All of Larry’s books have been about small groups—fraternity brothers, basketball teams, and now the crew of a submarine.  Perhaps because of his own background in team sports—he had an espresso in the big leagues and played baseball professionally for six years (seven if you count his summer with the Portland Mavericks)–Larry understands the dynamics of a small group.  He recognizes the signs prefiguring conflicts, he appreciates how losing can plant a kernel of bad karma and destroy harmony, and he knows how leaders can emerge in a crisis.  He paid a price to acquire this knowledge, riding buses in the boonies for endless hours in the minor leagues as a kind of clandestine anthropologist.  He’s put what he learned to excellent use as a writer, moving from an introspective gaze to a broad and detached analytical perspective.  But in offering up this praise to No Ordinary Joes, I must confess that I am not a disinterested party—Larry’s my amigo, and if I thought this book was bad I wouldn’t be saying anything about it. 

 Over the last forty years, I have spent more time with Larry than anyone not related to me.  We’ve watched each other’s kids grow up, commiserated about marriages, whether enduring or disintegrating, and celebrated the arrival of our grandchildren.  We’ve followed oblique career paths, each going our own ways but never so far into the woods that we couldn’t hear the other’s whistle.  We’ve dead-ended and back-tracked and yet somehow managed to find our mutual ways forward.  Nothing has ever interrupted our friendship.

We’ve also played hundreds of rounds of golf together, plodding along innumerable fairways, often in despair as our games have melted away over the years, oozing out in a demoralizing arc from respectable to mediocre to miserable.  We enjoy each other’s company, but we don’t have discussions when we’re playing—we’re both too preoccupied with this irritating and irreversible deterioration of our golf swings and the delicacy of our emotional states accompanying it to focus on anything but ourselves.  In this sense, at least, we’re like real athletes—we’re in the moment.   

Larry and me. September, 2010

What we have in place of conversations is parallel monologues.  It’s not babble–we don’t speak at the same time.  We listen to one another, but we just don’t respond in the ordinary way of listening and answering, the old give and take.  We concentrate on the give.  I talk about what’s on my mind and Larry talks about what interests him.   Larry always makes me laugh, and I have never once been bored by what I am hearing, even when it’s not for the first time.   What mostly interests Larry is also Larry, so our curiosity about this particular subject coincides.  Besides, listening to Larry talk is like hearing Tony Bennett sing—what, you wouldn’t want to hear “Once Upon a Time” again?  Larry’s cycle of stories about the life of Larry is filled with all the elements of classical myth—great tests and abject failures, feats of recovery and the resilient bounce of hope and always, perpetually, heroically, a good laugh at the end. 

Larry plus narrative equals what I call the larrative, which is the evocative and lucid report from the battlefield of the endlessly fascinating, complicated and admirable life of Larry Colton.   I am really glad that I have had the privilege of being around Larry all these years, even though sometimes life has dealt some lousy blows.  But that’s what life is, right?  It’s how you handle it that matters, and no one I’ve ever known is more resilient, uncomplaining and  droll than Larry.  He may love himself, as we all should, but Larry’s lesson is that humor can keep the hounds of narcissism at bay.  Larry likes to act uncomplicated, but he’s not. 

I have watched him evolve from a recovering jock ex-high school teacher trying to find a voice for his first published piece of journalism to one of America’s most accomplished writers of literary non-fiction.  He’s had success for sure with his last two books: Goat Brothers (a main selection of Book-of-the-Month club, a quaint institution back in the day when people bought books printed on paper); and Counting Coup, a report of the year he spent in Hardin, MT, watching the high school girls’ basketball team, half white, half Crow Indian, try to win the state championship, which won an award as the best e-book of the year, but alas, a decade before the invention of the Kindle. 

No Ordinary Joes grew out of an unlikely request by a financial supporter of a wonderful foundation Larry founded, Community of Writers (COW), his response to local school districts around Portland cutting funding for the arts.  He raised money to run writing workshops for teachers and then to place working writers in their classroom to help students do projects ranging from journals to newsletters to poetry and song-writing.  Larry created this program from scratch and fury, found a way to fund it (mostly by begging a lot of really nice people in Portland who have money who also like Larry to fund his idea), and ran COW until it was time to start writing again.  No Ordinary Joes was a book he needed to get back to.

The project started when the donor asked Larry to look at a manuscript written by an uncle who had served in WW II.  This is the kind of request writers dread and have to resist if they’re ever going to get any work done, but given that Larry was wearing his COW hat when the request was made and already had his hand out, he wasn’t in a good position to make a fist when the pages were proffered. 

The manuscript was brief and not particularly well-written, but it conveyed the outlines of a chilling and gripping tale: a WW II American submarine sunk, its crew captured by the Japanese and forced into slave labor, but not before their families and friends have been informed that the men are missing and likely lost.  Giving it context as he builds towards its complicated finale, Colton tells this extraordinary story in No Ordinary Joes.  The epic tale of the USS Grenadier will linger in obscurity no longer now that Colton has given it form.  The handful of survivors alive to read No Ordinary Joes deserve the gratitude and praise of their countrymen, even if it has been late in coming.

Larry Colton, author of "No Ordinary Joes"

The book officially launches in early October, with a party at Wordstock, the literary festival that is another Colton contribution to Portland’s cultural life.   Originally conceived as a fundraiser for COW, it now has a life of its own, and it’s fitting that this year Wordstock will celebrate Larry’s wonderful new book as a centerpiece of the literary banquet.

Jack Ramsay, coach of the one Trailblazer team to win the NBA championship and another legendary Portland character, was a Navy Seal in WW II.  Jack and Larry became friends when Larry was writing his first book, Idol Time, a chronicle of the Trailblazer’s championship season of 1976-77.   Knowing that he was a naval veteran of WW II, Larry sent Jack the uncorrected proof of No Ordinary Joes, which Jack read over the next two days, dazzled by what Larry had written. 

Now Jack is coming to Wordstock to share the stage with Larry and Tim McCoy, one of the main characters of No Ordinary Joes and a true hero of the Grenadier’s grim saga.  Their reunion comes during a difficult time, when America isn’t in much of a mood for celebration.  But men like Jack Ramsay and Tim McCoy, annealed by the toughest forms of competition, set a timeless example for all of us of what determination and purpose can achieve.  And Larry, too, despite his habit of self-deprecation and his aw-shucks shtick, deserves his place with them as a person who has struggled energetically and with great conviction to build a society that will take its arts as seriously as its wars.

Victoria Martz in her ASGCA blazer, one of three women among the organization's 200 members.

Vicki Martz, a member of the American Society of Golf Course Architects, was Vice President and Senior Golf Course Architect at Arnold Palmer Design until she started her own firm earlier this year.  As Director of Environmental Design at Palmer, Martz  established herself as an expert on the environmental issues golf developments face.  Her new firm, Victoria Martz Golf Design, focuses on sustainable design solutions, but it also looks for ways to make the game more attractive to at least two categories of players not always taken into consideration by mainstream golf design firms: women and children.  What follows is an insider’s take on women in golf design and how one woman’s views may affect the future of the game.

 

Why has the golf industry been so slow to perceive the need to make the game attractive to kids and families?

            For so many years a golf course was seen as an amenity needed to sell housing.  It was part and parcel of the “lifestyle” movement embraced by developers.  There was little motivation to cater to a new market.  In many cases the golf course was viewed as a “loss leader” and was never expected to generate profit on its own.  The “larger, bigger and more expensive” mantra was always geared to lure customers to the housing or resort-hotel component.  These courses were not designed to encourage women or junior golf.   They were designed to appeal to a demographic that wanted to play on a “best new” award  course or a course with a top one hundred ranking by one of the major golf publications.  The silver lining in this current market adjustment is that people within the golf industry have finally realized that, to keep this wonderful game alive and positioned for the future, more emphasis has got to be placed on growing the game—and we can’t do that without including women and families.

How do clients respond to your approach?

         It may or may not have been part of a formal discussion, but all of the designs that I did with Arnold Palmer Design were fun and playable from all sets of tees.  I was very cognizant of how each hole played for the higher handicap.  We now include “grandchildren” tees. They take very little maintenance and are so economical to install and irrigate that I am hopeful that most facilities will recognize their importance for the future of the game.

Bay Creek Club. Family Friendly Design

Arthur Little has done quite a bit of research on the importance of proportional tee positioning that deemphasizes strength and encourages skill.  He noted that swing speed, not handicap, should be the prime factor when players select and architects design tee locations.  It is an enlightened concept that will encourage more and speedier play. 

