Setting aside some time in your day to meditate is one of the greatest gifts you can give yourself. There’s no doubt in my mind that I’m a better person when I’m consistently practicing meditation. I use a guided meditation app called Headspace which offers different “packs” of meditation sessions. I knew meditation was making me a better person, expanding my heart and sharpening my focus; but could it make me a better golfer? I went to Goat Hill Park in Oceanside to find out.

The Goat, as it is affectionately known, gets a fair amount of press. You may have read about it on Golf.com or heard Matt Ginella talk about his love of the place on The Golf Channel’s Morning Drive. To summarize for you, Goat Hill Park is roots golf: an unpretentious, honest golf club that has been revitalized by John Ashworth of Linksoul fame. The club’s revival is a model for what the modern golf course can be: community focused, environmentally friendly and most importantly, a fun scene. Anyone can become a member for $50 and even if you don’t plan on ever setting foot on the property, it’s a nice way to support a noble cause. Despite living 90 miles away, I joined with an eye on maybe playing once or twice a year. When I got an email inviting me to the club championship I figured, why not make a weekend of it? It would be the perfect opportunity to put my focused-based meditation sessions to work.

Saturday, November 4, 2017

I arrive in Oceanside a few hours before my tee time and eat breakfast at an 80s-themed café. As my Denver skillet arrives the unfortunate song “Pulling Mussels” by Squeeze starts playing. I ask the waitress if there is any possible way she can skip to the next track and she tells me, “No way.” The song is one of her favorites. “How?” I ask. She can’t justify the song and then she mistakenly tells another customer that “Steppin’ Out” is by Elvis Costello. How this woman can work at an 80s-themed anything is beyond me. Disgusted, I pay my bill and leave. “IT’S JOE JACKSON” is all I have to say (loudly) as I walk out the door. I drive to the course and find a quiet spot in the parking lot to begin listening to my focus-based meditations.

“Thinking is just thinking. Whether it’s just thinking about the performance, thinking about something that’s happened in the past, something that might happen in the future, it is all just thinking. The moment we realize that, we let go of it, we are present. And in being present, we are focused. That’s it. That’s all we need to do.” – Andy Puddicombe, Headspace

As I emerge from my meditation session, the first thing I hear is more music. There’s always music playing at The Goat and on this perfect Saturday it’s an odd mix of The Cars and Bruce Springsteen. The range is filled with rhythmic swings and the mood in the air is chill. I’m not much of a driving range guy but I take a dozen swings, roll a few putts, mumble along to “Badlands” and go to the tee.

Local knowledge is massively important at The Goat and I’m coming in to the event with a total of 27 holes under my belt. Despite being a little green, my meditations have me feeling calm and confident. As an added bonus, the night before the tournament my prophetic 6-year old daughter Stella tells me, “Daddy, God wants you to win.” The field is going to have to get past me and the Creator. I like my odds.

We’re playing threesomes and I get a solid draw. I’m paired with Jack Collier, a local who has played The Goat a thousand times, and Joe Millett, an aspiring tour pro who has moved to Oceanside from rural Alexandria Bay, New York to make a run at his dream. As we watch the group in front of us tee off, Jack mentions something about “the tour guys.” I’m not really listening to Jack because my attention is fixed on an English terrier named Mulligan who is hanging out with the threesome in front of us. You don’t see English terriers often in tournament play, but it’s clear this is not Mulligan’s first rodeo. The attentive pup knows when to stay put and when to frolic. He obediently follows his owner Scott Nagel into the cart and they take off down the fairway. Finally, I turn to Jack and ask, “Did you say tour guys?”

Jack points to the range and tells me two guys, Dennis Paulson and Dean Wilson, have won on tour. Another guy named Mark Warman has played on several tours and won a state championship. I take a peek at the range and to me it looks more like a Ben Harper concert than the St. Jude Classic. T-shirts, flat brim hats and board shorts are everywhere, but you could tell these guys were sticks. That said, having recently won the Calvary Christian School Golf Scramble just last month, I also took some comfort in being among fellow champions. I suddenly realize that my mind and thoughts are everywhere and I need to sharpen my focus:

“Thinking is just thinking. Whether it’s just thinking about the performance…it’s all just thinking.”

