From the hearth: Snippets from the party line of conversations with Brian McCallen, longtime travel editor for Golf magazine, Dr. Joseph Parent, author of Zen Golf and Mark Frost, author of The Greatest Game Ever Played.

The Hearthstone Review: What's it like to be lobbied intensely by courses to be the best new this or the best new that?

Brian McCallen: I'm pretty good at ducking. You know, I can get out of the way of most of it. The good stuff ... it's kind of like being the judge of a beauty pageant. There's some undeniably wonderful things out there that you'd just have to say there's a broad consensus over…that this is genuinely excellent, undeniably great. Usually, the chatter is directly proportionate to the quality: the more chatter, the less quality.

I'm pretty good at ducking.

The ones that sound off the most often have the least to offer. I've learned over the years (16) the doctrine to move on to the ones that really are worthy. You can generally rule out the ones that are marginal by who designed them. I'm not stuck on designer labels but the best guys generally get the best budgets and turn out the best work. So if you track, you know, Rees Jones, Tom Fazio, Nicklaus, Weiskopf, all these guys, you're generally not going to be steered too wrong.

There are many exceptions to that rule - Jeff Brauer, for example, in Texas doing great work and there's a bunch of new guys like Tom Doak and Steve Smyers that are coming up doing very fine work…

Jim, it's not that I don't really appreciate hearing from everyone because if people stopped calling I'm not going to know what's going on, so I actually like getting sounded out. But it's like everyone does want to talk recognition when sometimes their product is not deserving.

THR: When you get right down to it there's not a whole lot of difference between Miss Texas and Miss California, is there?

McCallen: No, it's really in the eyes of the beholder. You're right. At that level, well, gee whiz, let's take 'em all.

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The Hearthstone Review: Doctor, Harry Vardon, the great British champion, wrote that "In selecting a club we should always choose the club that takes the least out of us." How does that strike you?

Dr. Joseph Parent: Oh, I really like that. It goes with my philosophy of low stress golf. One of the ways I encourage players to choose between clubs when they're not sure which one to pick, is to stand over the ball as if they're going to hit each one. And then, you've heard the term gut-check, a gut-check feeling. Check your belly. See which one is more relaxed. Which club do you feel more comfortable with? The one you feel more comfortable with, that's the one to go with, because it's going to take less out of you.

The Hearthstone Review: In the final round of the senior event here in Austin recently, Hale Irwin four-putted. He whiffed, then topped the ball from three-inches, a three-putt from three inches. A strange thing then happened. Hale dropping from contention then played the next 11 holes, he said, only thinking about hitting the ball solidly. He tried to play "without putting any pressure on himself," his exact words. Lo and behold, he looked up upon leaving the 17th green positively amazed to find he was tied for the lead. Then he went on and won the playoff. He called it one of the most bizarre days he'd ever had on the golf course. That's an example of what the Buddhists call 'letting go' isn't it?

Dr. Parent: I would say that's the case. I try to encourage my tour players to do exactly that, which is focus on the task at hand. A lot of time they talk about staying in the present and being in the now. That's really what it's about. In fact, Hale in that situation let go of what happened to him and started playing one shot at a time, playing the shot and trying to hit the ball solidly.

In other words, he was taking care of the process and letting the results take care of themselves. And that's one of my favorite sayings. When I have a player who comes off the course and I ask "How'd you do?" and he says, "I know I played well. I don't even know what I shot, I just know it was fun out there," then I know he's gonna come in with a great score and have a good time.

... taking care of the process and letting the results take care of themselves.

THR: Tell us about the very familiar evil caddie.

Dr. Parent: Well, Jimmy, when I wrote the book I took a lot of the exercises I've given to pros, amateurs and my golf schools. And one of those is called 'Fire Your Evil Caddie.' In it I pretend to be the caddie for one of the participants in my school. I get a volunteer and have them pretend they're going out to the first tee.

I'm their caddie. And I'll say, "Remember all the things we tried to work on: take it back low and slow, pause at the top, clear the hips, release the wrists. Be careful. Make sure you do it right. Everybody's watching. Just try not to make a fool of yourself, and for God sakes, don't slice it into the woods like you usually do."