 Here are my guidelines for “grandchildren tees”:

• Start by assessing hazards within 100 yards of the green.
• Set up tees anywhere from 40 yards to 160 yards, so the hole can be a par 3 for older children but a par 4 or even a par 5 for younger kids and beginners. 
• Remember that navigating the tee shot and learning the short game is the goal.  Par shouldn’t matter.  The point is to acquaint children to the fun and challenge of the game and encourage them in their learning process.
• At the minimum, mow a small area or an existing mound for a grandchild tee, but keep in mind that variety in the length and type of shot required to the green is what will keep the children’s interest up.

 Which of your completed projects best shows the benefits of making the game more family-friendly and accessible?

             The King’s North in Myrtle Beach, SC is a very challenging golf course that golfers pay a premium to play due to its reputation in South Carolina and its high ranking in golf publications.  However, it is also well recognized for the strength of its design for women, with not one but three sets of tees rated for women to accommodate all skill levels, from beginner to advanced.  With that “women friendly” model the course attracts couples who enjoy the game together as well as families who can take advantage of the variety of tee options.

 What is the biggest challenge facing the golf design business? 

             Golf became too dependent on the housing market.  Often courses were not built to be economically sustainable.  Economic data nonetheless shows that the retirement market for golf is still strong.  The baby-boom generation is just now reaching that golden age.  The boomers were brought up on golf and have a great desire to play, and also have the financial resources to do so.   If the financial markets will loosen up, then I think there will be a demand for new golf from developers who cater to this market segment.  

However, for this market of older players courses will need to play shorter and take less time.  There will always be a premium on well-designed courses with effective strategy and rich aesthetics, but playing challenges and beauty don’t necessarily mean “long” and “expensive.”  Existing courses, too, will always need to keep the components, like the irrigation system, up to date and working efficiently.  When it’s time for renovation work, courses can, and should, reevaluate the design strategy to make sure they can accommodate juniors, seniors and women, the growing segments of golf.

The Classic Club in Palm Springs. A family friendly tournament course.

 I have also worked with existing clubs to find their “course within the course.”  When play is light, a golf course can offer a shortened course that is hidden within the existing routing.  We need to embrace options that keep golfers wanting to play the “right amount of golf.”

“I Curse the River of Time” has the same calm narrative thrust of “Out Stealing Horses,” but the narrator, Arvid Jansen, is such an irritating, self-indulgent fool that it’s hard to find the story in all the misdirected cogitation. In this passage, for example, Arvid is describing a scene at his mother’s birthday party, where he had intended to read a speech he had written. It illustrates the dilemma Petterson has created for his readers:

“So when I stood up, a roaring wind blew through my head, there was spring tide and breaking surf in my brain, I took one step to the side and bumped into a chair where a farmer in a suit was sitting, he smelled of cowshed and milk, an uncle, I am certain he was, I had seen him before, and I had nothing against that smell, it reminded me of childhood, not my childhood, but someone’s childhood, and not only was I drunk, I had forgotten the two sheets of paper with the speech in my jacket, and my jacket hung in the hall with the other jackets.”

Is this intended to convey the wages of alcoholism? Is it supposed to be funny? If so, it must depend on a singular Norwegian humor that at best hopes for a titter or a chuckle, not a laugh. Or perhaps it is supposed to remind us that humor is close to tragedy, that we laugh at ineptness as long as it’s not dissolving into calamity.

But there is hardly a moment in the novel that manages to summon any sympathy from the reader for Arvid. He seems determined to show himself, again and again, in the worst possible light. Perhaps an early scene where he is driving and singing with his young daughters on a winter outing cloaks him with a convivial charm, but the kids disappear from the story after this brief early appearance. Despite parents, brothers, a wife and children, and co-workers (not friends), Arvid is as alone as any character ever imagined by Jean-Paul Sartre or Samuel Beckett. Even his mom, whose diagnosis with terminal cancer launches the novel, has richer prospects than Arvid.

A lot of contemporary fiction rests on misdirection or deceit, the art of putting the reader in the hands of an unreliable narrator. But Petterson’s storyline has deeper roots, and “I Curse the River of Time” falls somewhere between a tall tale and the audacious ingenuity of the early Charles Dickens. In “Hard Times,” Dickens’ Mrs. Gradgrind lies ill. Her daughter asks, “Are you in pain, dear mother?”

“‘I think there is a pain somewhere in the room,’ said Mrs. Gradgrind, ‘but I couldn’t positively say that I have got it.’”

