Anything to make a putt

Nora Naranjo-Morse, A Tewa Pueblo Indian, will teach a ceramics workshop April 8-13 at Southeast.

March 28, 2002

Dear Pat,

March in Southeast Missouri has tried golfers' souls. Lightning, thunder, rain and cold have dogged the days. Like farmers, golfers are Mother Nature's playthings. We hope, we pray and watch her movements in the weather reports.

I spent the long winter putting on the living room rug and reading: "Golf My Way" by Jack Nicklaus, "Lights Out Putting," and "How To Shrink Your Handicap," a book co-written by a psychiatrist.

You, like DC, may wonder why I or anyone else would care so much.

Louise Suggs, the first woman inducted into the Ladies Professional Golf Association Hall of Fame, compared golf to a love affair. "If you don't take it seriously, it's no fun. If you do, it breaks your heart," she said. "Don't break your heart, but flirt with the possibility."

Golfers set goals for themselves. First it's breaking 100, then 90, then 80. There are golfers whose goal is to break 70. As someone has said of Tiger Woods, he is playing a game I am not familiar with.

Average golfers are convinced we just haven't discovered the secret technique that golfers like Tiger Woods know, and if we did we could be as good. We downplay that Tiger Woods has superhuman hand-eye coordination, the perfect body for golf, the determination of Patton and the brain of a chess master.

Thinking problems are the culprit we consider when each new technique fails to change or lives or scores.

On a PBS show titled "On the Ball," the actor Alan Alda, who doesn't play golf, defeated a woman golf professional in a putting contest by using a method developed at the Department of Exercise Science and Physical Education at Arizona State University.

Dr. Debbie Crews' theory is that the two sides of the brain must be in balance for optimum physical performance to occur. The analytical left side used to read a putt must calm down enough at the last second to give the creative right side responsible for rhythm and coordination and imagery a chance to play its part.

A cap studded with electrodes allowed Alda's brain activity to be measured by an EEG. When he was in balance, Alda said he imagined he was a cloud.

I know the feeling of that sense of balance. What isn't?

There is a place within each of us where anxiety and time do not exist. Find it and we are free, gods whose breathing blows the clouds away and gathers strength and clarity.

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;

Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,

but neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,

Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,

Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,

There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.

-- T.S. Eliot

Reciting poetry, imagining I'm a cloud. I'll do anything to make a putt.

A hard freeze Tuesday night was followed by a Wednesday that sparkled and hinted of the warm days golfers' winter dreams are made of.

Love, Sam

Sam Blackwell is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian