Spirit of Aloha | Articles | Golfing in Paradise | March/April 2004

Golfing in Paradise
By Paul Spencer Sochaczewski

"How I Tame Tough Golf Courses - and Never Break Par"
Golf in Hawai'i is always an adventure, because you're playing in the footprints of the famous

I have two thoughts as I stand on the first tee of the Plantation Course at the Kapalua Resort on Maui. The first thought is a no-brainer. "Hey, look at me. I'm about to tee off on one of the world's greatest golf courses, the home of the annual Mercedes Championships, which has seen more drama than Stratford-on-Avon."

My second thought is a full-brainer: "God, even though I don't know these two guys I'm playing with, and even though I'll probably never see them again after we have post-golf drinks four hours from now, let me hit a decent drive and keep my fragile ego intact."

Golfers, not to mention golf gods, will of course scoff at the notion that Someone Up There is listening. That doesn't stop us from invoking divine intervention. Near Tokyo, a Japanese monk named Seiko Omi built a two-meter-tall stone altar that featured Kannon, the Buddhist goddess of mercy. She held a putter in her right hand, a golf ball in her left. Above the 13 drivers radiating from her head were the Japanese words "hole in one." And, while passing through Rome in 1961, Sam Snead stopped for an audience with Pope John. The famous American golfer had been playing poorly and confessed to one of the papal officials: "I brought along my putter, on the chance that the pope might bless it." The monsignor nodded sympathetically, "I know, Mr. Snead," he said. "My putting is absolutely hopeless, too." Snead looked at him in amazement. "If you live here and can't putt," he exclaimed, "what chance is there for me?"

My playing partner, a guy named Harry, slices toward the cart path.

My other buddy-for-the-next-four hours, Fernando, hits short, but straight. In golf, short but straight is good.

I connect and hit a long drive, which keeps on rolling over the crest of the hill.

Long and straight is better. Size matters.

I allow myself a moment to drift back to my first thought. Chances are I'll never get invited to play at Augusta National, home of the Masters. I balk at the exorbitant green fees of Pebble Beach. Still, I'd like to try my swing on some of the famous telegenic courses where professional golfers have triumphed. I'm blessed to be in Hawai'i, which has perhaps the highest concentration of courses in the United States that have hosted professional golf tournaments and are accessible to the general public. Golf here is always an adventure, because you're always following in the footsteps of the great.

Want a list? On Kaua'i there's Po'ipü Bay, which hosts the PGA Grand Slam of Golf. On the Big Island, the Waikoloa Beach Course has hosted numerous tournaments, including the LPGA Match Play Championships, and Mauna Lani Resort Golf Course has hosted the Senior Skins Game. On O'ahu, Turtle Bay's George Fazio course hosted the inaugural Senior Skins Game, which included Arnold Palmer, Chi Chi Rodriguez, Gary Player and Sam Snead. Hawai'i boasts at least a dozen other courses where golfing greats have played games that are nothing at all like mine.

That doesn't stop me from buying a bunch of over-priced logo balls from the tony pro shop and jauntily driving my golf cart on manicured courses that overlook the Pacific.

For my second shot I have to clear a gully, filled with ubiquitous native Hawaiian vegetation with the distinctive fecund aroma of fermenting guava, to land on a small, well-protected, sloping green. The carry's gotta be 130 yards, I guess, over Really Bad Stuff.

"Every shot is pure potential," I remember Fred Shoemaker, director of the School for Extraordinary Golf, explaining. "The future is possibility. Each next shot can be extraordinary."

Meanwhile, Harry, my partner, whom I learn is director of a company in Michigan that makes auto parts and who is staying at one of the $500-a- night hotels nearby, has laid up in front of the gully, as has Fernando, a Los Angeles stockbroker.

I find that people either get golf or don't. To me, the game is sort of like a computer circuit: it's either on or off, never in-between. On the one hand, it's just a game. On the other, it's just like life. You wake up in the morning and face the day. You start full of hope, invincible as a teenager and then deal with the challenges as they arise. As John Updike said in his great golf book: "You play your ball from the poison ivy, right where you put it."

Stop procrastinating. For my second shot I hit a clean five iron six feet from the pin. I like this "possibility" stuff.

But let's put all of this in perspective. I'm not a good golfer. I play to a 26.4 handicap, which in golfing terms means I'm capable of hitting a few great shots each round, mixed in with dozens of mediocre hooks and slices that cause caddies to snicker and playing partners to start counting their winnings by about the third hole. Twenty-six point four is a number that, to put it in journalistic terms, would mean I would qualify to write features about bake sales and women's clubs for a regional newspaper in, say, South Dakota. Good features, mind you, but not especially memorable ones. I am not the New York Times of golfers.

My 26.4 handicap comes with an eternity's supply of swing thoughts. These are psychic gremlins, put there by golf pros, which shuffle through a golfer's mind like a shaman's rattle. They even have mystical, mantralike intonations: "Flying left elbow." "Shift your weight." "Swing easy to make it go far." And my favorite oxymoron, "Hit down to make the ball rise." The problem with all of these swing thoughts, for which you've actually paid money, is that they are undeniably sensible, but try to remember them all and you'll reach golfing schizophrenia faster than you can say "reverse pivot."

In fact, the only good thing about my 26.4 is that it's honest. Golf is about the only sport where most people tell the truth. It's self-policing. Except sometimes I wonder, since a 2002 survey indicated that 82 percent of top corporate executives cheat at golf. That might be true, but, nevertheless, I'd bet that the vast majority of golfers, who are not CEOs, don't fib.

Harry puts his third ball into the guava gulch, takes a drop, pitches onto the green and is lying five. Fernando stays out of trouble and is on the green in four. I'm lying two and facing a birdie putt on a tricky green. Just six feet from bliss. On my first hole. On one of the dream courses of Hawai'i.
Harry and Fernando putt and mark. I lose track of their scores, of their own personal dramas. I have my own concerns. I'm thinking of glory. And thinking also about what can go wrong.

Crash and burn is a great golf tradition. It affects the great and the less great. Golf historians, a schadenfreude-obsessed lot, like to relive Australian golfer Greg Norman's flaming crash, when he blew a six-stroke lead on the last day of the 1996 Masters. Norman wound up losing by five strokes to Nick Faldo in a performance one journalist compared to a "horrifying slow-motion death that was evocative of an old Sam Peckinpah film."

I stand over the putt. The green seems to break toward the gulch, or does it? Who knows? Greens are sort of like women. You study them, admire them, walk around them, caress them, talk to them, think you've got them figured out and then, after you say to yourself, "Yeah, I'm pretty sure the putt breaks to the left," you watch, heartbroken, as your Titleist breaks right. But this time I'm sure. Sort of. Hit it two cups right, I think. Then the Big Doubt kicks in. Will I get the yips and barely touch the putt, leaving myself short? Will I punch at it and push it a yard past the hole, leaving myself in what Tom Watson calls "the vomit zone?"

Then I figure, there is always possibility. I stroke the putt and it rolls true and drops into the hole. High fives with my new best friends, Harry and Fernando. During the rest of the round, I never come closer to another birdie. Doesn't matter. I buy the beers and am happy to do so. Isn't golf a wonderful game?

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