While Seated

My Year With Golf

I started playing golf in earnest exactly a year ago, after my dad gave me a set of clubs. I'd been making these videos, and figured if I was going to spend all that time with golf in an "art" context, I should at least try playing the game.

I played once a year as a kid, when visiting my grandpa who was pretty avid about the game, and I remember hopping the fence at Cherry Hill in Amherst, MA to play with rusty clubs as a teenager. Last year, when I got my own clubs, I figured I'd give it a real shot.

For months, I sucked. I shot 90, 110, even. I played in the rain, in the middle of winter, hitting 3-irons off frozen ground, and when it snowed. Slowly, I started getting better. I'd figure out something new about the swing, like the fact that it isn't even really a swing per se, and I'd put that into action and see what worked. I developed, shed, and re-cultivated bad habits. It was a lot like an art (or photography) project. You make bad decisions, think they're good, realize they're bad, and slowly get rid of them.

I played a lot. Some days, 36 or more holes in 90-degree heat. I found all the courses close to home I could play cheaply (or for free) and set about trying to learn how to swing. Atlanta's a great town for golf, there are great courses everywhere, and some of them are even affordable, under $20. The municipal courses (where I play) are varied, and close, and each has its own particular charm.

While learning how to play, I found it easier to consider golf less as a sport, or me as an athlete, and to think about the whole endeavor as if it were an art project. Golf is so cerebral, the battle lies in getting your head to allow your body to do something, rather than doing something with your body that your head can't believe. I'm not saying my game is a work of art, but it helped me to consider it as a kind of artistic effort -- it capitalized a lot of my photography time, so why not consider it a new kind of aesthetic skill, a combination of the visual and the performative? (More on all that, later.)

The intersection of athletics and art is a personal sweetspot, and working on my swing felt exactly like everything else I've done with photography, or writing, or now, with video. A honing, a sharpening, a working toward a point that looks and feels right, with a distinct capability for something unknown, and beyond.

Then again, I'm just a guy swinging a golf club.

I attended a few PGA tournaments. I saw guys like Mickelson and McIlroy play unbelievable shots up close, right in front of me. Freed from the television, what I saw made sense; golf is physics, clubs crash into balls that take off and fly through the air. It's simple, really.

YouTube helped. I watched slo-mo Hogan swings, videos about proper grip, and I incorporated what I'd seen into my nascent game. My good shots increased. I started to understand what the hell I was doing, and how it made the ball slice & hook, fade & draw.

My goal was to spend a year learning the game and try to get to scratch. "Scratch" means you're a zero-handicap golfer, which means when you go play, you play Par for the course.

I nearly made it. My average score slid from the 90s, down to the mid-80s, then high-70s/low-80s, and recently I've reached the low 70s where I've stabilized, unable to break into the 60s (for now).

Along the way, I picked-up better clubs, a lighter bag, (I still play used balls I find in the woods), and my swing, while not very good, is getting better. I've learned what its tendencies are, and how best to employ my strengths while minimizing my weaknesses.

I still haven't had a lesson. A guy gave me some tips at the range that were helpful, and steered me out of a rut, but honestly, I've learned the most by watching (YouTube vids and the Golf Channel), and recording my own swing, trying to diagnose problems myself.

Last week I decided to ratchet-back my playing, maybe only play once-a-week, while life and work ramp-up into autumn. This morning I went out and managed to get my first Eagle, on a par-5, 18th hole. Better still were 11 putts on the back nine.

It felt like a good stopping point (and like all good ends, a good beginning), and we'll see if I can't drop into the 60s consistently next year!

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Hot Back Nine This Morning...

...with a 315 yard drive, my longest ever.  Front nine, not so much.

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Flight Plan

A new variant of these.

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Tiger Woods at Pebble Beach, a Study in Photographic (and Editorial) Contrast

Here's Woods in 2000, when he won the U.S. Open by a record 15 shots. This is from the first day of the Open, on the ninth fairway. Photo is by Chris Stewart for the San Francisco Chronicle.

Cut to ten years later, this week at Pebble Beach, Woods in a practice round on the same hole, disappearing over the fairway's horizon.

Photo by Robyn Beck for AFP/Getty

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9-Iron Swing Bounce Catch Drop Repeat

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The Srixon Z-Star Tour Yellow Pants of Saturday Morning Waffle House

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Twenty or Thirty Feet, Not Sure

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While Westwood Watched - My Entry for "America's Next Great Golf Writer"

Here's Geoff Russell, editor-in-chief for Golf World Magazine. He launched a contest to find "America's Next Great Golf Writer", and the winner gets to go to Scotland to cover the Open in July. So, I entered. Why not? I'm not a professional writer, and I've never written about golf, so I qualify!

