In the north of Scotland in June there is enough light to play golf until 10:30 at night. One evening at about that time I was walking off the course at Forres Golf Club with two good friends, looking for the path through the woods that would take us back to Newbold House, when I noticed a ball on the edge of the fairway. “Wait a minute,” I said, “let me hit this ball.” I teed it up and pulled out my driver. Now driving, as my friends know well, is my nemesis, the glaring weakness in an otherwise respectable game. But I took a free swing at the ball and it shot off the clubface like a rocket, rising gradually into the gathering darkness, holding an impossibly straight line before disappearing over a hilltop about 230 yards away. Here I had been playing with Vin and Jerry every night for a week and they’d never seen me hit a driver remotely as well. I heard one of them say “Wow,” and I couldn’t help but laugh at the irony of the driver finally working now that our week was over. 
    “Let me hit one,” said Vin, as he bent to put a tee into the turf. Vin’s a good player, so it was no surprise to see him hit a good shot, but it stunned the three of us to watch his ball follow precisely the same flight pattern as mine. Now Jerry had to hit a ball, not due to any macho, competitive impulse, but to satisfy our shared curiosity, unspoken yet unmistakable, as to where his ball might go. Moments later, as we watched Jerry’s ball somehow mimic the exact direction, trajectory and distance of those Vin and I had hit, the three of us exchanged high-fives and shared a deep laugh. It was a moment of pure joy, of reveling in the beauty of a perfect golf shot executed in triplicate, and of wonder at the mystery of coincidence.
     Mystery is, in fact, what brought the three of us to Scotland, and it’s what keeps bringing me back. I have known players who think the magic of golf is external, to be found hidden somewhere on the links, like a leprechaun under a rock. But I learned at Fairway To Heaven that the magic is internal. A player with an open mind and an open heart will gain innumerable insights into his true nature through golf, and in that way he is given the opportunity to change. That is the magic, the mystery, and the beauty of the game. 

   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 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.