The Kingdom of Shivas Irons

by Michael Murphy

  It was a lesson I’d learned more times than I could count. After an improvement of attitude, even one so brief, unexpected graces are given. Instead of resenting the fact that he’d beaten me by two strokes, I felt relieved and newly buoyant. This shift of mood was further enhanced when I stopped to enjoy the view. Beyond the white sands of Carmel Beach and cliffside fairways rolling south through mist and a lingering cloud, there rose the greening slopes of the Santa Lucia Mountains and blue ridges of Point Lobos. A gentle breeze was blowing, filled with salt and smells of the sea, and the waters of Carmel Bay were filling with harlequin stripes of lavender, grey, and green. I was grateful to see all this without filters of fear and recrimination.

  But as I turned toward the seventh tee, Cohen emerged from the crowd. “Murphy,” he said insistently. “Come here!”

  “What’s happening?” I asked, guarding myself instinctively against unexpected proposals.

  “You should ask me?” he said. “What’s happening to you? Have you started to talk?”

  “Talk! How did you like that drive?”

  The joviality in his expressive dark eyes gave way to his irrepressible irony. “What a relief!” he said. “Everybody was complaining. I told them you’re his father.”

  “But I’m only twenty years older!”

  “That’s old enough.” He waved me away. “Start talking to him. Think of him as your son.”

  The seventh hole at Pebble Beach is only one hundred yards long, but has a small tightly bunkered green below the tee and seawater to the right and beyond that swallows wayward shots. Depending on the weather, it plays in radically different ways, and can prompt different kinds of golfing magic. I remembered Sam Snead in a near-gale putting down the hard-packed path that runs from tee to green, content to play for a bogie, and in contrast my friend Andy Nusbaum holing his tee shot the year before during the second Shivas Irons Games of the Links. What contrasts and surprises awaited us now?

  “Murphy?” said Stuart as we waited for the foursome ahead to clear the green. “You know those things you said about golf becoming a martial art? I’ve got to tell you I don’t buy it.”

  “You mean my speech in Kyoto?” I masked my astonishment. “Where did you read it?”

  “In Japan, in the English edition of some magazine there. Do you really believe that stuff?”

  Did the challenge in his voice have something to do with the drive I’d just hit? “What stuff?” I asked. “I don’t know how they translated my speech.”*

  “Didn’t you say that golf is becoming some kind of Buddhist practice, or martial art?” He fixed me with his penetrating blue eyes. “Or did they get your meaning wrong?”

  For an instant he seemed to wear a shield, some sort of invisible breastplate. “What else did it say?” I asked, taking time to respond.

  “That we should call the game golfdo. Like judo. Were you joking?”

  “Calling it ‘golfdo’ was a joke.” I hesitated, searching for a way to avoid an argument. “They used to call martial arts ‘jutsus,’ but changed that to ‘do’ from ‘tao’ when they became ways of self-cultivation instead of killing methods.† Instead of jujutsu, ju do. Instead of aikijutsu, aiki do. But I was only making analogies.”

  “Just analogies?” His look had the same composed aggressiveness that it did when he stood to a shot. “Just analogies? You sounded serious.”

  Taken aback by the charge in his words, I didn’t answer at once, then remembered that we were here to have this kind of conversation. “Golf isn’t Zen,” I said. “But with all the sport psychology now, and course management, and attention to practice rituals, and emphasis on the inner game, it’s changing like the martial arts did. For a lot of people, it’s becoming a more conscious exercise.”

  “But Murphy, it’s only a game.”

  “Well!” I exclaimed. “There are different ways to play a game. A philosopher once said, ‘There’s nothing more serious than a child at play!’ ”

  He shrugged, paused, then gestured toward the tee. “Swing away!” he said. “Show us the inner game.”

