Streamers

SNOW COHEN

RL@RichardLees.com — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 19:17:58 GMT

SNOW COHEN

I keep a notebook of “Steve Cohen-ism’s” which, over the years I’ve known the founder and indefatigable leader of The Shivas Irons Society, has morphed into something I think of more as Koan-ism’s, as I’ve found that our conversations not only produce momentary smiles, but language that I find soothing when recollected in tranquility. There is no pretense about it -- we’re not talking Dr. Johnson and Boswell here -- but the subject is usually golf -- which is to say, life, at least as members of the Society seem to view “the both of ‘em.”

One of my favorite quotes among these has to do with golf and weather -- a subject that inevitably comes up this time of year for those of us who feel withdrawal pangs when our feet have not felt spikes to Bent grass for longer than three days…

I first heard it in the far north of Scotland, at Brora Golf Club, where the Kingdom Tour of 2007 began in mid-June.

BRORA sits on the Kintradwell Bay with the hills of Sutherland as backdrop, and it’s home to The James Braid Society, whom we dine and play a friendly match with whenever we’re in town. For those who don’t know, James Braid -- as I found out from posters, paintings, and photos on the Brora clubhouse walls -- was the Tiger Woods of his time, winning The Open five times in the first decade of the 20^th century.

Open Championship Wins

1901 - Muirfield
1905 - St. Andrews
1906 - Muirfield
1908 - Prestwick
1910 - St. Andrews

And like Tiger, he was not only a hugely popular winner, he was also one of golf’s true gentlemen.

AT any rate, we’re all fresh off plane journeys like mine, which was LA to London to Inverness, and we’ve gathered in the clubhouse overlooking the first fairway of the course, where earlier over coffee in my apartment I had witnessed the groundskeepers for the day go by in the form of a herd of cows to chew on the fairway grass and then a herd of sheep to trim the rough bordering the beach, and it’s pouring sheets of rain outside that are blowing straight sideways into the glass picture window in front of us -- and I’m thinking, well, this is what you’ve heard about the weather in Scotland… -- when Steve breaks the tension in the room with one of his great smiles.

“You know what they say,” he grins, “there’s no inappropriate weather for golf, only inappropriate clothing.”

After a hearty laugh, we all head outside into the gale. Great introduction to golf in the kingdom.

ON the first hole, we hit toward a pass which we’re told dogs downhill and to the right, and as I make my way over the hill toward my second shot, I’m listening to the squish of my shoes in soaked Bent when I look up and wonder if I’m still on planet Earth -- as I’m face to face with a huge black steer just the other side of a wall of rain.

I stare at him. He stares right back, happily chewing his cud, as if to say, “yeah, so…?”

And yeah… so… I take out a wet iron and aim toward what the caddie tells me is the green, which looks like it’s circled with some kind of marker.

“What’s that around it?” I ask.

“Electric wire,” he answers. “You don’t want the cow pies on yer puttin' surface.”

I look around and notice for the first time the giant 12-inch brown discs that occasionally dot the fairway.

“And yeah, you’re allowed relief if you land in one out here…” he adds before walking toward my ball, which now sits in rough to the right of the electrified green.

THE day was filled with moments like that, and as I was amazed to see golf balls fly as hit through a formerly unimagined atmosphere like this, I even made a great long putt on one of the electrified greens that my caddie said he knew was good the instant I hit it -- even though neither of us could really even see the cup some 30 or 40 feet away in the downpour.

And yeah, since I was the kind of kid who stuck his fingers in the fan, I did back into one of the wires around a green to see if it was really electrified -- even though I was soaking wet.

And yeah… it was… electrified.

But I lived to tell, and the little sting still seems sweet in memory a year and a half later.

THE rest of the tour was equally magical, with moments like the Cruden Bay episode with Bill Condaxis that I referenced in an earlier entry, "Mind The Gap."

And playing Royal Dornoch twice -- once in glorious sunshine and once in rain.

