A poem for Joe Godfrey by Stan

We gave up
That there was a perfect swing
There was only the connection
To the moment of the swing,

And the things of the swing,
The club, the man,
The ball, the tee,
The green grass by the yard,
The pin and cup,
Melded in a moment
Worked without mind.
The club as much a man
As a thing of man;
The man an extension of the club
as much a man.

Note: I learned about golf in my middle twenties. It was a revelation. Such a good reason to go walk through a park on a Sunday morning and enjoy the company of other men. It was not exclusively a men’s game, of course, but no women were asked and quite probably, none would have been willing to accompany this particular group. Those first encounters were with my fellows in Redimix / Nunnayerbizness. I had barely swung a club before. My brother had taken it up at about fifteen, but I was only good for caddying at twelve, he and his friend Dave Soliday thought.

It required patience from the Redimix boys, but after I got the basic idea of a swing, I discovered that you could waste a whole lot of money on balls at driving ranges. Also, if you kept your mornings free, you could play practice rounds at six-thirty and have the course pretty much to yourself.

I cannot say that I conquered the game with Redimix or even became competitive. But I didn’t mind being the butt of most of the jokes and, every once in a while, standing atop a bluff overlooking former pasture land along a creek some place in eastern Henry County, Indiana, the gods would be with me and I’d relax and the swing would be easy and natural and the ball would fly out as though shot from a cannon and travel almost to the creek, a perfect approach.

That lasted a couple of seasons, although the second season was a stretch. The gang had broken up. People moved off. My brother showed up and deigned to play with the caddy a few times, full of sage advice on the swing and club selection, and playing about as well as I did. Then Kathy and I moved to Texas.

The third year here, some of my fellow teachers at Faulk Intermediate School (before the middle school movement made a great deal of signage obsolete) took up the game, and we had a regular foursome for Sunday mornings for a while–my brother-in-law Doug Trenfield, Joe Godfrey, Victor Garza, and myself.

We played the course by the river and over the period of a year played well, played badly, argued where the bounds were, how rules applied, the value of a beer at the end of a round, the value of a second round, the effect of carts on play, cleated shoes vs. sneakers, everything. But most of all, we talked swings.

This poem summarizes our conclusion. Or at least mine.