  His challenge reverberating, and blood rushing to my stomach now, I took a pitching wedge, teed a ball, and visualized my shot. In books and articles, Stuart had described ways to do this. Bring your image to your hands, he’d written, to your kinesthetic sense of the swing. Following his advice, I mentally shaped the ball’s trajectory, felt a rhythm to produce it, and swung with perverse pleasure. As my ball landed on the green, I enjoyed the irony of using the mental strategies of a great and famous player who’d helped me appreciate—and yet dismissed—possibilities of the inner game.

  And my enjoyment grew as Stuart unselfconsciously demonstrated the same approach, lining up his shot with fierce but quiet concentration, drawing some invisible line in the sky, and nailing his ball to a piece of earth six inches from the cup.

  But was it possible? Was he competing with me?

  Trailing him down the slope to the green, I was startled by my caddie’s wink. “No nips from the flask,” he whispered. “He’s takin’ ye on.” In other circumstances the thought would alarm me, but something in me relished this unexpected possibility. I sank my putt for a birdie to match his tap-in.

  We didn’t speak on the eighth tee, and I remembered my new resolution. Was a contest with Stuart, which was certainly high comedy, a function of ego or soul? I decided to leave it an open question and accept the challenge as a grace. Maybe the mysterious guidance which had led me to Shivas Irons and through the occult dimensions of golf would reveal itself if I played without worrying about the reasons why or eventual consequences.

  “Swing away!” said Stuart.

  One’s drive on the eighth hole at Pebble Beach must clear a rise and sail straight. Otherwise an approach to the green is impossible. Addressing my ball, I felt a strangely detached excitement. Playing a match without handicap against John Stuart was absurd, but I would accept the challenge gladly. My drive sailed down the middle.

  If you’ve played the Pebble Beach Golf Links, you know that its eighth fairway curves around a diminutive inlet of Carmel Bay to a green you can reach with your second shot by hitting across seawater far below. Stuart nodded for me to play first. Given his far-greater length with irons, he would use a five-iron while I used my seven-wood.

  On the sixth hole, I’d felt a conservative guidance playing my second shot, but now came a bolder inspiration. The pin was two hundred yards away, in the far left corner of the multitiered green, while running from it to me, superimposed on the cliffs and grass between, there streamed an unmistakable airway in which the ball could fly. I heard the voice of Shivas Irons. “Imagination with hands,” he said, his Scottish burr intact. “Paint yer shot on the golf sky so tha’ no one’ll e’er forget it!”

  I felt the cadence of the words, addressed the ball, and hit it.

  And watched it sail over the cove.

  And stretched with some tenuous part of myself as it fell on the green’s lowest tier, bounced once, and rolled to the hole. I was in position now to make another birdie.

  Stuart didn’t speak as he walked off the distance from his ball to the cliff’s edge. Our developing contest wouldn’t interfere with his preparations for the tournament. But my caddie had a few words to say. “He’ll play a couple o’ shots,” he whispered, the smell of whiskey in his breath. “But this is the one for yer match. He’s not sayin’ it, but he’s takin’ ye on.” He nodded toward the other caddie. “Me and Pete started bettin’ on the seventh. Match play. I’m takin’ ye for five a hole.”

  “You’re betting on me?” I said with astonishment. “I’m old enough to be his father!”

  He snorted. “Or his gran’father the way ye looked startin’ out. That’s wha’ makes it interestin’.” He looked at me with a sly fierce look, filled with happy anticipation, his former solicitude and embarrassment gone. “MacDonald’s ma nemme.” He extended his hand. “Celts all ’round. Go get ’im!”

  And so bega
n another series of holes that calls up different responses in me. But instead of winces or groans, it evokes a range of questioning thoughts. To this day, I’m not completely sure about what was secretly happening.

  As my caddie predicted, Stuart played his first shot with special care, hitting it to twenty feet of the hole, then took two more from different spots from which he might have to play in the tournament. I sank my four-foot putt for a birdie, and with his first ball he took two putts for a par.

  If our secret match had begun on the seventh hole, I was now one up. On the ninth tee, coincidentally or not, Stuart again questioned my proposal that golf was acquiring elements of a martial art. Though they tried not to show it, our caddies listened with enormous interest. Both seemed to take our verbal exchanges to be part of the contest on which they were betting.

