Four Iron In the Soul

[Hodgy10]

Lloyd Cole wrote this great article about a visit to the Melbourne sandbelt.

http://www.travelandleisure.com/articles/golf-melbourne-mackenzie-and-me/1

Great article.

[SBL]

I've read bring me the head and four iron in the soul and to be honest, neither were as good as they were made out to be. A bit disappointing to me.

[ShagBag]

Just remembered I had this wee snippet on a Word doc......


Mr. Magic
We sat down with our coffee.
“I’m thinking of working with Jos.”
“Jos? The guru guy ?”
“That’s right, Jos.” Ross blushed. “I think I should be working with someone on that side of the game.”………………
Jos was Jos Vanstiphout, a Belgian with a Californian vocabulary for whom ‘Pleased to meet you’ was always ‘Ho, my friend’, a handshake was a street-wise wrestling grip and anyone who skipped the queue at the bar was a ‘filthy motherf****r’. He was also a former pop star. Remember The Mayfair Set’s 1973 Brazilian hit ‘Jeremia’ ? Don’t worry, I didn’t either.
Life for Jos had been a downhill run after the demise of the Mayfair Set. He told me that he had gone from music to a job with the Chamber of Commerce, then a newspaper marketing man. He took up golf, discovered he had an aptitude for the game and got down to a seven handicap. Finally, he went to California in search of his own guru and found W. Timothy Gallwey, the creator of a kind of sporting psychobabble called The Inner Game. From that day his life changed.
You may have heard of Gallwey. His book The Inner Game of Golf has sold millions, though why I’ll never know. I once bought a copy on impulse, took it home, had a quick flick through it’s pages and threw it in a box where it lay for five years. I often wondered what strange urge had persuaded me to spend money on a book with chapter headings such as ‘A Critique of the Do-Instruction’, ‘The Essence of Experimental Learning’ and ‘Humming Your Swing’.
…………..Early the next morning Ross and Jos were already practising. “Morning” I said. Ross nodded sheepishly…………………
It appeared that Jos had Ross playing an imaginary golf course. He would describe a hole – say a par-5 554 yards, bunkers left and right, big tree straight ahead – and Ross would hit a shot.
Occasionally, Jos would snap ‘How was that?’
Ross would stop, look down the length of the range, as barren and featureless a piece of land as you could hope to come across this side of a nuclear winter, and say something like, ‘Not too bad, at least I missed the tree at the front of the green.’ Every once in a while he would flash me a secret grimace, like a man looking for a way to escape a blind date.
This went on for an hour. Phase two was a soliloquy from Jos that revolved around the phrases ‘one ball’, ‘smile, focus’ and ‘self one, self two’.
I may have picked this up wrong but it seemed that Ross, contrary to appearances, was not one but two people, Mr.Self One and Mr. Self Two. The former was his destructive personality, the brat who lived in his head and constantly complained about the terrible shots he hit. The latter was his subconscious, a long haired hippy type who hung out in his belly, smoking dope and generally going with the flow. No prizes for guessing which guy Jos preferred.”