As we played the next few holes keeping a respectful distance, my encounter with the figure in black continued to unfold. Like a slowly sprouting seed, my memory of it had emerged for thirty-one years in response to different stimuli, whether conversation with Shivas and his friends in 1956, reports of golfing epiphanies from readers of Golf in the Kingdom, or my walk two weeks before around the thirteenth green. Our exchange seemed more real now than it had when I first remembered it. The stranger’s voice conveyed an urgency and impulsion from somewhere beyond my ordinary thoughts, and had an immediate physical impact. Part of me would go with Shivas wherever he went, I could hear the voice condensing still into words that were perfectly articulated with a Scottish inflection.
It was difficult now to focus on golf. Every hole of the inward nine brought reminders of my round with Shivas Irons. Shot by shot, my game deteriorated, partly because of my excitement, partly because of a gratitude I couldn’t explain, but also because I was struggling with doubts. It was possible that the voice I’d heard came from subconscious confabulation. Like certain dreams, the man in black might have been my own production, an ingenious wish fulfillment, another attempt to find what I’d lost when I walked away from Shivas Irons. If part of me would follow him wherever he went, parts of me would not. On the eighteenth green, remembering the shining presence that opened at his side, I felt an instinctive resistance. If it made another appearance, my contraction would be just as immediate as it had been in 1956.
“A pleasure, Murphy,” said Magee as we walked to the starter’s shack. “That was one fucking shot on the three-par. And Mitsu? What a round you played! What did ya shoot?”
Mitsubishi was putting last touches on his scorecard. “Ah, Magee!” he exclaimed. “You have 67. I shoot 84. And Murphy, you shoot 86! Thirty-four on the front side, 52 on the back. Not bad!”
In 1956 I’d shot the same score, but with 34 on the back side and 52 on the front. Then I remembered that Shivas had shot 67, and MacIver an 84. Certain fateful coincidences are not confabulated, and they cannot be produced through wish fulfillment.
After changing shoes at the starter’s shack, I stood by the clubhouse, divided. An American member had gotten me access to its storied meeting room, but the rules and sociability I was likely to find there might make it hard to assimilate what I’d experienced during this remarkable golf round. Still, the place might give me further clues to the activities and whereabouts of Shivas Irons.
With its high paneled walls and ceiling, and its mementos of a treasured past, the spacious room impressed me again with its warmth and rich sense of tradition. I had been here twice before: the first time in 1956, accompanied by Shivas Irons; the second time in 1970, with an introduction from a friend who was a member. It was not an easy place to visit. Women were not allowed. I was here as a friend of Grant Spaeth, soon to be president of the United States Golf Association.
None of the men in the room were familiar to me. Sonny Liston, the affable presence who’d served me on my previous visits, had left Burningbush a few years before, and none of the members I’d seen were in evidence. The handsome young barman hadn’t heard of Shivas Irons, Seamus MacDuff, or the other people I’d met in 1956. When I realized that he had no leads worth following, I took the beer he gave me to a window that faced the eighteenth green. It was a good place to recapture the hour I’d spent in this room with Shivas Irons. He’d been a magnetic presence that night, from the moment we walked through the door.
“What ye’ doin’ to the lad?” a man named Burns had shouted when we entered. “Takin’ his money, Mr. Irons? Or his mind? Or his soul!”
Shivas had only nodded in response, while telling me loudly to disregard him. Then Burns had shouted something back. By the time we reached the bar, it seemed that everyone in the place had turned to see us.
Waiting for drinks at the bar, I turned to survey the room. The paneled wall above us was adorned with a tartan kilt and crossed swords hung in a great gold frame, and photographs of Old Tom Morris, young Tom Morris, Harry Vardon, Bobby Jones, and other renowned golfers. On the other walls there were paintings of club captains, local aristocrats, a former Prince of Wales, and two or three British prime ministers. Some of these imposing figures wore costumes of the eighteenth century.
