[The enigmatic Bagger Vance and young Hardy Graves are walking the Krewe Island golf course the night before the exhibition match when they are joined by O. B. Keeler, friend of the legendary Bobby Jones. The historical fiction story is a recollection by Hardy in later life.]
“Let’s see you take a cut.” Bagger Vance held out Junah’s driver to me.
“You mean hit one?”
“Just give us a few swings.”
They had apparently been discussing some theory, and I was to be their guinea pig. I didn’t mind. I took the big deep-faced driver that Junah called Schenectady Slim, planted my feet and gave it a wail from my soles. Once more, Bagger Vance requested. I swung again. When I looked up, he and Keeler were both chuckling merrily.
I felt like a fool, half ready to slam the club down and storm off, when Bagger Vance again caught my shoulder with that warm strong hand. “We’re not laughing at you, Hardy,” he said.
“No,” Keeler followed, “more at our own poor selves, I fear.” Keeler explained, “We chuckled out of envy, envy of youth and fearlessness.” He declared that if he had torqued his spine through half the turn I had just taken, it would put him in the hospital for a week.
He spoke thoughtfully for a few moments about a boy’s natural swing, any boy’s. The big raw pivot, enormous arc, the natural sense of balance, release and turn.
“May I take it, sir,” Bagger Vance said when Keeler had finished, “that you believe there is such a thing as the Authentic Swing?”
You could see Keeler cover his astonishment. Apparently Bagger Vance had hit on something Keeler had thought about, and was deeply interested in. “The Authentic Swing, did you say? Yes, I do.”
He looked at Bagger Vance deeply, solemnly, still more than a little amazed to be addressed so seriously and with such intelligence by this odd, mysterious man.
“Tell me, sir, if you wouldn’t mind,” Keeler said, “what are your thoughts on it?”
“Have you ever seen identical twins take up golf? Their swings from the very first are radically different. Isn’t that odd?”
Keeler absorbed this from Vance, nodding thoughtfully. Yes, he had seen twins swing. Yes, how interesting that their motions were so different….
“Or,” Bagger Vance continued, “have you ever watched a boy pick up a club for the first time and swing? I mean his first swing ever. And then seen him years later as an accomplished player? Isn’t his mature swing virtually identical to the one he took the first time he picked up a club?”
“That is so,” Keeler agreed enthusiastically. “Please continue.”
“Or consider a professional instructor trying to alter a student’s swing to fit some preconception of the proper motion. It’s virtually impossible, is it not?”
Keeler agreed. “I see you’re driving at a point, sir.”
Vance paused. Keeler stood, absolutely attentive. “I believe that each of us possesses, inside ourselves,” Bagger Vance began, “one true Authentic Swing that is ours alone. It is folly to try to teach us another, or mold us to some ideal version of the perfect swing. Each player possesses only that one swing that he was born with, that swing which existed within him before he ever picked up a club. Like the statue of David, our Authentic Swing already exists, concealed within the stone, so to speak.”
Keeler broke in with excitement. “Then our task as golfers, according to this line of thought …”
“…is simply to chip away all that is inauthentic, allowing our Authentic Swing to emerge in its purity.”
We had reached the sixteenth green. Keeler paced beside Vance as he strode the putting surface, examining its slope and grain. “That’s why a boyhood swing like your young friend’s here is so fascinating. We marvel at its raw purity and unselfcon-sciousness. It’s why we laughed involuntarily when we saw it. It shamed us, in a way.”
“Think of a swing like Hagen‘s,” Bagger Vance resumed. “That lurching slashing motion, could you teach that to anyone else? Could anyone other than Hagen even make contact with the ball? And yet for him, it’s perfect. It is authentic. It is he. The swing he was born with, the swing that is the true expression of his existence.
“Have you noticed, Mr. Keeler, the endless praise and even adulation that is heaped upon your friend Mr. Jones’ swing? To watch it evokes emotion, does it not? One might even say love; and do you know why? Is it not because we, in some deep intuitive part of ourselves, recognize Jones’ swing as Authentic? The pure expression of his being, his inner grace and nobility, his power, his concentration and even his flaws and imperfections? Jones’ swing embodies every aspect of his being like a perfect poem or symphony, and, if I may guess, has embodied it from the start.”
Keeler assented emphatically. “I believe you’re on to something, sir! I’ve known Bobby since he was thirteen and, do you know, his swing today is virtually identical to the one he possessed then and, I’ll wager, to the swing he had at ten and eight and even six. Probably the first swing Bobby ever took would be recognizable to us, had we film of it.”
“And before that,” Bagger Vance declared. “Before he ever picked up a club. Before he was even born.”
Vance paused, realizing that Keeler had a notepad in his hand. “Do you mind if I take some of this down?” Keeler asked. Bagger Vance hesitated, but continued.
“Consider the swing itself,” he said. “Its existence metaphysically, I mean. It has no objective reality of its own, no existence at all save when our bodies create it, and yet who can deny that it exists, independently of our bodies, as if on another plane of reality.”
“Am I hearing you right, sir?” Keeler asked. “Are you equating the swing with the soul, the Authentic Soul?”
“I prefer the word Self,” Bagger Vance said. “The Authentic Self. I believe this is the reason for the endless fascination of golf. The game is a metaphor for the soul’s search for its true ground and identity.“
“Self-realization, you mean?”