  “It’s not happening with everyone,” I said in response to his challenge, “but with enough players to command a sport historian’s interest.” During the past seven years, I’d counted more than twenty articles in leading golf magazines and at least twenty books that emphasized the inner game. Then I reminded him that he was the author of one such book, and at least two of the articles. He only smiled in response, as if he enjoyed my taking him on, and ushered me to the tee blocks.

  A moment later, he drove his ball 100 yards closer to the green than mine, and ten minutes after that, his par beat my bogie. We didn’t speak while this went on, and I had time to center myself in a remarkable calm that was descending around me. It intensified on the green and again on the tenth tee to give my swing greater arc and my drive extraordinary carry. This kinesthetic epiphany seemed related to the first of three curious synergies between me and Stuart.

  Giving no visible sign that he sensed what was happening in me, he exchanged his three-wood for a driver. In the tournament, he would use the safer club to avoid the cliffs to our right; but my shot, or my state, or both, had changed his present strategy. There was a cooling of attitude, a recession of his usual fire, as he took two practice swings. But I could tell by the speed of his hip turn and the sound of his club head unzipping the grass that his adrenaline was running freely. He stood to the ball with a newly focused serenity, a winsome but deadly force, that stretched like an aura around him. I’d sensed this in Hogan once, on this very hole. When he swung, none of us could follow his shot.

  “I lost it!” his caddie yelled.

  “I’ve got it,” Stuart said calmly.

  And then the rest of us saw it, rolling to a point more than 350 yards from the tee. He wagged his head, with no smile, word, or other acknowledgment, and handed the driver to his caddie. Had he appropriated something of the presence I felt, or simply been charged by our competition? Ten minutes later, both of us sank short putts for birdies.

  Our second telepathic confluence occurred on the thirteenth hole, the only one I dislike at Pebble Beach. As on the tenth tee, after I’d felt an inexplicable elasticity and driven for extra distance, he exchanged his three-wood for his driver. This seemed more than coincidence. On the eleventh and twelfth holes, I hadn’t swung with such command and he’d stayed with his first club selection. Again he hit a towering drive that the caddies and I couldn’t see until it hit the fairway. He got a birdie to beat my par and didn’t change his first club selection again until the seventeenth hole. Meanwhile, returning more times than I can count to the resolution I’d summoned on the sixth tee, I went two holes ahead in our match by hitting both the fifteenth and the sixteenth greens with five-iron shots and sinking twenty-foot putts for birdies. But instead of the excitement I might’ve felt, an unfamiliar quiet held me.

  Looking at the seventeenth green, which was framed by bunkers and Stillwater Cove more than two hundred yards away, I remembered the last round of the 1972 U.S. Open. From the beach club, which stands near the tee, I’d watched on television as Jack Nicklaus hit a one-iron into a difficult wind, and had then looked through a window to see his ball hit the pin. There was an analogy between the two occasions. Both times I had multifocal vision—then by way of television and the beach club’s large bay window, now through my complex state of mind. It was apparent to me now, for example, that golf is simultaneously a venue of absurdity and revelation, a frequent source of embarrassment and relentless teacher, and a game which to play as well as you can demands the best of your practical skills and surrender to unexpected inspirations. In the surreal arrangement of mist and clouds that arched toward Point Lobos, there were columns of light that joined the sky and water. In this dazzling array, what seemed a human figure was forming.

  “Look!” I exclaimed. “In the sky above the green!”

  But no one responded. Stuart asked his caddie for a three-iron and ushered me toward the tee blocks.

  With difficulty I looked away from the light, took my four-wood, and addressed the ball. Then, like the bright strands you see when squinting at a flame, streamers came out of clouds. Our caddies would talk about it later. Filaments broke in showers of gold all across the golf course, and as they did I hit my ball through them. Above the streamers the sun broke through, blinding me for a moment.

  “Where is it?” I yelled.

  “Damn!” said my caddie, turning away. “It’s bright as Hiroshima!”

