My golf pro is either a frustrated yoga teacher or a sadist.
Getting the head of the club in the back swing to a position in line with my left arm's angle whilst bending my knees and keeping my head level and learning not to be afraid of the ball seems one step away from visualising the green with my third eye and aligning my chakras whilst contemplating the ball as an extension of my ancestors. Or something along those lines. The best bit is when I'm close to falling in a heap on the ground and he says the magic words, "Now doesn't that feel natural"?
As I was lining up for a shot he reached down to my inner calf, (that's the muscle below the knee, not a spiritual part of me that yearns to give milk), and pulled the hairs thereon. I tried valiantly to pretend that it was exactly what I had been expecting. As I hit the ball he said, "You felt that didn't you"? I answered that indeed I had and that I still could. "Well you shouldn't still feel it. I'm trying to show you that although you feel something, soon the feeling goes away and is nothing more than a memory". I stood silently waiting for him to call me grasshopper, smiling in what I hoped was an encouraging fashion. "You will hit a perfect shot, then the rest of the day you couldn't knock your grandmother out of bed with a Mack truck". I made a mental note to visit Nanna and prove him wrong, but kept the attentive look on my face. "Regardless of what you did, no matter how hard you think about it you cannot recreate the exact sensation even though you can remember it". I grasped for any memories of the works of Lao Tse as they seemed the most appropriate response, but came out with a sort of giggling cough.
He threw a few more balls down and told me to do what I'd just learned. I lined up, pushed back with my left arm, twisted my wrist to achieve the golden angle, swung gently describing an arc that would have been the talk of the mathematics department at Sydney Uni. My follow through spoke in tongues. It was a short par three. I was using a six iron. The ball followed the laws of physics. It bounced on the green. It went in the hole. Ethereal music came from nowhere as the sun broke through the clouds. Bluebirds alighted on my shoulders and the meek took one step closer to global domination. A hole in one.
"That's a little better", he said.
