THE GAME OF GOLF

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 10, Issue 72, 13 January 1947, Page 6

THE GAME OF GOLF

TROUBLE IS HYPNOSIS POWER OF THE LITTLE WHITE BALL s A great many folks and other people have made a cursory and sur-face-scratching examination of the game of golf, writes Clarence Kelland in an American magazine. Without such trained observation and keen analytical powers as I possess, they have ventured to give the wox’ld ther ill-considered and hasty conclusions, as to the theoi’y, science, practise and vocabulary of the game. But it has remained for me to examine golf with that meticulous, yet searching and broadminded care with which I am so well known to be equipped, and to peer at and to probe into it, not from the physical, but from the psy-~ chical plane. In short golf has been solved, and I have solved it. Alone and unaided I did it.

The trouble with golf is hypnosis

Hypnosis may, and often is, so the treatises on the subject state, induced by placing a small white object at an angle from the eye, and then compelling the subject, patient or victim as the case may be, to gaze at it fixedly until his objective mind ceases to function, and he passes into a state resembling sleep. It is a state in which he is ripe to fall for a joke, and that is why the professor can make "him think he is a piece of cheese being gnawed by mice. He is, as books so aptly say, amenable to suggestion.

You now perceive glimmerings, not to say glitterings of my great discovery. It develops further.

The golf ball, white, glossy, gleaming in the sun, is the small object set at an angle from the strained eyes. You take the place of the pasty-faced subject who arises in the audience. You seize your driver or your mashie or jmur putter and stare fiercely at the small white object, and gradually but inevitably you make yourself amenable to suggestion. In short, you hypnotise yourself. Without your knowledge of your volition, you enter a state of hypnosis—and there you are.

Then comes the suggestion. You furnish that yourself. Such haphazard observers of the game as Mr Guldahl and Mr Snead will doubtless tell you that this is the mental hazard. It is nothing of the sort, your ball,'you stare at it 'out of pond. Suppose it well. You address your ball, you start at it out of countenance and it stares back at you pallid and immovable. Then what? Then you stare some more, with the pond loafing about in the back of your mind. Presently you take for yourself a plentiful wallop at the ball—in your hypnotised State. What does the ball do? I pause to put that question to you firmly. What does the ball do? Friend and fellow subject, it dives head-long into the pond, just as you would have tooted like a steam engine if somebody in on the know had sneaked up behind you and inserted that suggestion into your cerebellum. You were well and plentifully hypnotised by the little white globulai’, round ball, and the suggestion did the rest.

Or take snakes, as many do not these dry days. Take boa constrictors as a fine example of snakes. How do they capture their prey in order that they may constrict it? They charm it with little, round glittering eyes—miniature golf balls. It is the same thing. The snake tees up its eyes and twinkles them at its victim. The victim stands still, tense, rigid, sweating in every pore, with all the careless easy grace of a man about to drive a golf ball. What then? The snake twinkles its eyes other and further times and the victim, charmed, hypnotised, draws closer and closer. Not because he yearns to be constricted. Indeed, quite otherwise. But he cant’ help it. Presently he strolls down the constrictor’s throat.

There you are again. You find it duplicated all through nature. The little ball in the roulette wheel draws the turgid business man from labour to ruin. The three golden balls before the pawn shop—ah, what do they draw? The young, the old, the youthful, the senile—all with their glittering attraction. But none of these, nay, not one, doth possess the awful, the hideous, the powerful drag of the pure white glistening, luring charming golf ball. One look and you are lost. Your eye is caught, shackled, plastered to the ball.

It charms you like a serpent, steals away your consciousness like the professor in the tall hat and the pasty complexion. It overcomes you. It topples reason and volition into the abyss of oblivion. From that instant until your descending driver or brassie or mashie knocks the ball away from your line of vision in a

beautiful arching slice, or a lovely Annette Kellerman in the pond, you are not yourself. You are beyond your own control. You are as hypnotised as the man who sleeps in the clothing store without food or water; and while you are thus, suggestion does the rest, and that is golf.