After Sonny Liston poured us each a glass of whiskey, I asked if they’d spoken in Gaelic. “It’s English,” said Shivas. “Not the King’s kind, but the language as spoken by Robert Burns.” Then he turned in the direction of the man named Burns and, with a resonant voice, recited these lines by the great Scottish poet:
Let other poets raise a fracas
’Bout vines, an’ wines, an’ drucken Bacchus,
An’ crabbit names an’ stories wrack us, An’ grate our lug;
I sing the juice Scotch bear can mak us, In glass or jug.
Several men turned as his voice rose, and some responded with other lines celebrating Scotch drink. A group near the fireplace lifted their glasses toward us. The recitations had triggered a show of friendship that stretched across the entire room. As if to confirm this sense of community, Shivas declaimed another stanza from Burns:
An’ now, Auld Cloots, I ken ye’re thinkin,
A certain Bardie’s rantin, drinkin,
Some luckless hour will send him linkin, To your black Pit;
But, faith! he’ll turn a corner jinkin, An’ cheat you yet.
“The devil doesn’t have us yet, my friend.” Shivas lifted his glass toward Burns. “Yer ancestor, if he was indeed yer ancestor, would’ve agreed!”
“You’re too confident, Mr. Irons.” The man nodded toward me. “I hate to think what trouble you’re visitin’ upon that handsome young man.”
Burns shouldered his way between us and demanded that Liston serve us more drinks. He was a burly man, about an inch shorter than Shivas’s six foot three, and over his dark brown jacket and tie, he wore a matching cape. “When ye recite tha’ poem,” he said, “we know ye’re up to somethin’. But let me warn ye. Ye must let the young man have a mind of his own.”
Shivas placed a hand on his shoulder. “Burns,” he said, “have faith. The man can hold his own.” He introduced us, and Burns shook my hand with a powerful grip. He had strong features reddened by drink and the elements.
“So what’s he tellin’ ye?” Burns leaned back to appraise me with an eyebrow cocked. “About his hole-in-one on the moon? Or his match with Old Tom Morris? Or how he beat Ben Hogan!”
Another member approached, then a third and a fourth. Soon Shivas stood in a spirited group, trading mock insults, toasts, and challenges. Watching this ebullient exchange, I took the glass of whiskey that Liston gave me and moved away without anyone’s seeming to notice
Grateful for a chance to be alone, I sat by the fireplace. Though there was light of the gloaming outside, the fire cast shadows on the paneled walls, and gave rich textures to the portraits above me. One in particular caught my eye. It depicted a fierce-looking, bearded man who’d been a colonel in Queen Victoria’s Indian regiments. Later Shivas would tell me that a Himalayan yogi had taught him to walk as if he were levitating.
The men at the bar were singing now, and the high, dark walls began to glow as the light outside grew dimmer. The wind, the sea, the summer grass had left their traces in me. Looking across the darkening links, listening to cheers from the eighteenth green, I sensed that everything was happening inside the greater body we secretly inhabit.
But as the hour passed, my mind and senses began to fall from this state of grace. Perhaps it was the dulling that follows the immediate liberations of whiskey, or simply my nerves’ inability to sustain this encompassing joy, but questions began to trouble me. In the philosophy department at Stanford University, where philosophic and linguistic analysis were in their ascendancy, there had been general agreement among my teachers that spiritual illuminations don’t give us knowledge of things outside the self. As one professor had told me, a mystic’s asserting he’d seen
angels or God simply meant that he felt good. For all I knew, my elevations on the inward nine had come from hypoglycemia.
Warmed by the friendship that filled the room, and resonating still with the magic of our golf round, I realized that I was closer than ever to the illuminations I would seek in India. And yet I was starting to doubt them.
And now, thirty-one years later, sitting in the same convivial place, I felt a similar conflict. If part of me would go with Shivas Irons, as the stranger had said, parts of me would not. My resistance to him seemed as strong as it had been in 1956. But somehow that wasn’t disturbing. There were leads to him everywhere, some hidden in the depths of my memory, some appearing from the world at large in response to the search I shared with Hannigan. It was more evident than ever before that there were several ways to find him.
