Regular players and followers of the game of golf as played by the Ballbashers will be very familiar with the existence of Player A and Player B who, in similar fashion to the well known monsters of horror movies such as The Exorcist or Alien, inhabit the body of our DisHon Sec, Nick, and take turns to control his golf game. Player A brings brilliance and joy, whereas Player B brings disasters and the Chaucerian slough of despond.
Today at Temple, another version of this form of golfing schizophrenia was brought into our midst by Rob M who, on the dusty shelves of an antiquarian bookseller called Amazon or some-such, had stumbled over a book entitled the Inner Game of Tennis. Being of a very, very lateral mind, Rob saw no reason why he should n’t apply the philosophy described in the book to golf. The undeniable facts that one game is played with a moving soft ball and a very large headed bat and the other is played with a stationary very hard ball and a very small-headed bat should, he argued, not make a gnat’s worth of difference when it comes to applying an internal state of mind to the conduct of the game.
Whereas Nick’s two states of mind are known as Player A and Player B, Rob’s are known more prosaically as Self 1 and Self 2. From the brief summary I was given by Rob, I understand that the basic theory espoused in the Inner Game is that, if you can get rid of the mushy contradictions placed in your mind at the top of the golf swing by Self 2 and thereby allow Self 1 a free-minded, uncluttered swing at the ball, everything will work well and you could be a scratch golfer in a couple of weeks. I have n’t personally plodded round many stupas but this does sound a bit like Zen Buddhism to me though it is a bit tricky playing golf while sitting under a banyan tree.
Rob chose to share this new-found ray of light with us as he stood on the 1st tee at Temple and he immediately unleashed a monster drive with a slight draw down the middle of the fairway. At this point the publishers of the Inner Game were probably thinking that they needed to get busy with a second print run, maybe in double figures this time. However the next 6 shots needed to get the ball into the hole, suggested that caution was perhaps the better course of action.
Having observed a full 18 holes of golf played by Self 1 and Self 2, my observation would be that, whereas Player A will normally take charge for 9 holes and Player B the other 9, Self 1 and Self 2 work at a much more frantic pace, with Self 1 frequently taking charge for just one shot before being ousted by Self 2. I suppose that this is fair enough in tennis where one good shot wins you the point, but in golf you need about 90 good shots to win the day. The Inner State of Calm was not much in evidence today but perhaps we need to give it time.
As for the golf today, we enjoyed really good weather for a February day and the course was in immaculate condition with smooth fast greens and even some run on the fairway. The balls fell so that PeterR, Rob and I were a team followed by MikeW and Mike S, who had just returned from Antigua and claimed to be suffering from jet-lag. The 3-ball went off first and immediately started to pull away from the 2-ball which encouraged us greatly.
Peter played a excellent golf over the front 9 with a particularly important run of the 3-pointers from the 6th to the 8th while I trundled on steadily alongside. Rob finally got into Chapter 2 of the Inner Game on the 9th hole and contributed 2 points to give us 21. We had encountered the 2-ball while they were coming down the 6th and we were going up the 7th and they had made some very disconsolate noises so we were a tad irritated at the denouement to subsequently discover that they had beaten us with 22.
We continued in much the same vein over the back 9. Chapter 3 of the Inner game was obviously a bit trickier to grasp than Chapter 2 or perhaps Self 1 was exhausted by his exertions on the front 9. None-the-less we totalled another 21 points on the back 9 and this proved sufficient to beat the 2-ball who scored 18. We also won the overall by 42 to 40 points which showed that victory for the 3-ball is possible despite the handicap reduction.
As far as the league was concerned the scores were:
Richard (37), PeterR (33), MikeW (32), MikeS (31) and Rob (23).
We were joined at lunch by Ashley, Bill, Pete and Stuart which made for a very jolly chat. Pete introduced another previously unknown ailment into the BB Lexicon of Medical Complaints – Planar Fibroditis (or similar) – basically a pain in the foot which is currently keeping him off the golf course – at least it does n’t require a catheter.
On a happier note, Ashley said that we currently have a full house signed up for the Sand Bucket in July which gives us something to look forward to in these days of rain and cold. That’s plenty of time for Rob to get to Chapter 24.