And getting to play Carnoustie while they were putting up the bleachers around us that would be filled by galleries for the 2007 Open just two weeks later.

(They let us play with little plastic mats that we carried with us, as we weren’t to take any divots on the course! And it turned out to be the mildest day of weather for the whole trip, making what we had been warned would be “Car-nasty” more like a stroll in a park. I don’t know, even 18 did not seem so tough after all I’d heard. Walking it, I actually couldn’t imagine a pro hitting into either of the two notorious loops of Barry Burn. What I really remember were the goose bumps I felt as I got to walk up to the 18 green, surrounded by bleachers a couple of stories high, where someone would stand in this arena of final focus and win The Championship two weeks later…)

I’LL leave you this Christmas 2008 with one final image from the trip, which, at least for me, sums in another Cohen-ism what The Shivas Irons Society is all about.

I snapped it on The Old Course at St. Andrews 06.27.07, and even the caddies who walked the hallowed grounds of golf’s cathedral daily said they’d never seen anything like it in all their time there.

Yeah, it snowed, or hailed golfball-sized hailstones in June.

And that’s Cohen standing on one of the great Old Course double greens where he’s just traced out the Shivas logo with his putter -- dressed “appropriately” for the “bad weather” with a smile.

Happy Holidays to all in the “bad weather” of 2008!

--RL

Mind The Gap

RL@RichardLees.com — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 00:16:41 GMT

MIND THE GAP

“Mind the gap” has always been one of my favorite expressions.

Although no one ever produced more from these three simple words than Dickens in “Great Expectations,” we all come to terms with the space between expectation and reality. Certainly all who pick up a golf club do.

(And by way of brief apology for the wide space between my first postings here and this one… well, let’s just say that certain realities in my life including this year’s stock market woes, some familiar family health matters, and one or two other things somehow got between me and my original intentions here when I began this blog in the Fall… )

But alas, I return to try and close this gap a bit… Once again through golf…

ONE could argue that all of golf is an inner contest to see who can best deal with this most persistent of gaps -- the one between reality and expectation.

And a quick summing up might argue that the pro’s find a way to close this gap to the smallest space, while the rest of us hope to limit it to something smaller than the size of the course we’re playing at any given time.

But then even among the pro’s, some seem able to close it tighter -- with the Hogan’s, Joneses, and Tiger’s seeming to find a way to make their gaps small enough that they’re barely visible to the human eye.

And yet there are other possibilities in this equation…

And the “greatest gemme” seems, at least for me, to always find surprising ways to point this out.

A couple of weeks ago, by the time the stock market had been pounded five days further into submission on a Friday afternoon, and the economy looked more like “the news” finally had TEOTWAWKI right “this time,” and my wife was on her back with yet another broken bone in the medical gauntlet she’s been forced to run in this life (with Tiger-like strength…), and even the hills around my City of Angels were literally on fire in Santa Ana winds, I ran my week-ending macro’s, squared my books, looked around my office, and… grabbed my golf clubs.

Within minutes, I was racing through the mountains north of Los Angeles in “the Batmobile” to my wonderfully named refuge, Lost Canyons, where two Pete Dye courses that Freddy Couples has worked on and also calls “home,” await me any afternoon I can magically drive through the gates.

When I stepped out of my car near the clubhouse, the wind knocked my hat off. Not like a Scottish gale that I’ve been privileged by my membership in this Society to have experienced first hand -- but more like the nasty slap you feel when jumping out of a plane with nothing but a silk parachute on your back.

Inside, the kid behind the starter’s desk smiled and muttered, “no wind or rain checks once you get out there, you know.”

“This is nothing,” I smiled back, “I just survived another week in this stock market without losing any money.”

AND there I was on the first tee of the Shadow course.

I loosened up, did my Vijay Vad yoga stretches, and pulled my sweater and hat tight. The wind was at my back -- at least for this hole -- but it was blowing so hard I couldn’t even hear myself let out a yelp of a laugh. Needless to say, I was alone on the course.