And, for the first time, I was beginning to sense that, in some mysterious way, he was reaching out to me.
PART TWO
FALL,
1994
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
THE FIRST RUSSIAN Open Golf Championship was held in early September 1994, at the Moscow Country Club, on a golf course designed by Robert Trent Jones, Jr., Don Knott, and other members of Jones’s architectural firm. Steve Schroeder, the firm’s business manager, won this historic event, which was scheduled for three rounds but stopped by rain after forty-five holes. Schroeder shot a 186 to defeat some fifty-five players from thirteen countries, among them Michael Bonallack, Secretary of the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrew’s and a former British Amateur champion. To my lasting regret, I didn’t compete in the tournament, but did play the course two weeks later with Horace Ziparelli, the colorful Italian amateur known in the golf community as “Horace Zipper.”
More than any other person living or dead, Ziparelli has tried to become that ball-striking paragon Homer Kelley called “The Golfing Machine.” Perhaps you have read Kelley’s book, and studied his Star System of Geometrically Oriented Linear Force (or G. O. L. F.). If so, you know that the golf stroke has twenty-four basic components, among them grip, plane line, plane angle, address, hinge action, pivot, shoulder turn, hip turn, hip action, knee action, foot action, left wrist action, lag loading, power package assembly point, power package loading action, power package delivery path, and power package release, each of which has from three to fifteen variations. And you know, too, that the golf stroke has twelve sections through which every one of its twenty-four components must be tracked to be given its “full recognition, application and continuity,” and that it also has three zones of action “occuring throughout the twelve sections.” When I met him in 1994, Ziparelli had memorized much of Kelley’s book, The Golfing Machine, its Construction, Operation, and Adjustment, and frequently quoted from it at length. Here is a passage he recited to me in Moscow, with references to diagrams in Kelley’s book without which one cannot possibly understand the Star System:
The hand relationship is invariably established at impact fix (7-8) with
1. the left arm and clubshaft in-line (4-D, 6-B-3-0-1)
2. the right forearm “on plane” (7-3, 6-B-3-0-1)
3. the back of the flat left wrist and the lag pressure point (6-C-2-0) both facing down the angle of approach (2-J-3). Otherwise, per 7-3, both must face down the right forearm impact fix Alignment (alternate target line) regardless of the true angle of approach (2-J-3, 7-5).
Ziparelli also quoted the following passage, which seemed especially important to him:
Because of the dominant role of accumulator 3, golf strokes are very dependent on the right elbow activity deriving from its locations and the nature of the subsequent right arm participation. The elbow must always be someplace and as there are only three definable locations, there are three major basic strokes—punch, pitch and push.
And this:
The proportion of the separation rate to the approach rate expresses the elasticity involved, and is called the coefficient of restitution which is 80% for the better golf balls—but drops below 70% at high speeds. Of course, this is assuming there is no Compression Leakage (2-C-0).
When Ziparelli recited from Kelley’s book, he left each disjointed sentence intact, almost as if it were holy scripture. For it was his life’s project to master every principle of the Star System, and thus realize an immaculate execution of the golf swing, an unprecedented perfection of golf mechanics, and a consolidation of vectors of force that would set new standards for amateurs and professionals alike.
He was nearly six feet tall, with a plump but elastic physique and round olive-complexioned face with large dark eyes that often had a look of astonishment. During our time together in Moscow, he was stylishly unshaven, and his thick dark hair fell over his ears, giving him a bohemian look that contrasted with his expensive, high-style, all-white wardrobe. But there were contradictions in Ziparelli beyond those suggested by his grooming and dress, most notably that through his mechanical mastery of the golf swing he aspired to “unzip” three-dimensional space (hence his nickname), and thus turn himself into a hypercube. He had been led to this by a confluence of Kelley’s principles with Salvadore Dalí’s painting, Christus Hypercubus, which shows Christ crucified on a tesseract, or unraveled hypercube, to suggest his ascension to hyperdimensional life and its immeasurable splendors. It didn’t matter to Ziparelli that a hypercube, which has four spatial dimensions, is a mathematical abstraction. He believed that a perfectly executed golf swing can, through the guidance of Kelley and by its synchronization of thousands of vectors of force, open up—or “unzip”—the world as we usually know it, and propel us into regions beyond. Our configuration in this superordinary state would be, precisely, a hypercube. When he announced this to me over beers at the Moscow Country Club, I thought for a moment that he was joking. But I should have known better. His behavior during our golf round that day had dramatically reflected his beliefs about golf and the fourth dimension.
