Fifty/Fifty and Other Stories by Matthew W. McFarland Read Free Book Online

more, I read as many of these instructional books as possible, and I’d like to think that I have a pretty good understanding of the fundamentals of golf, and the mechanics behind a good swing. I’ve read plenty of the psychology-type books too; any discussion of golf inevitably leads to the utterance of the dictum ‘golf is ten percent physical, ninety percent mental’, (the other one which every golfer likes to pull out every so often, usually after a good day on the greens, is ‘driving for show, putting for dough’). When I was fifteen or sixteen I lost all interest in golf. Put simply, I didn’t enjoy it.
     
    When I went to university I started playing again with friends, something I had not really done for a long time. And as a student, I had developed a whole new approach to the game. I learnt many things studying psychology which I was certain translated straight to golf. Things like how practising a movement leads to increased accuracy - scientific evidence for the need for several practice swings. How muscle memory worked – an explanation for why a good swing feels just right. Perception and proprioception – the way human physiology and neurology has evolved in such a way that we innately target things.
     
    In fact, most of the things I learned were immediately considered for their potential benefit to my game. I stopped worrying about how I took the club away from the ball, where my hands were at the top of my back-swing, how I tucked my shoulder under my chin. My golf improved dramatically.
     
    We lived just across the river from Fife, the Kingdom of Golf. On Sunday evenings we drank in the pubs of St Andrews, and afterwards we lay on our backs in the sand and smoked cigarettes in the bunkers on the 16th fairway of the Old Course. The lights from the hotel shone out towards the sea, and made us invisible to the patrons inside.
     
    We played in November when the cold Scottish winter freezes the air in the lungs and solidifies the nose. The wind in that part of the world comes down from the Arctic and pushes you and your golf ball every which way. A bad shot stings the hands, and is taken sideways by the wind at Mach-speed. Many times we walked in off the course in the dark, unable to see where the holes had gone.
     
    We played in June when the ground is sun-hardened, the heather thick and unforgiving as the course we liked to play at was prepared for qualifying for The Open. The forests in deepest Fife are dense, and trees lined the loamy fairways, the springy ground seeming to move beneath your legs. One of the fairways on the front nine was cratered from a Second World War bomb, 50 miles off target from the shipping and military installations on the Firth of Forth. A perfect bowl, fifty feet across and twenty feet deep. The local rule - play it as it lies.
     
    When I returned home and began to play with my father again, I played for one thing: the feeling when you connect the centre of your golf club to the bottom of the golf ball, and feel it fly into the air, penetrating, rising, soaring. The whoosh of the dimples parting the atmosphere, the blades of grass swept up into the air, the plough of a good-shaped divot into the earth. I don’t think he has ever quite understood, consistent with the majority of people I have ever had a friendly game with, where my pleasure in golf comes from . I know that they enjoy hitting good golf shots as much as I do, but they don’t really get that I am not competitive. I don’t mind playing against an opponent, but neither do I genuinely care if I win or lose. My satisfaction comes from how I play, which is not necessarily the same thing as how well I have scored. A pure strike, sending the ball into the ether at a velocity and with a trajectory near perfection will leave me grinning like an idiot for days.
     
    In the five years I had been away, I had grown as a person, and golf was a way to reconnect with my father. We walked the course together, just a few