Arvid, with his putative recollection of “someone’s childhood,” is the reincarnation of Mrs. Gradgrind,only now instead of an earnest Victorian woman the wandering soul has taken on the form of an insecure Norwegian Maoist entirely lacking self-awareness. The novel is set in 1989. The Berlin Wall is falling, Arvid’s mom has just learned that she is dying while his wife, about whom we learn absolutely nothing, has filed for divorce. Arvid is willfully alone, perversely isolated and determined to avoid learning anything about himself. He follows his Danish mom to her hometown in northern Jutland — the part of Denmark that is attached to the continent — all the while contemplating what’s driven her to go there from Oslo without bothering much to wonder why he’s followed her.

The tone of “I Curse the River of Time” replicates the appealing timbre of “Out Stealing Horses,” but the novel not only avoids the river of time, it also buries Arvid up to his knees in the mudflats of futility. There’s a subplot of an early affair Arvid had with a young woman, a kind of counterpoint to mom’s endgame, but as with Arvid’s other tales, it’s inconclusive to the point of vapidity.

Nonetheless, I still believe Petterson is a writer of great power. Arvid Jansen may be molded from some deep substrate of Petterson’s psyche, and in purging him onto the pages of “I Curse the River of Time,” Petterson may have liberated himself from the hold of this strange intemperate man, freeing him to undertake the next great novel surely able to flow from his pen. 

I CURSE THE RIVER OF TIME
Per Petterson�
Graywolf Press
$23, 224 pages

Brice Secord's Convenient Way to Carry a Tee

On the first tee I met Brice Secord, whose creativity in a game renowned for its traditional allegiances and conservative attitudes, was immediately obvious.  His play was so-so (as was mine, let’s be honest), but his fashion sense was clearly perfectly in tune with the Portland zeitgeist.  

Brice, who’s an apprentice lineman for PGE (one letter away from being in the PGA, as close as any of us can aspire to), carries a tee in each ear.  Before he found his calling climbing utility poles, he worked as a piercer in a Portland tattoo parlor, establishing his creative chops in a revered Portland creative arena.  Once his ear holes were wide enough for thick plugs, but several years working at PGE, where dangling baubles are not encouraged, has reduced them to the perfect dimension to hold a golf tee.

On the day we played, Brice went with the navy blue pegs, but has experimented with other colors, depending on his mood.   The ear tee adds a new phrase to the vocabulary of the links.  Someday Brice’s innovation may rank with Gene Sarazen’s discovery of “bounce” in the sand wedge, or Dick Halmstetter’s experiments for Callaway with giant metal drivers, saving forests of persimmon.  I expect the Secord approach to tee management to have a lasting influence among Portland’s creative golfers.

The Tee Ring

Arjun Atwal--First Indian Player to Win on PGA Tour

Just under a year ago I watched Dale Lynch, the Australian swing guru, provide a tutorial to his latest pupil, Arjun Atwal.   Atwal was at a Nationwide event in Boise, Idaho, just starting to play again after a difficult recovery from torn rotator cuffs in both shoulders.  He had aggravated the injuries trying to come back too soon, and for months could not take a full swing, let along fire the club at the ball the way any successful touring pro must.  Yet today, August 22, 2010, Arjun Atwal is the biggest story in golf, having just won the Wyndham Championship (nee the Greater Greensboro Open) by a shot over David Toms, with a 20 under par score of 260.

(See http://johnstrawn.com/golf/golf/instruction/284/dale-lynch-at-home-on-the-range)

At 37, Atwal has now won for the first time on the PGA Tour, just days after losing his tour card when his medical exemptions expired without his having won enough to remain qualified for the all-exempt tour.  To get into the Wyndham he first had to get through Monday qualifying at Forest Oaks, a former tournament venue.  He carried the momentum of that success to a first round 61 at Sedgefield.  He was tied for the lead after two rounds, three clear after the third, and one giant shot to the good after the final putt fell.

Dale Lynch Shows the Way

Atwal averaged almost three fewer putts per round than the field this week, which is the number of strokes per round by which he bested the field.  He putted well, of course, but he first had to hit the ball well enough to give himself birdie putts.  Because he was finally playing in the last group, Arjun was subject to a slow-motion swing analysis by Peter Kostis (as well as to positive comments about his rhythm by Nick Faldo in the booth, but a clear expression of doubt about his club selection for his second on 18).  Kostis noted the steadiness of Atwal’s head position, the strong release by his right side, and his wonderful tempo.  With so much at stake, he played rock steady, walking calmly, almost always with a water bottle in one hand and a towel in the other, keeping well-hydrated and sticking to routines.

