "levitation-like sensations." One man, for example, wrote that on the eighteenth hole of his country club, a long uphill par-five, he felt as if he were walking downhill. In this state, which he thought was True Gravity, he reached the hole in two for the first time in his life.
• Psychokinetic abilities, including the power to affect a ball's flight through mental intention. Several people have claimed that they lengthened a drive or straightened a crooked shot by willpower alone. A teen-age club champion wrote that he once made a sliced three-iron "hook at the end so that it landed only six feet from the hole." The ball, it seemed, curved twice on its way to the green.

   

• States of extraordinary joy and release, some of which seem religious in nature, and a lasting delight that does not depend upon the satisfaction of particular needs or desires. I have come to believe that golf produces more states of well-being and a wider range of such states than most people realize.
• New energy, which often lasts for many days. Some people have said that streaming sensations, subtle effervescence, or other unusual sensations accompany this extraordinary vitality.
• A volition beyond ordinary volition, a capacity (or condition) described in different ways, in phrases such as "the game played me," "my swing flowed," or "my golf round simply happened." Several correspondents have claimed that such experiences carried over into their non-golfing life.