So here I stand; mentally repeating my meditations, watching Mulligan the dog bound down the fairway and in a few minutes I’m going head-to-head with a handful of guys who’ve won on the big tour. Given my delicate place in the Universe at this particular moment I ask myself, why am I holding a 5-iron on a 305 yard hole? I go back to the bag and grab the Big Dog and attack. My game plan of chasing Old Man Par has been thrown out the window and is rolling in the ditch. The new, albeit hasty game plan is to be the aggressor and gun at every single pin and never let up. What could go wrong?  I mean, God wants me to win after all.

As our threesome rolls through the rugged, sunbaked terrain, Joe starts to run out of gas early. He claimed he was still on east coast time, but I wondered if his fatigue had something more to do with the vibrant bar scene in Oceanside. By the turn, his body language is that of an exhausted triathlete. He grabs some cold Sierra Nevada to guide him through his closing nine, a veteran move from the big southpaw.

As for Jack Collier, sometimes golf is a much needed escape and on this day it’s just that for Jack — and he’s shinning in it. Draining clutch putt after clutch putt, Jack is squarely in the mix. A native or nearby Escondido, Jack shared stories of his high school golf days and the criminal nature of the San Diego Chargers move to Los Angeles. Through it all, he manages to settle back into the game, back into the focus of the moment, on shot after shot.

“The moment we realize that, we let go of it, we are present. And in being present, we are focused.”

Jack was a model of athletic focus we could all emulate. I, on the other hand, was something completely different. Early on, my aggressive game plan was working. I was coasting until I got to the fifth tee where I found myself stuck between clubs and having a hard time committing. As I addressed my tee shot, that song, that horrible song about pulling mussels from a shell that ruined my breakfast popped into my head. I backed off the shot and made up some lie about a wind gust when it was really just bad eighties rock blowing through my mind that gave me pause. I knew sooner or later I was going to get distracted or frustrated and I had a plan for it. I recalled the introduction of my meditations:

“I hope you’ve started to get a sense of what it means to find this quiet place of focus in the mind. It’s not something that we need to create, or think ourselves to, but rather an innate quality which exists the moment we recognize the mind is distracted. We discover this place of being present. Focused…Of course the more intense the environment, the more likely we are to fall back into our old habits, perhaps assuming that we need to think ourselves into this place of focus.” – Andy Puddicombe, Headspace

You know the cliché, “you can’t win on day one but you sure can lose?” That was me. The odd thing was that I was thinking so hard about focusing, but all I was doing was thinking and not playing at a very high level. As the tournament unfolded I was absent, lost somewhere in my running mind. I hit a few good shots here and there but I never really got rolling and my aggressive decision making proved costly time and again.

After 27 holes and 115 shots I cooled off with a few icy drinks and some pizza. Jeff Gipner, a fellow Minnesotan and Goat Hill member winced at my score and told me what I already knew. You can’t overpower The Goat because The Goat will overpower you. Dean Wilson’s 93 was a mere 22 shots in front of me and I had a couple dozen players between Dean and me. I wasn’t sure if God was in Puerto Rico, South Sudan or Syria, but I needed him to be in on the first tee tomorrow at 9:10 a.m. because I wasn’t going to win this thing without some heavenly intervention.

Sunday, November 5, 2017

In a hotel room somewhere near the Carlsbad airport, I put in my earbuds and go to my Headspace app.

“Focus is not something we need to create. It is an innate quality of mind. It’s always here for us, wherever we are, we always have the ability to come back to it. So if we can remember that, then we start to find this sweet spot of effortless effort. This place of flow. It’s a flow that, we feel it in our mind, we feel it in our body, we see it in our performance. It starts to change our behavior. So it’s not just an idea, it’s not just a nice concept, it becomes our experience, it becomes part of who we are and how we perform.”- Andy Puddicombe, Headspace

I avoid the 80s café like the plague and drive straight to the course. Considering the USC Trojans played a high-scoring late game the night before and half the field probably toasted each touchdown with tequila shots, the extra hour we gained from daylight savings is a saving grace. I arrive well-rested, hydrated and ready to enjoy the day.

As I open the hatch of my car I notice a few persimmon woods in the back of my car and I figure, why not? I go to the range and show them to Jay Montoya, a fellow persimmon aficionado who works at Goat Hill. Jay is among the leaders in the event and he tells me there are several other players in the field who prefer the Lo-Fi approach, including John Ashworth who is also just arriving. John and I talk about meditation for a bit and I learn he’s a practitioner of the more traditional suttas found in Buddhist teachings. He gives me a link to dharmatalks.org and I go off to the first tee.