Arjun’s victory on the US Tour, in an event won in past years by great major champions such as Sam Snead,  Ben Hogan, Julius Boros, Billy Casper, Ray Floyd, and Nick Faldo (although not every victory was at Sedgefield, where Arjun won), provided a pivotal moment for Indian golf.  Arjun’s home club, Royal Calcutta, the oldest golf club in the world outside the UK, is about to undergo a major renovation to restore itself to eminence in the Indian golf scene.  (Ian Baker-Finch mentioned having played in Indian Opens there.)   A number of new courses by prominent international design firms have elevated Indian golf in the last several years, and the Royal is determined to catch up.   India’s economic rivalry with China echoes across the golf course, too, and now India has trumped China with Arjun’s victory, just a week after Wen-Chong Liang set the course record at Whistling Straits and  finished tied for eighth, a brilliant result.  Perhaps someday India and China will play a Ryder Cup-like event for national bragging rights.   That’s where the trajectory of golf’s future is bending.

Second Round Leader Matt Kuchar at Whistling Straits

When is there ever a “forced error” in golf?   Did Kuchar’s fellow competitors suddenly jump out of a bunker and try to bump him in his backswing?   “Unforced error” is a term of art for tennis, and even there it sounds precious and affected.  In tennis the person on the other side of the net is trying to make you screw up so he or she can win the point.  Forcing your opponents into an error is one of two ways to win a point in tennis, the other being to hit an outright “winner.”   Golfers may be distracted, may not “commit to the shot,” may be knocked off balance by a gusting wind, or may simply not hit the shot they’re hoping for, which is certainly something everyone who’s ever held a golf club can understand.  But “forced error” or “unforced error?”   They have nothing to do with golf.  It would make more sense to blame the caddie.

Players are struggling not against an opponent but against the golf course—in this case the ominous Whistling Straits, with all the optical illusions and vertiginous slopes and gnarly rough that Pete Dye’s ingenuity and virtuosity can summon.  Designed to confuse and intimidate and ultimately exhaust anyone who confronts its challenges, Whistling Straits whispers “calamity” in the players’ ears.   

Climbing Mount 17: You Can’t Get There from Here

But unforced errors?  No, every mistake a player makes–every flair to the right on 17, every smothered hook on 2– is the product of Dye’s genius, with contributions from the weather or the sudden intrusion into consciousness of the dreadful realization of what is at stake in a major championship, and not because of any disturbances from beyond.  If Baker-Finch and other commentators would just think about what they’re saying for one moment, they would abandon the conceit that there are “forced errors” in golf, and settle for describing shots usng the plausible scale of somewhere between “lousy” and “great.”   After all, most viewers are now watching with excellent resolution on their high def TVs, and can see for themselves what’s going on.  Baker-Finch’s innate kindness contributes to his favorite locution, which is a variation of “that’s pretty good from where he was.”  I can live with that.

Oakmont CC

Day Two: The Turnaround.  Completely opposite result from Day One, but it was Too Late.  Team David and Lee won 6 to 3 and 6 to 3, allowing them to finish cumulative fourth in their flight, only one and a half points out of shared first.  The real highlight was that Lee made natural birdies on the last two holes he played, 17 and 18, an especially satisfying vindication on 17 after the mortifying accidental lateral the day before. 

The Kiltie also has a bunch of skill events—long drives, closest to the pin, longest putts.  There are separate competitions for handicaps from 0-13 and above 14, which was Lee’s category.  He got to write his name on the long drive board once but it didn’t hold up.  The most impressive skill victor was an Oakmont member in Lee’s flight, Bernie Marcus, who won KP on both days on the the long 16^th in the over 14 handicap group, hitting it to 20’2” on Friday and making a hole-in-one on Saturday. 

On Sunday, Lee learned the true reason for the invitation when David asked him to get the ladder out of the garage so he could repair and replace the outside lights. As I said before, Lee’s handy around the house.

For the original post, go to http://johnstrawn.com/golf/golf/personalities/268/america-s-happiest-man

Arjun Atwal at the Albertson's Boise Open

Pat Sullivan of the NY Times filed a story about Lynch  after the 2009 British Open, when Lynch’s student, Matt Goggin, was chasing Tom Watson for the lead until a rash of bogeys late in the final round dropped him into a tie for fifth.  Lynch, Sullivan wrote, doesn’t emphasize “psychology,” but rather “takes a different approach. He has combined a focus on the fundamentals of the swing with an emphasis on building pressure into every aspect of practice. His belief is that it is better to fix any weakness a player has at the driving range than on the psychologist’s couch.”