I decided on the spot that this was an opportunity for one of Fred Shoemaker’s “care-free” rounds, so I bent down with a smile and teed it up high.

The wind blew the ball off the tee. Twice.

But then with a grin on my face, I turned and let the R7 loose. And no one but me saw the new Bridgestone RX I’d picked up at Roger Dunn’s not only fly like a buzz bomb, but fly straight -- and clear the two Dye-abolical traps that greet you on No.1, Trail Head, at 227 and 248.

I’d never cleared both these traps in the five years I’ve been playing. In fact, I never even tried. I always played it safe and aimed left on No.1, hoping of course to even go left…

But there it was. My ball sat white and pretty between the last trap and the elevated green at 275. Wind at my back or not, the shot gave me goose bumps. And I felt like I was off into the canyons for an unusual round.

I guess “unusual” is as good a word as any. Fred calls such golf “out of the ordinary,” or “extraordinary.” Shivas Irons grins and says, “turn the wind around, make it your friend.”

All I know is I was aware more than anything of the sound of the ball cutting through the wind, and that’s what I looked forward to on each shot -- hearing that s-s-s-s-sound.

I don’t remember if golf balls made the same buzz bomb sound years ago when I first tried to play the game as a kid. Maybe it’s the technology, the sound of 330 computer engineered dimples on the outer core of a soft three piece gradational core modern golf ball. But I love that sound! And I’ve never heard it more clearly than that day, which I later learned was blowing flames all over the city with gusts of wind up to 70 MPH.

With the wind, against the wind, between canyons of wind -- it made no difference. Or the only difference was the slight change in pitch of the note the ball created flying through the yaw of a course I felt I’d never played before.

It wasn’t about score. There was nothing more absurd than thinking about score in the face of a day like that. So I didn’t. But I did notice a birdie on a par 5 that made me remember with fondness watching Bill Condaxis, a teaching pro who has meant a lot to me since coming back to the game, as he hit three straight drivers -- two off the deck -- on a ridiculously long par 5 at Cruden Bay with Scottish wind and rain smacking us in the face during the Kingdom Tour 2007. I’ve never forgotten the joy on his face as he played that hole laughing in ridiculous conditions that day in Scotland; but this day was the first time I think I may have experienced what I saw on his face.

There were drives that flew. And some that seemed to stop dead and drop straight to the earth. There were irons, strange irons that sometimes cut through the wind like knives, and at other times seemed as helpless against the gusts as a balloon in a hurricane. And even putts. You know the wind is strong when you have to take it into account when you’re putting.

But more than anything there was amazement that the ball still flew. You could still play. It was a different world. But the game was still the game.

TO bring a long -- and strikingly fast round -- full circle, the last hole I played was Scout, No.16, a 160-yard par 3 that I decided to try and hit a cut 6-iron into even though I’d never thought about that shot on that hole before.

It was simply not a day to think.

I just felt it, saw it, went up and hit it.

The ball ballooned a little, but came down on a bank, pin high just off the green to the left.

My cart felt like it might not make it up to the green; the battery was getting weak in the wind, and I noticed for the first time that it was getting dark out.

I stepped into the deep green grass, grabbed my copper 64, wiped a wind tear off my cheek, and lifted a sweet soft wedge onto the green. I remember I heard the nice soft sound of the wedge moving through the grass and a little thump.

Then the wind howled. A Lost Canyons road runner scampered off the hill behind me. And I watched, feeling almost completely outside myself as the ball rolled without so much as a hesitation across the green, down a Pete Dye swale, and broke three feet right to the cup, where it disappeared a good thirty feet away.

I didn’t move for a few seconds.

And then I did.

And all of a sudden I realized where I was -- standing on a golf course at dusk in November, YOL 2008, in the high desert outside Los Angeles, crazy wind blowing fire ash all over the hills around me, heat turning to cold, and maybe I was the only man on earth doing what I was doing -- and enjoying it.

