"Play Like A Man" By Holly Brubach

THE SUMMER I WAS twelve, I took up golf in a mistaken attempt to spend more time with my father. Mistaken, because I had thought that golf would bring us closer together. As it turned out, my game was erratic and flashy (bogey, double bogey, birdie, triple bogey), and my father, a methodical man who ate the same thing for breakfast every morning, was horrified by my inconsistency, which he presumed to be a feminine trait - a function of that same capricious streak that prompted women to change their minds on a moment's notice or buy a new pair of shoes when they already had enough shoes at home.

My mother, too, had signed up for golf lessons, and she played with the other wives, on ladies' days. Every so often, my father would humor her by joining her for nine holes on a Saturday afternoon, after having played eighteen with his regular foursome. Playing golf with wives, as I understood it, was the price men paid for the freedom to play with one another. Furthermore, I got the distinct impression that the game as practiced by the "ladies" was somehow second-rate. If I wanted to earn my father's respect, I would have to play like a man. To that end, he occasionally invited me to tag along with his foursome, not playing but walking the course a few paces behind, in the hope that exposure to their seriousness of purpose would somehow expunge the fluff from my game. As corrective methods go, this one eventually proved to be a failure. But inadvertently it had another effect, one that in the end hooked me on golf even more than those occasional birdies, because it was my initiation into another world: the world of men without women.

Movies provided a window onto men in the military; novels described the life of boys in private schools. The hazing of the recruits, the raunchy humor, the blood lust-all this was precisely what we'd been led to expect whenever testosterone was given free rein. The presence of women was a mitigating influence, a force for civilization, giving rise to thank-you notes and fish knives. But the world I glimpsed on the golf course didn't conform to these notions. What set it apart from the conditions of everyday life was something far more subtle and remarkable.

At work or out to dinner, men seemed to be continually aware that there were women in their midst, and that awareness somehow altered their behavior. They grew nonchalant or they grew solicitous. They stammered or they became suddenly loquacious. They didn't know what to do with their hands or they gesticulated. Even in those instances when they went out of their way to ignore us, the sheer effort betrayed an extreme self-consciousness.

Together, however, on the golf course, they were spontaneous, relaxed, thoughtful, generous, genuinely funny, physically graceful. They were also consummate gentlemen, all by themselves. On those occasions (surely no more than a handful) when my father took me along, the men in his foursome greeted me on the first tee and then simply went about their game as if I were invisible, Which suited me fine. I silently trailed them, careful not to trigger their notice, and when every so often I tended the pin or found a ball that had burrowed into the rough, it was with all the self-effacing deference of a caddie.

Looking back on these excursions, I now recognize the thrill of watching men play golf together, oblivious of my presence, as being akin to the experience, described by nature lovers, of observing a species in its natural habitat. Men struck me as more at home on the golf course than they were in the world. They were certainly more at home on the golf course than they were in their own homes. My father tiptoed around the house, dodging knickknacks, careful not to track dirt onto the celadon-green wall-to-wall carpeting. On the golf course, though, he strode the fairways as if he owned them. Which, in a sense, he did. Meanwhile, the women trod gingerly, like trespassers, never claiming the turf, not even on those occasions when they conquered it.

If their running conversations were any indication, women regarded golf as a social game, like croquet or canasta. My mother and her friends chatted continually about upcoming parties or their children's latest accomplishments, taking time out to strike the ball every now and again. For men, however, golf was evidently more along the lines of, say, chess or baseball. No small talk. My father and his four- some, when they spoke, did so in a kind of rapid-fire, telegraphic banter: they teased one another good-naturedly; they improvised nicknames. The subject was always golf. Sometimes they called out commands to the ball, which the ball routinely ignored.

I watched and listened and learned a lot about men, if not about golf. I learned that their conversation was almost always impersonal, revolving around something other than themselves-in this case, the game at hand. I learned that they were surprisingly affectionate with one another, but that they expressed that affection through wisecracks and teasing. I learned that, contrary to what most women believed, men did not discuss women. I also learned that they were open books, if only you knew how to read them. On the golf course, I learned to read their swings.

My father's was, appropriately enough, unspectacular, slow, and steady, so grooved as to appear almost mechanical; he never took more than two putts. My uncle's, by comparison, was abbreviated, staccato (his backswing had been cut short by arthritis in his shoulder), descending to a quick jab at the ball and a stinging sound at impact -the manifestation of a personality that was nervous, quick, and debonair. I came to think of golf as an expression of something deep within, some vital energy, coiled and released in a way unique to each individual. Watching men swing, I discovered a poetry in them I might never have detected otherwise.

In time, as I got older and interested in boys, I developed a crush on a guy at the club. I was fifteen, heading into my junior year of high school; he had just graduated and would soon be off to college - a New England Ivy League school where, according to rumor, he would be playing on the golf team. That he didn't know I existed was deplorable but in the end not inconvenient, in that it enabled me to watch him, unobserved, on the driving range as he worked his way through every club in his bag, refining his swing in preparation for the illustrious future that lay just up ahead. As the summer sun sank into the hills, I lined up my own shots and, head down, staring at the ground, studied his lengthening shadow. To this day I carry with me the memory of his swing: its fluid power-the way his knees led into the ball, the stretch into a high arc at the finish - had awakened in me something I couldn't yet begin to fathom.

Eventually, I, too, went off to college, where I, too, remarkably, landed a position on the golf team, though my commitment to the game was by this time highly conflicted. Golf seemed to me complicitous in, if not actually responsible for, the relegation of women to the rank of second-class citizen (this was the seventies).

I resented the inconvenient locations of the ladies' locker rooms; I railed against the starting times (women after 1 :00 P.M.); I hated the reek of cigars that escaped the door of the Nineteenth Hole, which was off-limits to women. Golf was one of the dead white males' many mechanisms of oppression, and I was determined to overthrow it from within. Once, as a teenager, I had won seventy-five cents from the boys chipping for quarters on the practice green, and the women's club champion gave me a piece of advice I never forgot: "It's okay to beat them," she said, "but you must never out-drive them." For several years in my twenties, I set out both to beat men and to out-drive them.

AND THEN I QUIT. I WAS twenty-six, and after turning in a particularly disastrous performance in the annual father-daughter tournament, an alternate- shot event, I resolved never to play again. Fast-forward fourteen years. At the urging of a friend, I ventured back out onto the driving range and, at the urging of the local pro, back out onto the course. Now I was playing with men who, like my father and my uncle, had left their wives at home, and I was aware that for them I occupied some undefined territory: not a woman, exactly, like the ones they had married or the babes they saw on TV; but not a man, either - certainly not one of them. Still, they relaxed in my presence, despite the occasional joke about my three-yard advantage from the ladies' tees or accusations of, 'swinging like a girl" - leveled at one another though never at me, out of some well-intentioned if not very well-thought-out attempt to uphold the laws of political correctness. Every so often I caught a glimpse of what I'd seen when I was young: an artlessness, an elegance that rarely, if ever, got called into play at the office or on a date. If golf retains a glamour for me, and it undoubtedly does, it lies somewhere in this insight into what I've come to think of as men's true nature: their closely guarded ease with one another, which they recklessly neglected to conceal from a twelve-year- old girl. If their secret was safe with me for the time being, it was only because I was waiting to grow up-not to appreciate what I saw, which I did even then, but to articulate it.

(from "The Ultimate Golf Book", Houghton Mifflin 2002) Copyright 2002 by Holly Brubach