Letters to a Young Golfer (1 of 2 free samples)

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COPYRIGHT
Letters to a Young Golfer by Bob Duval with Carl Vigelund. Copyright 2002 by Bob Duval and Carl Vigeland
All Rights Reserved. Sharing not permitted.

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LETTERS TO A YOUNG GOLFER

Bob Duval with Carl Vigelund

for Tripp


INTRODUCTION

We are all young golfers

New Year's Day, 2002

Dear Reader,

We are all young golfers. Every time I play golf I think to myself, "I'm starting from scratch again. This is another opportunity to play good." If a golf score were cumulative, so the score from each round was added to the next, I don't know who would ever have the courage to play.

You learn to hit a golf ball through mechanics, but that isn't how you play golf. Swinging a club and playing golf are not the same thing. Naturally the two are related, but there are plenty of people with good swings--even at the professional level--who don't really know how to play golf. They look great on the range, but as soon as the match begins something happens to them, they make bad decisions or doubt themselves at a crucial moments, they lose the very thing that got them there. On the other hand, to judge by their performance in tournament play, some of the greatest golfers in the world don't possess what you might term a perfect swing. Lee Trevino takes the club way outside on his backswing; Arnold Palmer has that funny move with his forearms on his follow-through. But look at their records. If I hit a bad shot--and I hit plenty of them, everyone does--I immediately start putting it behind me, because you never know what may happen next--in golf, or in life.
This is a book about dealing with the mistakes we make and the surprises we find in golf--how we handle the unknown in the game and, more fundamentally, the mysterious, unpredictable, thrilling discoveries about ourselves we can all make if we work hard and learn to enjoy what we're doing. My anticipation of the unexpected, my experience with the pains as well as the joys of life--these inform everything I do on the golf course. I am a man first, a golfer second.

Long before I hit my first shot in a golf tournament that mattered, I lost a person I loved more than life itself. His name was Brent Duval and he was my oldest child. He was twelve years old when he died. You never really get over the death of a child. To this day, being reminded of Brent's death makes me feel so vulnerable. It also makes me remember how grateful I am to be here. Each day. Each round. Each shot.

When people ask me about my life, how I figured out finally how to keep going, I'm quick to say I'm not a hero. "Don't put me on a pedestal," I say. We all live with some kind of pain. Learning how to do that, rather than trying to make it go away, took me many years and many tries.

My name is Bob Duval. I am fifty-five years old. My only daughter, Deirdre, has just graduated from college with a second degree in psychology; my surviving son David and I play golf for a living. David is thirty as I write this--thirty and just coming into his own as one of the best golfers of his generation. I used to say I taught David everything he knows, but that's not true anymore, if it ever was. David still calls when something goes out of sync, and we play when we're home in Ponte Vedra, Florida (his house is about a mile from mine). But what he has achieved in the last few years--winning nearly a dozen tournaments in a sequence of fewer than three dozen starts (including one in which he shot a record-breaking, final-round score of 59), and dramatically capturing the 2001 British Open, his first major--I cannot explain these achievements by discussing his grip or stance, his ball alignment, his swing.

David was always competitive as a boy, at one time playing as much baseball as golf, but "competitive" doesn't begin to explain the mastery--in one such stretch, the domination--which he plays with now. I wish I could cite a specific something I once said or recall a specific something I showed him, but learning to play golf, at whatever level you play, doesn't work like that.

You hang together, father and son, you play all those evenings in the spring after school, you see him at the club every day during the summer, you hit balls together, hundreds of balls a day, you watch him grow, you help him get into tournaments and, later, college; you try to be there for him. And when in those hard nights he remembers, in the days and months and finally years, you try to say what cannot be said. You comfort, you encourage, you endure. You tell him to go on.

"Play what's in front of you, David."

And then it hits you, a realization comes over your whole body so you feel it even in your swing, sending range balls into the distance on a summer afternoon at a country club in New Jersey, where the Senior Tour is competing one week, or at home at the TPC Stadium course, where David and I are practicing. The feeling starts somewhere in your gut and travels throughout your body, to your arms and legs, making them weightless. Suddenly I am light-headed. I stand still. More than 200 yards away I see a clearing by some trees. I've been hitting three-woods toward that clearing. I take a deep breath, then another. I can feel the tension in me, the trigger that I'm going to be playing, begin to disappear. By the time I hit the first shot off the first tee it will be gone, except for the adrenaline flow when your name is going up the leader board.

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