Here's my entry "While Westwood Watched", with it's ramshackle third sentence, a failing I only realized after-the-fact. Hey, I made the deadline by three and a half minutes!

Michael David Murphy
Entry for Golf World "Next Great Golf Writer" Contest
April, 2010

While Westwood Watched

Phil Mickelson missed the putt. It's easy to forget. Highlight reels will replay Mickelson's second shot from the pine straw on 13 at Augusta National until everyone who applauded, whooped, and yelled, "Get 'em Phil" (while the ball arc'd its way across a tributary for Rae's Creek) is dead and gone. The most spectacular shot of the tournament won't be known for what it was, a remarkably risky but perfectly executed approach for an eagle putt, but for what it wasn't, the swing that won the 2010 Masters.

Mickelson's game at Augusta had flash and brilliance (his 2nd shot on 14 on Saturday, a hole-out from 138 yards, rolled a path of inevitability upon landing) but Major Championship-winning golf doesn't always express itself in the most heroic ways. There are small, unacknowledged victories along the path. Crucial par saves. Stepping-up to the first tee with a 3-wood (instead of your surgically-repaired driver) and lacing it up the middle.

If the fans at Augusta were any indication, we're comfortable with Phil as a champion. We could imagine running into him at Parent / Teacher night at our kid's school. He's got the look of a man who's worked hard for a living, but not too hard, and he's achieved a kind of life anyone would admire; a beautiful wife, great kids, a big paycheck. Who wouldn't want the chance to birdie 18 to win the Masters by three strokes? Mickelson does it for the rest of us, and we pay him with our cheers.

But the battle of Masters Sunday didn't turn out to be between Westwood and Mickelson. It was between Mickelson and himself. Between Mickelson and the shadow of World Number One, Tiger Woods. Between Mickelson and the kind of year that would break lesser men in two -- his cancer-stricken wife waiting for him to redeem the promise of his talent on the 18th green.

Westwood never stood a chance against Mickelson's internal struggle. And in ragged glory, Phil fought it out with himself all the way to the edge of self-destruction, otherwise known as the tributary that skirts the 13th green. It took caddy Jim MacKay two attempts to dissuade his boss from going for the green, and it took Mickelson a 6-iron to get there.

You know the story, how the shot threaded through trees before landing softly, but perhaps the most Mickelsonian moment came with his next stroke, the missed eagle putt. As daring and risky as the shot from the pine-straw was, it was only one swing, and you don't win the Masters with one swing.

After missing the three-foot putt for eagle on the high side, Mickelson stood upright and put his left-hand in his pocket. It was as if the ghost of Winged Foot was trying to flutter up and out, and it was all Phil could do to cram it back in there. Not here, not now.

After sinking the three-foot comeback, Mickelson sighed the sigh of a man who's stalled his car on the train tracks, and the car's engine's finally turned-over after franticly turning the key and pumping the gas.

While Westwood watched (cagily dressed in Tiger's traditional Sunday-red) Mickelson had been over the creek, around the bend, and as Phil grabbed his ball from the cup and walked off-green toward the 14th tee, he couldn't move fast enough. He'd failed upward into birdie, like Westwood, and in doing so, he'd rattled himself enough to know his demons were close, and if he could only stay in front of them, he'd have a good chance for his third green jacket.

Seventeen strokes later, the patrons knew. The radio announcers and television analysts knew. Lee Westwood knew. Amy Mickelson and her three children knew. You probably knew from the comfort of your couch.

In making the birdie putt on the 18th green to win the 2010 Masters, Phil Mickelson proved himself right. You can hit it into the trees and bounce back. You can learn your mother and your wife have cancer, and you can grow strong and fight the disease as a family. You can look at the 13th green through a gap in the trees and tell yourself you can do it, despite what your caddy thinks, what the guys on TV think, and what the ghost of Winged Foot in your left pocket thinks.

You can be remembered as the World's Favorite Golfer, which is it's own kind of World Number One. It's the one people hold close, not just in their minds, but in their chests, where blood beats and keeps us going into the next swing, the next day, the next year.

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Phil Mickelson, 274 Yards to Unknown

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Oh Phew, Sunrise Service on the 18th Green at Quail Hollow Championship

Oh phew, I was wondering where I'd be able to get my Prayer On before watching Tiger Woods (if he makes the cut) on Sunday morning.  

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