Lynch’s bag of tricks for building pressure into practice sessions includes a test that asks a player to hit say, six of ten shots with a five iron to a target green 200 yards away.  The first few are easy, but if a player has succeeded five times and has one shot left, that’s pressure.  “Players want to succeed, even when it’s not for anything,” Lynch says.  “They really start grinding, so that’s also when any swing flaws will show up.”

Atwal was in the midst of rehab from not one but two torn rotator cuffs, playing in a Nationwide event, the Albertson’s Boise Open, hoping to reclaim a spot on the PGA Tour in 2010.  Lynch had flown to Boise from South Carolina, where he and his partner, Steve Bann, had recently established the International Institute of Golf, part of the vast complex of Cliffs Communities stretching across two states, with courses by a constellation of top designers, including Jack Nicklaus, Tom Fazio and Gary Player (who was so enamored of the region that he’d moved his design company’s headquarters to The Cliffs at Mountain Park, the course he designed).  

IIG had set up shop at the Fazio course, The Cliffs at Keowee Springs, just over the South Carolina state line from Georgia.  In 2010 IIG would open a satellite operation in Asheville, NC, America’s number one retirement town, where legions of active boomers provided a rich pool of potential students eager to improve their games.  Lynch, however, continued to focus on guiding elite players, such as Atwal.  The success of his finest pupils— Geoff Ogilvy, Aaron Baddeley, Matt Goggin—had made Lynch a hot name among swing gurus, inspiring his move to America.  Despite the financial crisis, the PGA Tour is still the premier showcase for the game’s top players from around the world.

Lynch, too, once aspired to success as professional player, but grew increasingly frustrated as his efforts to improve led nowhere.  “I couldn’t get answers to questions regarding my game,” Lynch says.  “Why was it that I was working hard using the standard methods but actually getting worse and not better?”

So he set out to learn what worked, not from listening to experts or reading, but from watching, observing with his own eyes what he saw was working for good players.  “It was just me learning how the swing should operate.  The full swing was my biggest frustration when I played.  How the game is taught now is much different.  Then we were still in what I would call the Jack Nicklaus era—‘keep your left arm straight, head still, drive your legs, swing the club from inside, roll your wrists’—things that have proven to be false.  I say ‘the Jack Nicklaus’ era’ because that’s what commentators thought Jack did—or even what Jack at times perhaps thought he did—but it’s not what he actually did.”

Dale Lynch

Because he had been a professional golfer, Lynch always looked at the swing from the perspective of the accomplished player.   The lessons learned would one day be distilled for higher handicappers—teaching academies such as IIG are designed, after all, to sprinkle the magical elixir onto pupils willing to pay for the chance to improve—but the focus was always on elite players.  Even today, Lynch organizes his schedule around visits to tournaments and championships during the season so he’s available when his players need fine-tuning, or perhaps a pep talk.

Lynch found talented young players were a natural receptacle for his method, but it still took time for the results to appear.  “You can quickly identify talent,” Lynch says, “but it’s a long journey to success.”  As the Head Coach at the Victorian Institute of Sport’s golf program at Melbourne’s Olympic Park, Lynch produced five players good enough to win as professionals.  He knew instinctively what Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers points out–that it takes approximately 10,000 hours to master a skill, and no matter how naturally gifted a person may be, without the practice, no mastery is possible.  Winning requires not just talent but also persistence—“they need to have the drive,” as Lynch says. 

Lynch thinks there is another reason for the exceptional number of outstanding Australia pros—after all, the continent has only 22.5 million people, or fewer than the inhabitants of Texas—and that’s the expectation that young players will fend for themselves.  “18 year olds in Australia were expected to organize their own travel plans,” he said.  “I think they learn responsibility at a young age, while perhaps American players are a bit coddled.”  Aussies in general have a matter-of-fact take on the world, and Lynch exudes the practical competence of his culture.

Americans, he thinks, have another advantage in golf, beyond the abundance of courses, the profusion of college scholarships and the richness of the professional tours.  “Americans are easier to teach across the board because they almost all have some background in baseball or softball, and a good golf swing is almost identical to the perfect motion of a baseball swing.”