Russia’s first championship course, which is seven thousand yards long from the blue tees, is set in a forest of pine, maple, and silver birch, with bent grass fairways and greens, man-made ponds, and wetlands nourished by natural streams either beside or cutting across the third, fourth, fifth, and eighth holes. In 1994, given the broken-down condition of most Russian parks, it seemed a miracle of design and maintenance. Indeed, it seemed a miracle that it existed at all in the heart of the former Soviet state, and a wonder that in its first year it was already frequented by players from Western Europe, Australia, Japan, and America. If its maintenance held, it promised a long and storied future. Given Russia’s epic flair for the unexpected, there was no telling what prodigies of body and soul it would produce in the years ahead. But as I waited on the first tee for the partner the starter had promised me, I didn’t anticipate the surprises that would come in the next few minutes.
Then I saw Ziparelli. As if on oiled ball bearings, he was gliding through the pine trees with his caddie. From the beginning, there were hints of the golfing machine.
His back was straight, his stride was fluid, and his arms swung in uniform arcs as if he were marching to a metronome. But the most startling thing about his movement was the way he held his head. It moved as if on a laser beam above his long and rolling gait, without the slightest rise or fall. As he approached, he raised his left arm in greeting, with what looked very much like a Roman salute, and shouted a hearty buon giorno.
“Murphy!” he said expansively. “I am Ziparelli. This is my caddie, Signor Georgi. He knows this course, all of it, every hazard, every green, every fairway, every swamp, as if he built it himself. Is that true, Georgi?”
The caddie, a short, dark, unshaven Georgian dressed in a ragged red shirt and faded blue jeans, nodded in my direction. He spoke no English, but a little Italian, and—I would soon discover—had a pistol in Ziparelli’s golf bag in case we were accosted by members of the Uzbek, Chechen, Georgian, Armenian, Sicilian, or other Mafias.
I was struck immediately by Ziparelli’s loose
white shirt and elegantly pleated white pants, obviously the product of Italian high fashion, and his expensive white leather golf shoes. Given his dress, his bodyguard, his unshaven face, and expansive manner, I guessed that he was either an actor or a businessman on the little-policed frontiers of post-Soviet capitalism. Or could he be a mafioso?
But my speculations about Ziparelli’s employment were soon overwhelmed by my wonderment at his approach to golf. “I hope you will forgive me, my friend,” he said a few seconds after we’d met. “But I must now prepare! Play when you are ready.” As I examined the scorecard and took some practice swings, he started the ritual he would often repeat to reinforce what Homer Kelley called “machine feel.” In The Golfing Machine, Kelley gave the following instructions for achieving this golfing beatitude:
View the left shoulder as a hinge arrangement, not as a shoulder at all. The right arm becomes a piston—with steam or air hoses and the whole bit. The hands become adjustable clamps with two-way power actuators—for vertical and rotational manipulation. The left wrist is merely a hinge-pin allowing wristcock but no wristbend. The more of this translation a player can accomplish, the more understandable the procedures become.
Following this instruction, Ziparelli swung his driver with his left arm, held ramrod straight, while making uppercuts with his right fist and hissings that were meant to simulate the action and sounds of a piston. He had learned to synchronize these separate movements with remarkable grace; but not knowing Kelley’s system, I was at first disconcerted and then astonished by them.
The Kingdom of Shivas Irons Page 18
