Someone had been reading my mind…

The peculiar psychology of short putts and the missing thereof also has a lot to do with how cruelly an errant 3-footer annihilates the brilliance of a shot, or a series of shots covering 400 yards or more, that got you to that position. It doesn’t seem fair, and it isn’t fair. It’s an outrage!

The Wall Street Journal: When 3 Feet Is a Mile

Golfing in Slovakia

The reason for my recent temporary hiatus and overall low frequency of writing in past weeks is very simple – like a bull tempted by a red flag I have been blindly following a vision of improving in golf. The major turning point is marked by the issuance of my green card that assigned me a handicap of 54 and a ticket to almost any golf course in the world.

My first real round of golf took place last Monday in Šilheřovice near Ostrava. The golf course is set in between pebbly path walks, shallow ponds, and monumental oak trees that have been growing there ever since the Rothschild family decided to build their chateau – to direct the steel mills that coined Ostrava’s nickname of City of Iron which it has been unsuccessfully trying to wash off – in the area and transformed its surroundings into a park. But the well-kept fairways clearly contrast with the state of the chateau which apparently lacks an owner and therefore necessary funds for its restoration. The club house itself does not possess the luxuries typical for newer club houses and was it not for the limousines in front of it, a first time visitor would hardly recognize it as a social heart of the sports area; albeit the tee fees belong to the upper half of Czech comparison table, and waiting lines are long, the maintenance costs of the largest golf course I have visited so far sentence the non-essential buildings around to slow deterioration both in the inside and outside.

Nonetheless I approve the direction in which raised money is spent, the course is magnificent. The right-turning first hole the longest of them all, is hilly on the, side and the path of a driver is obstructed by an old oak tree that tempts you to aim to the right where your ball will inevitably be lost in the long-cut rough. The second hole is far less challenging, just like holes three, four and five (which green however is randomly leveled and makes putting more a matter of luck than skill (that might have actually played my favor)), but idiosyncrasies of hole six elevate the level of one’s frustration back to proper highs when the branches of surrounding trees tend to divert paths of balls into wetlands behind them. I lost my favorite Titleist 2 there (I lost another beloved Titleist today after a swing that will forever live in infamy for the peculiarly curved trajectory it gave to the ball). The hole seven (par three) represented a return to more leisure railways as it allowed me to hit the green with only one stroke and finish completely it with boogie.

Only two more holes of the remaining eleven deserve commentary. I scored my very first boogie on par other than three on hole ten. On hole eleven I managed to lose two balls less than twenty meters from the tee ground; my first ball was lost immediately somewhere by the roots of plants with large green leafs, the second one literally vanished after I hit it after yet another crappy drive. The tragedy however didn’t end there. Encouraged by my grandfather I decided to drop another ball closer to fairway with a hope that this will not get lost. How naïve I were. Although the shot was perfect – long, properly high, well-aimed to land on fairway – we never found it. Debating taught me to successfully hide my feelings and at moment I was glad the infuriation that was boiling my blood in veins was not reflected on my face and choice of vocabulary. I was very, very angry.

Later on Friday I left to a “vacation” to Slovakia. The quotation marks around the word vacation are intentional and very appropriate – I feel more tired than ever. The daily program here consists of driving at least 60 miles every morning to one of two spa towns in western Slovakia where we play a round of golf. I sometimes follow it with a tennis match (though the results ought to remain unpublished), and then run away to Tesco where I sit by a table in a corner of a café and steal their wifi. There I download emails and work for five or six hours every night until one in the morning. What a vacation!

Tomorrow (or actually today, in just nine hours) I will enter my first golf tournament. I have two motivations: first, I want to improve my handicap that is now on the beginner’s level; second, I want to eat more of the delicious chicken breast with green peppers I lunched yesterday in the restaurant adjacent to the club house. It’s soothing to know that at least one of the goals will be accomplished because the waitresses are always willing to serve the hungry golfers more of the overpriced (but delicious!) meals. But frankly I feel my cynicism here is misplaced; I really have improved more than marginally (another cynicism – any step forward for a beginner objectively represents a large improvement) and my ambitions for doing reasonably well are not groundless. My current sky-high handicap will provide me a comfortable aid on each hole, and at the end might be really helpful. I will see and let you know…

A detour ahead on my way to PGA trophy

I must say I was extremely pleased with my performance at the golf course last week. Despite not holding the club for over three years (and I played only twice those years ago!), my swings were sending the golf balls over the flag signaling 100 yards quite regularly (that means four crippled balls were followed by a superb one that began this cycle again), and no green seemed to be too spacious to prevent me from putting the ball into the hole at two shots, three at max. I felt as though with more practice, Tiger Woods should worry about his $128-million gig.

Things turned out differently yesterday as I realized why the deep truth of the “beginner’s luck” phenomenon is most often described on a hypothetical example of two golfers.

At first I attributed the wide-left flying shots to the powerful wind that was blowing over the driving range. Regrettably, no improvement came upon the half-tornado waned into a warm breeze. Experimenting with the angle of the club came next, followed by attempts to paralyze my hips and prevent them from spinning during the shot — with no desired results. Therefore I decided to move right from the tee 1 to tee 8 to prevent more balls being lost in the forest on the left (and to minimize chances of hitting the front window of a car that unsuspectingly and inconveniently parked dangerously close to my location).

The arrival of my coach gave a new my trying, because he brought four other people with himself, and I didn’t want to look like an Incapable Golfer Newbie. I won’t — intentionally — attribute my superiority over those people to my skills, although none of them was short of an arm or a leg or bore any other physical disadvantage and thus gave me an advantage. The truth is that my three previous flirts with golf clubs were the reason for me hitting the ball more often, more often straighter, and more often further. But because the shots carried those comparative qualities mainly thanks to the deeper inexperience of my fellow strivers, it became apparent that my road to being a golfer (defined as a person who is capable of hitting the balls in the direction he decides prior to his swing)  will not be straight and fast, but rather crooked, covered with rocks, and several times detoured.

I indeed have a long way to go before challenging Tiger for the first time. I have already scheduled my next lesson to Tuesday and I am going to a practice course to Olomouc tomorrow as well. The initial enthusiasm, based on an irrational thought that I actually might be talented, disappeared and made a space for my strong will and determination which will be tested to their bones during the course of next three months I decided to devote to learning golf. My idea goes that I will learn as much about the sport before heading off to Gettysburg where I will abuse the college-affiliated golf course in the pursuit of acquiring better skills. I just hope the students will be permitted to enter the course for free, as the entry fees secretly compete in reaching the skies as fast as possible.

On three good things that happened yesterday

1) I officially graduated. Or not really, because I wasn’t present at the ceremony and thus my diploma is still in the headmaster’s office. Why weren’t I at a once-in-a-lifetime ceremony?

2) Because I and my brother were fighting our way to win a four day trip to Amsterdam in July. One reason for our success, besides being two awfully good debaters, was that I developed a strategy that might have been immoral, but strictly adhered to the rules of that quazi-debate format. In short, we didn’t disclose our solution to the problem until the second — and last — speech of ours. Because the primary purpose of this format is not to make the two sides engage in argumentation, this was a perfectly legitimate way to deliver speeches.

3) I picked up golf. During my stay in the U.S. four years ago I played two rounds of nine holes, finishing each round with approximately 300 shots above par. But yesterday on the driving range the balls were flying in the right directions and into plausible distances, which motivated me to start golfing more intensively in the future. That will be another way to fill my free summer time.

More about each later.