[Jeff Ritter of The A Position makes the same point comparing Tiger Woods’ current imperfect (“stuck”) swing with the classic fluidity of Sam Snead’s swing.  Jeff describes it as “a baseball mentality: arms behind, arms in front, arms behind.” 

To look at what Jeff ‘s analysis, go to:http://rittergolf.com/golf/golf/instruction/94/take-on-tiger]

But with the great players, he works not just on mechanics or technical issues, but on counseling players on the emotional challenges they face.  Geoff Ogilvy, for example, who seems so laid-back with his lanky stride and languid swing, “was very volatile, even in his early days as a pro.  He tried to be more relaxed when he played and couldn’t break 80.  Even the word ‘relax’  is a bad one for a pro—it doesn’t reflect a competitive mindset.  Geoff was volatile because he’s such a fierce competitor.  And volatility is also not the same as anger—that’s a different emotion from the fury players who have a great competitive drive like Geoff feel.  But Geoff has learned through a lot of thought and discipline to set an even keel during competition.  And he’s a very cerebral guy—there’s a lot more going on underneath than what appears on the outside.”

Lynch says he always links the technical to the emotional side of the game—a player can’t succeed utilizing only one part of the equation, so when he’s working with players he keeps the emotional side as well as the technical side in mind.  When he was working with Atwal in Boise, for example, he focused almost entirely on a very small adjustment in the grip, and for the rest encouraged an easy tempo.  His tone was soothing and not a hint of criticism was ever sounded. 

Lynch thinks players who grew up away from golf’s mainstream, like Atwal, may play more with feel than do players who started formal instruction at a very early age.  Atwal agrees.  He learned the game in a club rich with tradition (and one of the oldest golf clubs in the world), Royal Calcutta, which has produced some of India’s best professionals.  In addition to Arjun, two other players from the Royal are full-time touring professionals. Still, the number of competitions, coaches and academies in India is small compared to what players in other countries enjoy.  Atwal himself moved to the US as a teenager to pursue his golf career.  He’s had several good finishes this year, including tied seventh at the Byron Nelson and tied 17^th at the Texas Open.

Lynch believes “if you get too involved in mechanics, you lose feel and touch.”  And the golfer has to learn to let instincts take over, to trust the feel.  It’s the same for a full shot or for a pitch, a chip or a putt.  Instinct rather than calculation has to guide the execution of the shot.   But one final theoretical question bothered me—where, I asked, does the short game stop and the full shot take over?  What’s the definition of “short game”?

Lynch laughed.  “I guess you could say that any shot with a wedge that’s less than a full swing defines the outer range of the short game.  But if you’re playing in the wind and you need to hit a six-iron an eight-iron distance, that’s ‘short-game like.’”

This response sums up Lynch’s approach to golf—thoughtful and specific and well-considered, but neither reverential, stuffy nor hidebound.  Dale Lynch has discovered a practical and sensible but comprehensive method of golf instruction, but conveys it without a hint of pretense—in other words, echt-Aussie.

Gary Shteyngart: A Big Genius

An early entry in the diary of inept life-extension salesman Lenny Abramov notes that he has always regarded his parents’ native tongue, Russian, “as the language of cunning acquiescence.” Gary Shteyngart’s hilarious dystopian novel, “Super Sad True Love Story,” is also sly and compliant, but like all great comedies, it is erected inside a scaffolding of sorrow, as the title promises.

Lenny is desperate to qualify for the “dechronification treatments” that he’s supposed to be selling to High Net Worth Individuals (HNWIs) on behalf of his company, Post-Human Services. He’s a sucker for the immortality pitch himself, even if he’s not signing up many customers. The social worker he once saw, he writes, was “unable to cure me of my fear of nonexistence.”

After a meeting with the tiny, enticing Eunice Park in Rome inspires him to keep a diary, Lenny is delirious with hope, the annihilating force propelling his life and fueling his observations. But it’s the contrast between Lenny’s tender soliloquies as he pursues his love for Eunice and the brutal banalities of life unplugged from meaning that give “Super Sad True Love Story” its satiric clout. For example, Lenny and Eunice go shopping at the “United Nations Retail Corridor.” Eunice normally shops online. The U.N. has long since been made redundant by Chinese power and puerile Europe’s acquiescence.

“These thrifty Retail Corridors,” Lenny writes, “were supposed to mimic North African bazaars of yore, their only purpose a quick exchange of goods and services, minus the plangent cries of the sellers and the whiffs of tangerine sweat.”

