From the hearth: With apologies to Holland, Dozier, Holland, reflections of the way life used to be - and remains ever after - from Senior PGA Tour journeyman (often a derisive term, though not here) Bob Duval.

To make shots that count - for me, in a tournament, for you, when you first play a real round - you have to deal with your anxieties before you play. You have to prepare emotionally, mentally, psychologically the same way you work out, eat well, get enough sleep, take care of the rest of your life - before you arrive at the golf course. I used to think the equation worked the other way. If you cold only pull "it" off - win the Masters, beat the champion - then you could deal with whatever it is inside yourself that had kept you until then from achieving your own personal version of the impossible. It took me most of my adult lifetime to realize I had this backward. I had to learn what it feels like to succeed, in fact I suppose you could say, as far as my golf goes, that's what I was doing all those years while I was a club pro giving lessons and playing in local tournaments when I could. Or times like the day someone in Tallahassee called and said there was someone in town who was looking for a match with a guy who could play, he had a lot of money to stake himself, and so I went and cleaned him out. But it could have ended the other way, and sometimes, earlier in my life, it did.

Excerpted without permission from letters to a young golfer by Bob Duval with Carl Vigeland, Basic Books, 2002.

The Golfer's Ten Commandments
Royal and Ancient
Into the Bear Pit
Helicopter Words
The Walter Hagen Story
ClubAlert . . . The Electronic Club Leash
I Remember Augusta
Hoch as in Choke!
Bud, Sweat, & Tees
Only Golf Spoken Here
Passion for Golf
Fourteen Clubs and the Auld Claret Jug
Gleanings from the Wayside
Discovering Donald Ross
The Art of Golf Design
A Round of Golf with Tommy Armour
Lazy Days at Lahinch