And just like that, I knew I was done for the day.

I leaned with the cart into the wind and headed back toward the clubhouse. The wind on 17 and 18, Shotgun Ridge and Shadow Pass, was even beyond anything I had experienced up to that point, and by the time I pulled in near the starter all that was left to wonder was whether the cart was going to make it to the shack.

“Good time out there?” the kid who took the cart from me asked.

“Better than that, “ I smiled.

SITTING back in the Batmobile, I began to feel my face flush with heat. I saw myself in the rear view mirror, wild-haired, looking nuts with dirt and ash on my face, but as happy as I’ve ever been around a golf course.

I recalled some of the shots I’d hit out there. And I realized I was conscious there in my car, I was thinking for the first time in hours, I was suddenly back to “analytical.”

But there was one more smile left in the day.

I realized there was more to the expectation-reality gap than a straight line grid of measurement requiring unending effort to close.

There was also another possibility: that of letting the expectation end of the grid move.

If I can say anything about the day at this point, it’s that the ridiculous conditions just freed me of my expectations. My gut just said no one could have any expectations for what they’d do on a day like that.

And the result was inarguably some of the best shots I’ve ever hit on a golf course.

I’d found a different way to "close the gap" a little.

And it had nothing to do with the mind.

I finally understood something my buddy Bill Condaxis has been heard to say on a golf course: “you don’t want to be in your mind on a golf course, it’s not a nice neighborhood to play in.”

Mind the gap, yes.

Just not with your mind.

The game is still the game.

Maybe changing expectation is yet another way to play it.

ONE WINS -- THE OTHER DOESN'T

RL@RichardLees.com — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 17:49:52 GMT

ONE WINS -- THE OTHER DOESN'T

When Camillo Villegas started smelling the finish line in his first Tour victory at the BMW last weekend, it was interesting to note that his demeanor sharpened and elevated and, in fact, turned inward with intensity.

When Sergio Garcia has gotten close, his reactions have been very different: he starts looking up at the sky, at his clubs, at spike marks on greens, at the long grass of the rough he suddenly finds himself stuck in.

When questioned after rounds, Camillo talks of how he's worked, his eyes narrow, and you can see he's leaning on the strength of his workouts, the detail of his routines, the method he's found to focus on his game.

When Sergio is questioned, he talks of himself in the second person, saying things like, "you give it your best shot, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't," or "you hit good putts, but sometimes they don't fall."

On 18 at the BMW, Camillo's eyes widened on the tee, he reared back, and did the opposite of what Johnny Miller was calling for "on the air" -- he hit an aggressive power fade aimed and executed to carry a bunker 290 yards out on the left side of the fairway.

And then when he tapped in for his first victory, he simply closed his eyes, looked inside himself, said yes to all the work he knew went into the moment, and clenched his fist in silent validation.

At Carnoustie, or any number of other close calls, when Sergio doesn't get there, he looks up at the sky, or at his putter, or his opponent.

One looks inward, at himself -- and wins.

The other doesn’t.

PASATIEMPO

RL@RichardLees.com — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 21:20:07 GMT

PASATIEMPO

Our 16-year Anniversary event at Pasatiempo on 08.21.08 was a wonderful day of golf played, as is par for the Society, on one of the world’s great courses, as well as in the hearts and minds of all the lucky members who journeyed to Santa Cruz this year. For, this year Fred Shoemaker, of Extraordinary Golf, offered up the keynote before we hit the links, and it was nothing less than “The Mystery of Golf Revealed.”

I first encountered Fred at my very first Shivas event up at Bandon Dunes in 2004 where, much to my amazement, I also found a group of people who shared the deep appreciation I had only recently rediscovered in my life for “the greatest gemme.” At a time in my life when the world seemed not only “too much with us,” but increasingly bent on pushing out all elements of grace, I suddenly found myself sitting in a circle of like-minded men and women that reminded me of the T-groups I’d participated in back in the day in Palo Alto and Ann Arbor when people were struggling to find a way to express connections to deeper feelings and yearnings that, when admitted, we all seemed to share a solitary internal relation to and dialogue with. And the truly amazing part was that each of us in that circle also seemed to find that the golf swing connected us to that inner dialogue even as it propelled us around the dunes of Bandon.