Then I tell them to go ahead and make an imaginary swing. Then I go, "You dope! I knew you were going to slice it into the woods. Are you ever going to learn how to play this game?" And the class is usually shocked. And I say, "Excuse me, how long would you have me as your caddie?" And the volunteer…well, the longest they've ever had me is three seconds. Then I turn to the class and ask "How many of you have spoken to yourself that way on the golf course?" In fact, you bring your evil caddie with you for 18 holes of golf. Why don't you fire your evil caddie and become your own best friend?

The Hearthstone Review: You're mimicking those private conservations we're having with ourselves that are so destructive.

Dr. Joseph Parent: That's exactly right. The whole point of Zen Golf is to focus on what's right with you, rather than what's wrong with you. That's really the fundamental slip and so much of the culture of golf is about fixing something wrong, and it gets us headed in the unhelpful direction of turning ourselves into a pretzel. By the sixteenth hole we're trying to do eighteen different swing fixes and did you ever notice; it's right around there - the sixteenth or seventeenth hole - that we give up. We say, "Ah, heck, I'm just going to stand up there and hit it," and all of the sudden, we hit a great shot.

THR: I mentioned the concept of the evil caddie to a friend of mine and he said that the evil caddie is just telling it like it is.

Dr. Parent: (Laughs) I don't think that's entirely true. The evil caddie is focusing on the negative and missing the things that we do right.

THR: You work with some of the best players in the world. Do they really struggle with the same kinds of problems as someone who can't break 90?

Dr. Parent: It's really amazing but it's true. For example, many of these guys have played the same courses over and over again and what happens is unknowingly they reinforce the negative experience of their misses so when they stand on the tee what comes to mind are all the memories of places they hit it that they didn't like because they tied the emotion to the negative experiences.

You can tell when you're watching TV, if they don't follow the ball down the fairway, you can tell if he or she has hit a good shot. There's no emotion and they pick up the tee. But if it's a bad shot there's a lot of emotion tied to it. So they end up focusing on and remembering those emotional experiences, which we're hardwired to do, and then all they see if rough and they don't see the fairway.

One of the jobs that I have is helping them return to a positive focus and focus on where they want the ball to go rather than what they want to avoid.

THR: How would you like to see us respond to a shot, good or bad?

Dr. Parent: That's great. I have a little story about that. In Zen Golf, there's a chapter called "The Post-Shot Routine." Now, let me ask you, Jimmy: "Do you have a post-shot routine?"

THR: My post shot routine is generally to get off the tee as quickly as possible.

Dr. Parent: I was giving a corporate talk and I asked people "Do you have a post-shot routine?" And one little guy raised his hand, very seriously. I was happy to hear it and I called on him: "Yes, sir, what's your post-shot routine?" "NO! NO! NO!"

That was his post-shot routine. I have an interesting flip. We tie negative emotions to our post-shot routine, to our bad shots. What I'd like you to do is flip it: put a little emotion into your good shots and here's what I like you to say: "That came out just the way I pictured it," or "Just the way I planned it." That reinforces the preparation in your pre-shot routine and it's a really good compliment to yourself without sounding arrogant. "That's just the line I wanted, something like that." OK?

Now, if you don't hit a good shot, this is a little different. I want you to say, "Hmm, interesting."

THR: Kind of ... setting up a little distance from it ...

Dr. Parent: "How unlike me." And I always get a big laugh over that at the golf schools because we identify with the bad shots - "Yup, there goes my slice again," and with the good ones we go "Wow, I don't know where that came from." Well that doesn't make us feel like great golfers so I want you to identify with the good shots and say "Yes, that's what I can do." And with the bad ones, you go "Hmm, I wonder what got in the way."

That's the key.

And the questions you ask are: "Did you have a clear picture of where you wanted it to go or were you focused on avoiding something?"

THR: Hmmm, interesting.

Dr. Parent: How unlike me.

THR: Gary Player was here last week. Pound for pound he may be one of the best golfers who ever lived and his positive outlook is well known. He said something that sounded like it could've been lifted from a Buddhist text. He told me: "We have the choice in life to be happy or sad, and we have the choice in life to be positive or negative. I choose to be happy and I choose to be positive."

Dr. Parent: That's exactly right. I think Gary has had some experience studying Eastern philosophy and the Buddhist point of view and it's quite common among people who understand this perspective, and that is you can't control what happens to you but you can control how you respond to it.

In Zen Golf there's a chapter called 'Chi Chi's Prayer.' Someone asked Chi Chi Rodriguez "Do you ever pray to make a putt?" And he said, "No, I don't but I pray to react well if I miss." And that's really part of the character that golf builds.