The future Shteyngart conceives here — China as the world’s sole superpower, a bankrupt, frightened U.S. bogged down in a war in Venezuela and ruled by an “American Restoration Authority” controlled in turn by the “Bipartisan Party,” its citizens absorbed in the broadcasts of “FoxLibertyUltra” as National Guard troops patrol the streets, occasionally shooting a “Low Net Worth Individual” — has a chilling plausibility, which makes the jokes funnier and the gloom even murkier.

People no longer speak, they “verbal.” Texting is a college major. (And you can attend one of the merged global universities, such as “Brown-Yonsei” or “Reed-Fudan,” a sly homage to Portland, where Lenny’s company also has a satellite office of its R&D department.) You can buy a business-class seat on the subway in New York. Books, as obsolete as clay tablets and slightly repulsive, “smell like wet socks.” Boys aspire to work in Credit, girls in Retail, creative types of both sexes in Media. Pornography guides sexual relations. The U.S. government, responding to prompts from the world’s most powerful man, the Chinese Central Banker, is pushing its citizens to consume more. It’s the Bush years on steroids, the collapse the Obamites hope they have avoided.

The structure of the novel is simple and effective. Shteyngart interrupts Lenny’s diary to inject a series of messages written by and to Lenny’s beloved, Eunice, sent over the GlobalTeens network (“teening”) in a kind of truncated code that Shteyngart nails. This device adds new points of view, so that Lenny’s suspect consciousness doesn’t have complete responsibility for the narrative. Here we learn about Eunice’s abusive podiatrist dad, for example, and her self-effacing mother, meek to the point of obliteration.

Shteyngart is a droll Kafka — not so enigmatic, perhaps, but just as inimitable, and much, much funnier. He has a genius for composing the perfect, concise, illuminating phrase: “the sickening contralto of middle-class people screaming.” Or “the pedestrian awkwardness of the born Southern Californian.”

Creating an alternative world inhabited by characters we can care about isn’t easy. Katherine Dunn did it in “Geek Love.” But even a writer as great as Philip Roth couldn’t quite manage it in “The Plot Against America,” where the conceit of the story can’t conceal itself, even with Roth using all of his powers to push the narrative forward. The artifice defeats the art. Yet Shteyngart, without resorting to pyrotechnics or hyperbole, insinuates his readers into an original, engaging and frightening world, at once foreign and familiar. I loved this novel.

SUPER SAD TRUE LOVE STORY
Gary Shteyngart�
Random House
$26, 352 pages

POSTSCRIPT

On August 4th I went to a reading by Shteyngart at Powell’s Books in Portland.   It was wonderfully entertaining in a way most author’s readings are not.   In the Q & A after the reading, someone asked Shteyngart if he’d even done stand-up, and it was certainly a reasonable question, given how much he made the audience laugh.  He did a good reading, but the give and take was brilliant–engaged, enthusiastic, and really funny.  His wit was also, like Super Sad True Love Story, layered with a kind of sublimated anger and dismay, giving it bite, but delivered with a soothing and gentle modesty.   He listened to the questions, spoke directly to his interlocutors, and had the audience in the palm of his hand.  If you ever get a chance to hear him, go!  In the meanwhile, for another taste of his humor, check out 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EfzuOu4UIOU

Yesterday I beat him out of six bucks.  We always play a three dollar Nassau, and he was putting just awful, which is rare for him.  He grips his vintage Bull’s-eye putter with his index finger down the shaft, legs spread wide like he’s expecting the deck he’s standing on to surge, and makes everything.  But yesterday he couldn’t drop a marble in a rain barrel, and until I started spraying drives on the last few holes and let him get a half on the back, I was crushing his spirit and mocking his aspirations.  He always pays promptly (and expects immediate payment, too.)  So why did he have such a big grin on his face when I saw him later?

About 5:30 last night Lee’s phone rang.  It was his son-in-law, David, calling.  Could Lee jump on a plane in the morning and fly out to Pittsburgh?  To play in the member guest?  At OAKMONT?  He ran it by command central and got approval from the Chief, so this morning at dawn I heard the cab pull up and Lee walking down the stairs with his golf clubs and his suitcase, heading east.  The force field of joy emanating with every step washed across the lawn, and America’s happiest man headed off to the friendly skies.

To find out how Lee did, see http://johnstrawn.com/golf/golf/personalities/290/happiest-man-returns-to-earth