“What is this voice?” Steve Cohen asked with his great smile that anyone who’s ever encountered him knows makes the same smile appear on their own face.

And so my journey into The Shivas Irons Society began.

Fred not only posed the question again this year at Pasatiempo; he answered it.

“This voice” is the voice of our swing. And all we need do is listen to it.

Not dissect it. Not analyze it. Not deconstruct it. But listen to it. Be aware of it. And practice that awareness rather than struggle with the physics of all that goes into its sound.

The implications of this simple statement -- like most simple statements that seem to capture a firefly’s light in a bottle -- are enormous. And endless for golfers -- just as a game which is known as “a round” is, by definition, endless.

To tap into what we already know, as opposed to insisting that “knowledge” must be imposed upon us by the world outside.

And without doing anything more than find a way to swing a club in “a plane” that already exists around us.

To be able to duplicate that sound -- of connecting to that plane -- with our own voice, produced not by understanding with the mind all the physics of air being forced across our vocal chords and shaped into groupings of words that we mutually agree to call a “language” -- but rather, by listening to the sound itself, feeling where it comes from inside us, and shaping that sound as we shape notes in air with the musical instrument that is our natural voice.

Our golf clubs striking different notes, like hammers striking different strings inside a piano.

And then to practice our awareness of striking those notes so that we can “hear” or “see” when we’re “on” or “off.”

Sure, it can help to look at a video of a golf swing. (Especially if it’s the natural swing that Fred captures at his schools.) But the swing ultimately isn’t in the video. It’s in us. Better to be able to produce it from within than without.

As Fred says, he’s been finding that awareness with every swing of his for 40 years, and it never ceases to amaze him that it’s still there for the finding every time anyone lays hands on a club, feels the grip, and raises up into the swing.

* * *

At the end of the day, after all of us had circled ‘round Pasatiempo back to the place where we started -- all of us the same, but different -- and we’d shared some food and “sung the praises,” another remnant of my first Shivas “event” up in Bandon bubbled to the surface.

Unbeknown to those of us in the circle up at Bandon, Fred and Steve had placed a red wood rooster one day under one of the seats where we gathered each morning before the day’s round. After the usual morning talk had started, Fred said to all of us that we should look under our seats. There, beneath one of us, was The Rooster. And just as simple as that, one of us could now “hit a hole-in-one.”

We all laughed.

And though the person with the Rooster under his seat did not “have” a hole-in-one that day, we all experienced a change in our perception of what “could” happen when we went out to the first tee. We admitted this later. And that, of course, was Fred’s larger point…

And thus, The Order of The Rooster was born.

I read of the Rooster’s adventures the next year, when I couldn’t return to Bandon. Placed with it’s legs surrounding a cup on the practice green, putts were suddenly easier to “see,” easier to “make.” And not because the ball would funnel into the cup off the wider target of the rooster’s spread legs. No, the putts were dropping straight into the cup without touching the legs. The sound of the cup filling was suddenly all over the green.

Why?

Again, because of a change in perception, not “stroke.”

Again, “awareness,” not “knowledge.”

And now, years later, from a new perspective still, the Rooster was being auctioned after the 16^th Anniversary dinner at Pasatiempo.

Bidding started slowly, but picked up, and I heard behind me that the winning bidder had an accent, that he was from The Isle of Wight.

I wanted that Rooster, but I also smiled at the thought of it crossing the ocean, flying closer to the place of our Society’s origin, the place of our gemme’s origin.

And I let it go.

And I’m glad.

Because the Rooster’s "over there" now, but still with me, and still with the Society -- the same as it has been since that circle up at Bandon became, for me, my first completed Shivas Irons round.