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The Hearthstone Review: You closely examined the coverage of the 1913 U.S. Open. Front pages were held back awaiting the result. The local papers naturally couldn't resist playing up the patriotic angle. How did the Boston papers handle the story?

Mark Frost: Well, they had seven or eight daily papers back then as newspapers were the main means of communication. So, they had it covered like a wet blanket. There were reporters on every single hole watching from every single angle so from my perspective to try and recreate it, it was an enormous help. And as Francis kind of rose up the leaderboard from the first of the week and it became clear that he was the only one left to challenge Vardon and Ray, the Boston papers took an enormous interest because it was an angle they could really play. They didn't even know a lot about golf. In fact, one of the papers on the final morning had to publish a primer on how people should behave at a golf tournament. They had no idea. They thought you were supposed to cheer like at a baseball game. It was kind of chaotic.

Francis rose above it all and they saw it as a great opportunity to make a local hero. And it soon spread around the country. He was on the front page of every paper from the New York Times all the way to the West Coast. It was that big a shock.

The Hearthstone Review: They called him the boy amateur.

Mark Frost: He was such a wholesome, unassuming, gentle guy. No pretensions, no big ego. He simply wanted to be the best golfer he could be. He'd grown up as a lower middle-class kid. His father was a manual laborer. He'd been a caddie all his life, Francis had, and he had aspirations to become a business man in the Boston area. He really wanted to elevate himself. He had no intentions of becoming a professional, and he never did. So America could not have chosen a better champion to represent the sport and the country and as it turned out, he became really one of the great beloved figures in the game. In the research that I did, I never found one single person who had a negative thing to say about Francis Ouimet. And I think the sport was very lucky to have such a wonderful human being as the first person who really called attention to it in this country.

The Hearthstone Review: Ouimet needed to play the last three holes in regulation in 10 strokes, a par three and two stout par fours. Under pressure and very wet conditions without being able to mark and clean his ball on the green, he made a birdie on the 17th hole - maybe a twelve or fifteen footer. And he stroked his putt just as a traffic jam started behind the green and the horns started blaring. It's remarkable.

Mark Frost: The seventeenth hole runs along Clyde Street, which is where Francis's house was, in fact the seventeenth green is the green that he used to wake up and look out at from his bedroom window from the age of four on. And he used to sneak across in the very early mornings before the greenkeepers were out to practice on that fairway and green, so he probably knew every angle to the hole on that green. It was probably his good fortune that it came down to that green. As he got there, he was one stroke back of Vardon and Ray and the street had jammed up with cars as people were pouring out from Boston to watch the end of the tournament. And somebody had a fender bender and the horns started honking and he said afterwards "I never heard a single horn." He was so intense on the putt that he was surprised when people told him afterwards that they could hardly hear themselves think. That's how intently in the moment he was.

© THR, 2003

Talking Points - Edition I - Ron Green
Talking Points - Edition II - Dr. Patrick Cohn
Talking Points - Edition III - Bradley S. Klein
Talking Points - Edition IV - Doug Sanders
Talking Points - Edition V - Curt Sampson
Talking Points - Edition VI - Geoff Shackelford
Talking Points - Edition VII - Bryan Gathright
Talking Points - Edition VIII - Tim Rosaforte, Ray March and Gary Player
Talking Points - Edition IX - Dave Pelz
Talking Points - Edition X - Don Wade
Talking Points - Edition XI - Sidney Matthew
Talking Points - Edition XII - Bud Shrake
Talking Points - Edition XIII - Betsy Rawls
Talking Points - Edition XIV - Roy McCoy, Cliff Rampy and Susan Naylor
Talking Points - Edition XV - Cindy Figg-Currier & Dan O'Neill
Talking Points - Edition XVI - Golf Digest's Pete McDaniel
Talking Points - Edition XVII - Darren Kilfara & Lorne Rubenstein
Talking Points - Edition XVIII - Kaye Kessler
Talking Points - Edition XIX - Frank "Sandy" Tatum
Talking Points - Edition XX - Reid Spencer, author of The Sporting News Presents 50 Greatest Golfers, Ron Garland, author of Golf Nuts, and Martha Burk
Talking Points - Edition XXI - Reid Spencer, author of The Sporting News Presents 50 Greatest Golfers, Ron Garland, author of Golf Nuts, and Martha Burk