  But there were shouts from the gallery by the green, and Stuart announced calmly that my ball had hit the pin. When I finally saw it, it was lying just a few feet from the cup.

  Without emotion, Stuart put his three-iron in his bag, studied the hole again, and took out his four-iron. It was the third time he’d changed clubs after I’d hit an inspired shot. The sun went back behind the clouds, leaving the bridge of mist and light that arched toward Point Lobos. But still something that looked like a human figure hovered in the sky ahead of us.

  “Christ!” my caddie muttered. “Look at that!”

  Stuart’s ball left the tee on a high trajectory and was burning brightly. Were my eyes traumatized by the sun? Now it floated over the green, alive with the light of the figure beyond, and landed a few feet from the hole.

  “Did you see it?” he asked.

  When his caddie said it was next to the cup, he looked with astonishment at the green. “I thought I hit it short,” he said, then turned and looked at me quizzically.

  But much of the gallery was cheering now. “You’re the man!” someone yelled. “This is your tournament!”

  And there was even a cheer for me. “Way to go, Daddy!” someone shouted, reminding me where I stood on golf’s ladder of merit.

  But my caddie ranked me higher. “Pete’s pissed,” he said as we walked toward the green. “I’ve got ’im fer ten. Ye’ve got the big guy where ye want ’im!”

  Stuart was two down in our secret match. Our scores went to three and five under par respectively for holes seven through seventeen, and the secret contest was done, when we sank our putts for birdies. As we left the green, the dazzling array of clouds broke up and the luminous figure vanished.

  We stood on the eighteenth tee in silence. About 540 yards away, beyond the leftward-curving seawall, the green was shrouded in spray from Stillwater Cove. It seemed set apart, as if in some enchanted world that challenged and beckoned to us. As we waited to play, I turned away from Stuart. The vistas south of us contained the whole spectrum of light, from violets in the distant hills to blues and greens in the harlequin sea to shades of red in the rocks below. The air’s fragrance—part pine, part grass, part rolling surf—evoked a quick succession of moods. My complex emotions were matched by this revelation of the senses.

  It was a lesson I’d learned again and again. If a part of us opens up, the rest begins to follow. Different moods and states of mind, and an extraordinary range of sensations, were simultaneously present now. This condition seemed to reflect my search for Shivas Irons. I remembered his voice in Ryzhkov’s tower. The kingdom is coming, and already here, but no word, or system, or state can hold it. Joy and wonder, puzzlement about the synchronicities of our round, sadness
that all of us fall from such grace, and gratitude were present at once, each revealing some part of my past, my present and future. Each was connected, for better or worse, with lasting patterns in my life. All of them served to reveal a part of the world’s richness.

  I turned again to see the hole. The gallery stretched from tee to green to the right of the curving fairway, its members pressing for better views of their champion. Our secret match was over now, my caddie had collected his bet, and members of the press were questioning Stuart about his prospects for winning the tournament. In contrast, my gallery consisted of a single person—the ever hopeful and now-vindicated Cohen. Standing near the tee, he held up two fingers in a V for victory.

  But a moment later, as if to reestablish the natural order, Stuart outdrove me by a hundred yards. And a few moments after that, he hit his second shot with a rise at the end so that it hovered above the pin as if deciding whether to remain in this dimension or another. When it fell to the green, a tremendous roar came down the fairway. He’d fired a double eagle. “Did you see it?” he asked with irony, wonder and, yes, revenge all present in his look.

  I was too astonished to answer.

  The Tap Room at the Pebble Beach Lodge has a bar at one end, and walls that are either paneled with hardwood or covered with dark green felt. Clustered at various points are pictures of participants in U. S. Open Championships, Crosby Pro-Am’s, and other tournaments played on the Monterey peninsula. Stuart and I sat at a table trying to finish the exchange we’d started on the course, but people kept interrupting. After we’d ordered beers, I sat back to watch him hold court. Word of his presence had spread through the room, elevating people’s excitement and making a private conversation impossible.