Golf is deceptively simple and endlessly complicated; it satisfies the soul and frustrates the intellect. It is at the same time rewarding and maddening - and it is without a doubt the greatest game mankind has ever invented.
~ Arnold Palmer
Last Friday was the Annual PCBA Golf Tournament. The results were not in until after press time, so unless my team won, this will likely be the last you hear of it from me.
We were at a new venue this year, but one I am familiar with – Burns Park in North Little Rock. It was close to five decades ago (pre-KM) when I first loaded up my starter set of Top Flite golf clubs, which consisted of a driver and a 3-wood; a 3, 5, 7 and 9 iron; and a putter of some kind. I sat with my sticks in the way-way back of one of mom’s many Vista Cruisers, with the wood grain sides, and watched everything going on behind us as we headed to Burns.
I remember the long line of boys standing next to their own personal pile of around 30 range balls. I remember the heat and the smell of cut grass, and seeing the low-flying locusts dart around in front of us.
That was my introduction to the game I would come to love so well, and often hate so much. But it’s good to be passionate about something, I’ve been told.
I don’t know why golf grabbed hold of me like it did, way back then. Maybe it was because of the old pro who walked behind us, the safest place to be, and critiqued between winces at the spectacle before his eyes. I remember him stopping behind me and saying, “Good swing,” after I got one airborne. Was that all it took?
A couple, three at the most, of those group lessons pretty well ended the teaching phase for me. There was one other I remember, though, which took place across the river at what was then the Little Rock Country Club. Now it goes by the Country Club of Little Rock. I’m not sure when or why it changed names. Maybe some embroiderer got it wrong on an order of shirts and rather than send them back, the board just changed the name of the club.
The lesson I took that day was from the club’s pro, Charles “Junior” “Pro” Lewis, who held the position from 1956 to 1986. He was inducted in the Arkansas Golf Hall of Fame in 1997 and passed away in 2012. But on that day, I had his full attention for about a half hour. He watched, and taught, and then at one point said, “Good swing.” I guess I was hooked.
Now, at age 57, I still love to play, even when some unseen force pulls out a kitchen knife and jabs it into the nerves connecting my lower spine to that part of the brain that says, “Ouch,” like last Sunday. It came on the second green, after I’d tried to swing the club on the first two tee shots like Rory McIlroy, both of those shots being topped and barely bouncing past the ladies’ tee boxes. That would be the “hate” part I was talking about.
But there was another shot waiting, like always, so I quickly moved to my ball (so my friend Robert Jackson who was playing behind us wouldn’t see where I was hitting from). I smashed a 3-wood (metal, actually) perfectly, toward the green some 250 yards away and walked back to the cart, imagining voices from long ago saying, “Good swing.”