Hence, I never take this show on the road. When I truncate my home track, I have to turn off my autopilot and consider every hole from a new angle. (A course I didn’t know as well would just be another eighteen, not a familiar eighteen reconsidered.) With an average reduction of more than eighty yards from the middle tees I usually play, each hole presents new options and opportunities well beyond the reach of my normal game. Hazards that were safely in the distance suddenly taunt me to tempt them. Like Tiger—and this may be the only circumstance in which we’re not legally enjoined from appearing in the same sentence—I sometimes find it prudent to leave my driver in the bag. I know I can still get home in two.
And even without my driver, I find myself beyond customary landing areas. Of course, I have played shots from these positions before—third shots after flubbing one of the first two. So my attitude is different. Instead of feeling hangdog for my ineptness, I’m positively focused on how best to attack. With a wedge or short iron. Like (dare I whisper it?) Tiger. It can, as Faxon says, do wonders for the mind-set. Although there’s a flip side, too: When I reach the green and discover I’m thirty feet from the pin—a result I’d be elated with had I hit my three-hybrid from 190—the disappointment is a reminder of what I need to practice. (Thank you, Pia, you’re absolutely right.)
It’s such a kick to be reminded that golf isn’t just a game of power that I’m surprised more men don’t try this now and then. Well, actually, I’m not. Nor does it surprise my friend Eric Stake, who sometimes accompanies me on my abbreviated journeys. A superb golfer, he’s a psychiatrist by trade, so he understands both the intricacies of the player’s psyche and the dark night of his soul. “When we leave a putt short,” Stake asks, “what do we say?‘Hit it, Alice.’ It’s a way of berating ourselves for being unmanly. Project that to asking a man to give up, even for a day, what he thinks is his rightful place and play from the forward tees. Before he’s swung a club, he’s Alice in his mind.”
I’ll gladly support anything—recoloring tees, renaming them, adding additional ones—that alleviates the stigma for others. Call me what you will, but I’m one golfing Alice who looks forward to his visits to wonderland.
