I grew up in the 1950s and learned to play golf in the 1960s. The first article I ever read about golf was in Sports Illustrated, circa mid ‘60s, in which Arnold Palmer was quoted saying, “Golf is 80 percent mental.” (I know, Jack Nicklaus said it too. My favorite is golf coach Jim Flick’s “Golf is 90 percent mental, and the other 10 percent is mental too.”) Since then, I considered that every bad shot I made on the golf course was the result of a blip in concentration, a misjudgment of conditions, laziness or over-aggressiveness; in other words, nothing physical, just momentary mental lapses that creep into your mind at the top of your backswing or as you are stroking a putt.

The Wee Ice Man Cometh Back
        I also recall reading as a youngster the inspiring story of Ben Hogan and how he won the 1950 U.S. Open at Merion just 18 months after his car collided with a Greyhound bus, breaking virtually all the bones in his body that were necessary to strike a golf ball properly. No one ever questioned Hogan’s mental toughness, which translated, often enough, as a taciturn and unfriendly nature. The discipline to come back from those physical injuries was beyond impressive. (The Brits called him “The Wee Ice Man.”)
        If I were older than 2 in 1950, I might have been rooting for Hogan, although I am an admittedly contrary fan; I don’t like to root for the guy (or team) that most everyone else is gaga about. When I was young, my favorite baseball team was the Brooklyn Dodgers -– “The Bums” -- and my least favorite, the one I rooted against, was the ever-successful New York Yankees. I was gleeful when the Yankees hit that multi-year bad patch as the ‘80s turned into the ‘90s, yet I almost started feeling sorry for them after a few years, when they became the second most popular team in New York City. Almost.

Tiger Burning Bright
        Which brings me around to Tiger Woods and his play over this last weekend at the PGA Championship and, indeed, his play over the last two months at the major tournaments. I think there is a case to be made that his comeback, which will almost certainly result in a win in one of the majors next year, might rank as nearly the most impressive of all time. In that prediction I am ignoring his terrible back problems, which are bad enough and worthy of a comeback award alone; more impressive, because golf is a mental game, is his comeback from the public fall from grace of that Thanksgiving eve crash into the tree, the smashing of the back window by his club-wielding wife, the agony of being separated from his kids, at least for a while, and the overall public humiliation and reckoning with his reputation.
        Golf is indeed a mental game, and it takes an enormous discipline to retrain the mind to shut out the residue of public and private humiliations for 72 holes of high-pressure golf. It is a different type of discipline than coming back from the debilitating injuries of a head-on car crash. Yet on a golf course, the mental comeback may be tougher. 
        Although I am not a Tiger Woods fan, I will be pulling for him to win a major next year and complete what will be one of the greatest comebacks ever in golf or any sport. Once that happens, I will go back to rooting for the underdogs, or at least for those who will be getting much less attention than Tiger.

        The turf on Pawleys Island, SC, golf courses took a beating this winter. Bermuda grass and its variants do not like to sit for more than a few hours under a sheet of ice, but that is precisely what happened during one of the harshest winter seasons in memory. As of the beginning of July, most of the area’s courses were not yet back to normal and, indeed, a few greens looked more suitable for a lunar landing than for putting, with patches of new sod that, unfortunately, had not survived a recent drought. Although the grass on the greens at my own course, Pawleys Plantation, had grown back in, the course superintendent was clearly nervous about the dry days and hot nights. They were as slow in July as at any time in the last 10 years.
        As usual, the management at the Mike Strantz-designed Caledonia Golf & Fish Club and, to a similar degree its companion course across the road, True Blue, recovered more quickly thanks to the loving care of its turf managers and a general management willing to spend what it has to in order to justify its green fees which skew toward the higher end of the nearly 100 courses on the Grand Strand of Myrtle Beach.  (You get what you pay for...)
Caledonia Golf & Fish Club justifies its green fees with great attention to condition, no matter how rough the weather.
        I played Caledonia twice on my July visit, 10 days apart, and was impressed as always at the things that should matter most to golfers –- the ability to stroke a putt that holds its line without bumps and wiggles; and the pleasure of not having to roll your ball over on the course’s well mown fairways. It took some getting used to the greens on my first round after playing the much slower local courses, but I was prepared for the second round at Caledonia, where I played and scored my best in the last two years. But golf, as we know, can be cruel when you stop thinking it is, and I made a common amateur mistake; I believed I was playing so well that I couldn’t make a bad stroke. Indeed, I stood on the 15th tee –- the 6th hole, a par three since we played the nines in reverse order –- thinking that if I birdied that hole and the rest, I would shoot my age of 70 for the first time. I made a good stroke with a seven-iron and wound up 15 feet above the hole. And then the inevitable: I tried to make the downhill putt, knocked it five feet past, got too aggressive coming back uphill and knocked it three feet past, and then missed the comebacker.
        I finished with a 75, my only sub-80 round of the year, along with my only four-putt in the last five years. Golf giveth, and golf taketh away, even –- or more accurately, especially -– on the best courses.