One on my partners for the final day is John Kay, a rangy 6-foot 4-inch digital sales professional from Tucson who’s Arizona Wildcats took a tough loss the night before to the aforementioned Trojans, and John is worse for the wear. He’s the kind of guy who keeps a few putters in his trunk and he’s just ditched his vintage bullseye for a 36-inch belly putter. But the putter is not his concern; it’s the full shots. He has a case of the “boths” going, meaning he’s missing both left and right and can’t tell which one is coming. I know exactly how he feels because I am suffering from the same affliction. For about 12 holes we are brothers with no arms.

My other playing partner is Lupe Figueroa. At about 5-foot 7-inches and 200 pounds he’s built like every other guy I’ve ever met who’s name is Lupe or Figueroa. Just like John and I, Lupe is light years behind the leaders and happy to be on the course playing for skins and following his fantasy football team’s progress. At some point, I tell him I had been trying to use meditation to help me play better golf, and I think Lupe could sense my feeling of failure and dejection with the process. Lupe says, “I’ve been doing it for a while, man. Just keep it up. It works, man. Meditation works.” Turns out Lupe also uses Headspace, not so much for golf but overall wellness. He’s a believer; “It’s good stuff, bro. Good stuff.”

“We may find ourselves in a situation where we just think; “there’s no time for this!” And all of a sudden we find ourselves putting in way too much energy, too much effort, trying too hard, thinking too much. And it’s OK. This is natural. If we expect it to immediately be OK and at 100 percent, we’re going to be really disappointed. That’s just not going to happen. But over time, it starts to permeate and we start to see the results. We’ve got to think of this as a long-term strategy. This isn’t a magic pill that’s going to change something overnight…It’s a foundation that we put down over many weeks, months, and years. Then we start to see the results.” – Andy Puddicombe, Headspace

Was I really so naïve to think that I could just listen to some meditations for 10 days and suddenly I’d be a dialed in master of the golfing mind? Not at all. I just knew that meditating had improved so many other parts of my life, so why not golf. But just like anything else worthwhile, it takes time. And right now I sit squarely in the process, building the skill. If it’s true that, as Ben Hogan said, “ The secret is in the dirt” then I am absolutely willing to get filthy in this effort. I have a long way to go and can feel that it’s worthwhile and important work for my game and my soul. I may be struggling to find the bottom of the cup, but I’m committed to improving my focus through meditation.

My tournament is done so I get a cooler and I jump on a cart with a few other guys and a dog named Terry. We go out on the course to see how the leaders are holding up. The first group we catch features Dennis Paulson who tells me; “People ask me; Is it a great course? No. But it’s a great experience.” I’ve always respected his work and on this Sunday afternoon in November, there’s no other place else Dennis Paulson would rather be.

Not many municipal courses have caddy programs, but Goat Hill does and two of them are looping in the final group. One of them, Edgar, is on ex-PGA tour winner Dean Wilson’s bag. As I am looking at Dean’s persimmons it catches my attention that Edgar’s sporting pink flip flops. Goat Hill Park is a tough, tough walk, and this kid’s just done it in flip flops. Blake is the other caddy in the group and he’s on Grant Holly’s bag. Grant’s also got a ton of game, but he’s kind of the anti-Wilson: big titanium clubs, loud bright colors and a highly effective devil-may-care swing. One gets the impression that Blake’s loop is a little tougher than Edgar’s, but at least Blake’s wearing proper shoes.

As the sun starts to set and the scores are being counted, I suddenly hear John Ashworth: “Five bucks. One club. Two-man teams. Five bucks. Who’s in? Five bucks a man.” Golf balls go up in the air and we pair up. The Derby is on: 18 golfers, two dogs, and about half a dozen spectators are going down the first fairway. Grant Holly nearly drives the first green… barefoot. John Ashworth conveniently gets paired up with Dennis Paulson. My partner Mike Domler splits the first fairway and I stuff a punch 9-iron to 12 feet. Of course, Mulligan the dog is part of the scene and I’m not sure I’ve had more legal fun on a golf course and I certainly don’t want to leave.

All good things must come to an end. So what should your takeaway be from all of this? It’s twofold: First and foremost, try meditation if you haven’t already. You might, in fact, find that you already incorporate meditative practices in your life but just call it something different. Secondly, consider joining Goat Hill. Where else can you pay $50 to join, buy beers for $2, play persimmon woods, compete with ex-PGA winners, wear a t-shirt, watch dogs run around, go shoeless, listen to music and get a caddy who wears pink flip flops?

As Lupe says, “It’s good stuff, bro. Good stuff.”