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 “I’ll probably only play nine,” I said. “That’s OK,” he replied. “I’m going to be a shell of myself,” I said. Our tee time at Rio Hondo Country Club in Downey was for 11 a.m. I’d never played there, so I arrived early to hit some balls on the range. It was ugly. I could barely swing the club. After chunking a couple dozen balls I went to the putting green and hit two putts, neither of which ended up in the cup. Those of you familiar with Rio Hondo’s first hole might think that it’s difficult to hit a ball over the Green Monster-size fence that separates the right rough from the driving range. It’s not. My shot looked like a Vladimir Guerrero opposite-field home run. Bye-bye Pro V1x, hello double bogey. After my first-hole shenanigans, I played the next four 2-over par. Not bad considering I was full of decongestant and numb between the ears. My back pockets were so jammed with tissues there was no room for my golf glove. Standing on the sixth tee, 4-over par and wishing I was home in bed a la Ferris Bueller, a funny thing happened. An old golf tip came to me. “Hold the image of your target through the entire swing,” the voice said. I hit a great drive. Then I hit a great second shot. Then I hit another great shot, and another, and another. The ball went where I wanted it to go for the rest of the round. As I stood over my last putt of the day — a 5-footer that looked to be about 5 inches — I knew that I’d been playing well, but I didn’t know how well. I was so out of it I’d forgotten to add up my score. My buddy didn’t. As my ball fell into the cup, he looked me square in my watery eyes and said, “Nice 75.” I’d played the last 13 holes even par. I had found that elusive, hard-to-define state called “the zone.” What happened? I needed to investigate. When I got home I consulted my battered dictionary. Unfortunately, the only sports reference Random House has for “zone” is “end zone.” So I called some of the finest players and psychologists in the game to get to the bottom of this “zone” thing. “I think it’s a word that’s been invented by someone trying to define what concentration is,” said former CBS broadcaster Ken Venturi. “The ‘zone’ is very vague. Concentration is what it’s all about.” Dr. David Wright, who runs his Balance Golf Academy at Arroyo Trabuco Golf Club in Mission Viejo, agreed. “Basically, the concentration level we long for on the golf course is similar to that which we achieve when reading a good book,” said Wright, who told me to think of a time when I was so immersed in a book that I didn’t hear anything else. I did. “Believe it or not,” Wright said, “you were, effectively, ‘in the zone.’” But how did I get in the zone at Rio Hondo? Sure, I focused on my targets, but I focus on targets all the time without playing that well. In fact, I’ve been playing golf for 23 years and can honestly say I’ve only been in the zone twice. Maybe being sick had something to do with it. “You played without any expectations,” said LPGA Tour Hall of Famer Amy Alcott. “I played my greatest golf when I had no expectations.” Alcott, who once won the Canadian Open with a 103-degree temperature, acknowledged that being sick helped her find the zone — for that tournament. “Beware the injured golfer,” Wright said. “When you’re injured or ill your expectations are lower, and your nervous system is quieter. When you have high expectations you’re less tolerant of frustration. It’s analogous to hitting the ball sideways on the range and then going out and shooting your career round. When you’re sick, you’re moving slowly. When you’re injured your movements are quieter.” When Venturi won the U.S. Open in 1964 he wasn’t sick, but he was so exhausted a physician had to examine him mid-round. “I trusted my ability and let it happen and played by instinct,” he recalled. “They can call that a zone, but I call it concentration and preparation.” “I think the zone is where preparation and destiny meet. It’s an elusive thing,” Alcott said. “You want to stay in that place, but it’s more of an unconscious place than a conscious place. There is a Zen quality to it and to golf.” It’s true that when I’ve played my best golf, sick or not, the game has been very Zen-like. While I haven’t adopted the view that golf is spiritual, I try to find an inner peace on the course that Zen practitioners follow. But I never “om” in my backswing. I promise. “The zone is our natural state of being,” said Dr Joseph Parent, author of “Zen Golf.” “We always are in the zone. The reason we don’t experience it continuously is because we cover it up and get in our own way.” Parent argues that most people have a hard time understanding what the zone is because they think it’s elusive and hard to create. “There’s a reason you can’t create it, because it’s already there,” he said. “There’s a reason you can’t find it, because you’re already in it. You’d be like a fish trying to find the water. Fish can’t find water because they live in water.” Maybe that’s why I have such a hard time finding the fairway even though I’m standing on it. “We’re constantly interfering with our natural state, spending hours closer to machines than nature, stuck in traffic instead of walking in the woods, or multi-tasking rather than focusing on one thing,” Parent said. “The average golfer can only hope that all the junk that covers up their zone disappears when he tees it up.” “I couldn’t tell you how [the zone] happened, why it happened or when it would happen, because it just did,” said former PGA Tour player and Masters champion Billy Casper. “But you could just feel it once you were in it. And then you play the next week and you say, ‘What was that I had last week?’” If Alcott, Casper and Venturi have trouble finding and staying in the zone, maybe I shouldn’t expect to find it too frequently either. But when I do, I’ll welcome it. I just hope I don’t have to be sick to experience it. “You and everyone else,” Alcott said. n |
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