Golf is played by more than 25 million people in the United States, and from this vast pool, about 90 are fully exempt members of the PGA Tour (the rest being foreign nationals. On the LPGA in 2015, about 40 of the top 100 money winners were from the U.S.). These select few are like supermen or superwomen to the weekend player who hacks it around with his or her friends. The pros are both admired and envied. The great English golfer and author Horace Hutchinson asserted that at heart the average golfer is a hero-worshipper, one with “faith in the methods of heroes, a faith that is touching. He has at the same time a sublime confidence, although hitherto latent, in his own abilities for heroic achievement; he has not a doubt that, adopting the methods of heroes, he will join the demi-gods on Olympian heights.”
Try as we may, we can’t adopt the methods of our heroes and control our swings well enough to make the ball go where we want it to go time and time again. How do they do it, we ask? O.B Keeler wrote of his own mundane game in the 1920s and lamented that the average golfer’s game progresses “to a certain point, and there we stick.” He echoed Hutchinson’s sentiments from a generation earlier however, adding that the “eternal optimism of the game is upon us, and we never stop trying .”
Keeler described watching the great Chick Evans practice. Evans, who won the 1916 U.S. Open with a record score of 286 using just seven clubs, “spilled a dozen balls on the turf and began to hit them, and the balls went away in the same line, with the same elevation and trajectory…I was fairly hypnotized. How did he do it ?” Each shot was almost an exact reproduction of the last. Keeler noted, with absolute candor, that if he hit a dozen shots they would have a dozen different results, and so it is with us mere mortals. We marvel at them agic they conjure with club and ball.