A nostalgic parable of the irons
One of the things I like to do is hit golf balls. It’s something I’ve done for more than 50 years, and I have a routine. I go to a far end of the range, away from other golfers, take a few balls from the bucket, pick out a target, and build a rhythm. I start with the short clubs—usually a 50 degree wedge. The first swings are easy, but I get faster and faster until I’m swinging the wedge at 10 or 20 percent harder than I would swing it on the course.
Then I take a nine-iron, repeat the process. And again, with the seven. I usually only hit my odd-numbered irons in a session, though sometimes I should even them out and do a day where I only hit the even-numbered clubs.
After I finish with my threeiron—I still carry a three-iron; it is hollow-bodied, high-tech, with a flexy face—I move onto the driver, the three-wood, and the hybrid. I work my way back down through the irons to the wedge, only this time I hit only half and three-quarter shots with it.
Then I imagine a hole, hit a tee shot and follow that with whatever I think the appropriate shot should be. I play a tee-to-green round this way. Sometimes I have to hit a low-spinning 50-yard wedge into a green; sometimes I have to step on a five-iron. I go back and forth to my bag, choosing clubs and shapes for the hypothetical approaches.
I pay attention to divots; I want to leave an easily repaired strip rather than a square yard pocked with shallow craters. This is called etiquette, which I learned a long time ago.
This probably looks odd to other golfers using the range, which is one of the reasons I try to sequester myself on the fringes. It occurs that I might have a touch of OCD; I’m not really interested in visiting or even talking about what I’m trying to accomplish when I’m hitting balls. I just want to hit balls. To make the repeatable motion. To feel the dull thud of contact. To watch the result. To work.
I don’t buy into the idea there’s anything inherently ennobling in our games. As Lee Eisenberg, the longtime editor of Esquire and one of the founders of Rotisserie League Baseball, the Fertile Crescent of fantasy sports, once wrote, “A ball park is not a cathedral. A second baseman is not a holy man.” Sports don’t teach us lessons; the people that teach us sports might.
While this is not a meditative practice, I might realize the same psychic benefits from it that others get from their zen workouts. It is my time to think about nothing other than getting the club on plane and accelerating through to a high finish. There is a kind of release in making something that doesn’t matter at all the only thing
that matters. Focusing on something to the exclusion of all else obviously gives us a reprieve from thinking about the petty errands of adulthood.
My golf swing is not lovely. But it works well enough, and I am used to it. It changed quite a bit after I hurt my right arm a couple of years ago; it’s shorter and I have to consciously think about not taking the club back too far inside on the takeaway in order not to hit a loping hook, but I mostly make good contact. When problems arise on the course, I know my swing well enough to fix it.
Aside from my three-iron, the irons I use are simple blades, a technology that existed when I started playing in the early ’70s. They are not what golfers call “forgiving,” for if you miss the center of the club face on a shot you will lose both distance and accuracy, and if you miss the “sweet spot” of the club face by more than a half-inch or so, the results will be embarrassing.
I play these clubs because on the odd times when you find the precise center of the clubface on a strike, you experience a remarkable sensation. It feels like the ball softly blooms on the club face, that it somehow launches itself high and far. It’s almost as though you’ve hit nothing—a frictionless, silver feeling.
I play golf to chase this feeling, which you hardly ever get on the range, with the one-piece limited flight balls they stock the machines with. But to catch the dragon, you have to put in the work.
Sometimes people set up near me on the range. I do not glare at them; I try not to give off any signal that I’d rather they move elsewhere. I understand that they aren’t concerned with me and my secret rules. If we make eye contact I’ll nod and smile. If they speak to me I speak to them. I’m not a misanthrope.
The other day a young man, a big, lean 30-something, dropped his bag in my proximity and began hitting long, high seven-iron shots that came down at a steep angle. He was athletic, but not a refined golfer. I pegged him as a weekend warrior, someone who’d taken up the game as an adult as either a social pursuit or to replace the sports he had played as a younger person. He hit the ball a long way, longer than me, a fact that I find a little annoying.
After a few minutes, he stopped and I could feel his eyes on my back as I took my cuts. I wouldn’t have thought much about that except a moment later he asked me a question.
“If you don’t mind, sir, what kind of clubs are those?”
I pulled my nine-iron out the bag and handed it to him as I explained it was a muscle back blade. He asked if he could hit it and I said he could, but it turned out in actuality he couldn’t; on his first pass he managed what might have passed for a bloop single to right. On his second swipe he hit a near shank. He laughed at his ineptness and shook his head.
“You want to try mine?”
So I took his thoroughly modern seven-iron, with its plastic badge and wide sole, and hit it high and straight and 30 yards further than I hit my own (though not quite as far as he hit it). And the strike—even with the rock-hard range balls— felt pillowy and pure. Not the same feeling as when you strike a forged blade right, but not an inferior feeling.
And I asked myself why I was punishing myself with my old blades. Because the best golfers in the world play them? Because if, on the odd chance that someone who actually bothered to look in my golf bag would see them, recognize that what they were, and be impressed that I could play them?
That’s exactly why I’ve been playing them.
Nostalgia is a disease. Not everything gets better always, but some things, probably most things, do.