No matter how much I improve, golf just doesn’t get any easier. The 2009 season was one of my best, as I finished the year with a handicap index of 10. But getting there was hell.
    I battled the yips for the first three months of the season. The yips is a condition in which you find yourself unable to make short putts; very short putts. It’s a dreadful spiral that starts with a fear of missing putts, causing you to putt defensively until soon, without knowing it, you’re turning your head at impact to watch the ball roll toward the hole. This head movement inevitably causes the ball to veer off your intended line and miss the target, thus compounding the original problem.
   The good news is that when the Club Championship came around in August, I had overcome the yips and was playing some of the best golf of my life. The details of how I did it don't really matter. Suffice it to say I had accepted the fact that I was going to miss a lot of putts as I worked through the yips, yet I resolved to putt with confidence anyway. Confidence is such a critical element of good putting that even false confidence can be useful.

    I haven't hit a golf ball in three months and it's still winter, looking like it will be quite a while before we're back out on the course at my club in the Hudson Valley. At Christmas I gave a full set of clubs, bag and all, to the First Tee program in New Mexico; I hope some kid who otherwise wouldn't get a chance to play has some fun with them.
    I bought new irons a month ago with a store credit I had from last fall, when another set I tried didn't work out and had to be returned. The shaft in that set was wrong for the quick tempo of my swing and, rather than get them changed, I took a loss on the clubs. But the new set from my old standby outfit, MacGregor, looks great, feels great and inspires unreasonable hope.
    A few days ago I sent one of my putters, my gamer, to the Scotty Cameron Custom Shop to be refinished and to get a sight dot added. It was totally unnecessary, as the head was in good shape already, but these are the things we do to pass a long winter. Some of my pals are in Florida or South Carolina this month, but they're retired and I'm not; so they keep their games in shape, while I fiddle with equipment and wait, impatiently, for the return of the red-winged blackbirds.

    I made a hole-in-one today at my home course. First time I've done that. A moment of beauty, to watch a perfectly struck 8-iron fly high and straight at the hole, 140 yards away. The ball landed just two inches right of the hole and jumped in. I was playing with my brother and two friends. Beautiful and surprising to see the ball disappear after landing just beside the flagstick. I knew when I hit it that it was struck perfectly, it felt pure, like nothing at all. Then we watched it fly, holding its line, dead on the flagstick all the way, never moving left nor right at all. We knew as it began to fall that it would land close, but to see it hit the green, spin leftward and disappear... well, it was a moment breathtaking in its perfection.

   On the Friday night before the semifinal round of the Club Championship,  I read again some of my favorite parts of the novel The Legend of Bagger Vance by Steven Pressfield. Many golfers have enjoyed the book, which is vastly superior to the disappointing, sentimental film of the same name produced by Robert Redford.
   The movie bears little resemblance to the novel, which is a retelling of the Bhagavad Gita, a sacred text of Hindu mythology. The book closely parallels the theme and structure of the original Sanskrit poem. The key to the novel is chapter 21, in which the mystical caddie Bagger Vance reveals his true nature to Rannulph Junah, who's facing a crisis of confidence during his epic golf match against the great Bobby Jones and Walter Hagen.
    At a moment when Junah, physically exhausted and emotionally defeated,  is ready to quit in despair, Bagger tells him that loneliness is the great burden of competitive golf, capable of crushing the human spirit. The caddie then explains that he, Bagger, is an incarnation of the single, universal Self that all people share. "You are never alone," he tells Junah. "I stand by your side always."

    The course on which I struggled through so many angry rounds as a youngster was called The Hills. My father was on the club's board of governors and I caddied there throughout high school. I grew up on the short, tight course and knew it like I knew my own backyard.
    I stopped playing golf when I went away to college and didn't take up the game again until after I quit drinking at the age of 43. By then, my father had died and I was living upstate in the Hudson Valley, but I still had family who were members of The Hills and occasionally I'd be invited to play as a guest.
    On my first trip back I was really excited. It had been so long since I’d played the course, and my game was so much better than it had been when I was a teenager, that I was full of hopeful anticipation.
    As it turned out, I played terribly and behaved badly. Not that I threw clubs or broke tree limbs, but I got angry and depressed, making me poor company for my brother and sisters, who had been looking forward to a pleasant afternoon.