“If you like. We enter onto this material plane, as Wordsworth said, ‘not in utter nakedness, but trailing clouds of glory do we come from God, who is our home.’ In other words, already possessing a highly refined and individuated soul. Our job here is to recall that soul and become it. To form a union with it, a yoga as they say in India.”
“You’ve been to India, sir?”
“Many times,” Bagger Vance replied. “In the East, men are not embarrassed to speak openly of the Self. But here in the West, such piety makes people uncomfortable. That is where golf comes in.”
“The search for the Authentic Swing is a parallel to the search for the Self. We as golfers pursue that elusive essence our entire lives. What hooks us about the game is that it gives us glimpses. Glimpses of our Authentic Swing, like a mystic being granted a vision of the face of God. All we need is to experience it once—one mid-iron screaming like a bullet toward the flag, one driver flushed down the middle—and we’re enslaved forever. We feel with absolute certainty that if we could only swing like that all the time, we would be our best selves, our true selves, our Authentic Selves. That’s why we lionize men like Hagen and Jones and treat them like gods. They are gods in that sense, the sense that they have found their Authentic Selves, at least within the realm of golf.”
Keeler was now utterly in Vance’s thrall. We had passed off the sixteenth green and were climbing the rise to the seventeenth tee. Ahead we could see the ballroom lights and hear the orchestra music, faint scraps of it corning to us on the air. “Tell me, Mr. Vance. How does one find, if that’s the correct word…how does one find his own Authentic Swing?”
“I will answer that, Mr. Keeler. But before I begin, let me make an important distinction. The wild fearless cut we saw young Hardy take a few holes ago, that was not the Authentic Swing. It is a precursor, a foreshadowing. To reach the Authentic Swing, a player must pass through three distinct stages.
“First the pure state of unconsciousness, or preconsciousness. Pre-self-consciousness. This is the state in which our youthful companion resides now. He doesn’t think about what he’s doing, he simply picks up the club and swings. This demonstrates deep wisdom, because it expresses faith in the existence of the Swing, it launches itself fearlessly into the Void. Unfortunately this pure state, like youth itself, cannot last. It must by Nature’s law pass on to the next stage.”
“Self-awareness”—Keeler strode step-for-step beside Bagger Vance up the rise—”self-consciousness.”
“Exactly,” Vance acknowledged. “In this stage, we realize that we possess an Authentic Swing, but we can’t repeat it. Some days we can’t find it at all. Our frustration mounts. We begin to study, to seek instruction, to strive by dint of effort to mold and control our motion. This as every golfer knows leads only to despair. We cannot overcome golf by force of will.”
Vance stopped at the pinnacle of the teeing ground for the seventeenth. He looked out pensively over the dark duneland that stretched for a thousand yards along the night shore. His focus seemed to have wandered, to have left Keeler and traveled to some distant shore in his mind.
“You said there was a third stage,” Keeler prompted. “A stage, one assumes, beyond self-awareness.”
“Few reach that level, as we well know.” Bagger Vance smiled, returning from whatever inner land he had journeyed to. “And then only briefly. It is as elusive as Enlightenment. Merely to realize we possess it makes it fly from us. And yet paradoxically it is always there, nearest of the near, closer to us than our own skin.”
“But how,” Keeler pressed, “how do we get to it?”
“It gets to us,” Bagger Vance said. “Surrendering to it at last, we allow it to possess us.”
“The Self, you mean?”
“And then we can play.”
A soft chiming sound interrupted us. Keeler tugged a silver railroadman’s watch from his vest pocket. It chimed its last sweet beat. “My goodness, it’s four A.M. I must get at least an hour of sleep.” He was torn, you could see, wanting to stay up and listen to Vance all night.
“Sir, could you briefly, as we walk in, expound on this subject just a little more? Is there a path, a Way, that leads us to the Authentic Swing?”
“There are three,” Bagger Vance said.
Unfortunately I missed most of what he said, for he had me pacing yardages on these two last and most important holes. I scooted out quickly, with Vance shouting after me not to rush but to keep my strides uniform, then scurried back as fast as I could while still being true to the yardage…. I caught what I could of the instruction Vance gave to Mr. Keeler.
The first path, I heard him say, was that of Discipline. It had something to do with beating balls, with endless practice, an utter relentless commitment to achieving physical mastery of the game.
Second was the path of Wisdom. I heard practically nothing of what Vance said here (I was checking yardage to three separate bunkers off the eighteenth) except, I believe, that the process was largely mental—a study of the swing much like a scientist might undertake: analysis, dissection, and so on.
Third (and this I heard most of) was the path of Love.
On this path, Vance said, we learn the Swing the way a child acquires its native tongue. We absorb it through pure love of the game. This is how boys and girls learn, intuitively, through their pores, by total devotion and immersion. Without technically “studying” the swing, they imbibe it by osmosis, from watching accomplished players and from sensing it within their own bones.
“All three of these paths embody one unifying principle,” Vance said. We were now approaching the eighteenth green. “That of surrender. Surrender of the Little Mind to the Big Mind, surrender of the personal ego to the greater wisdom of the Self.
“The path of beating balls defeats the player, as it must, until he surrenders at last and allows his swing to swing itself. The path of study and dissection leads only to paralysis, until the player likewise surrenders and allows his overloaded brain to set down its burden, till in empty purity it remembers how to swing.
“In other words, the first and second ways both lead to the third. Love is the greatest of these ways. For in the end, grace comes from God, from the Authentic Self. But to plumb this mystery would take us far more than a night and, I’m sorry to see, we have reached the final green. You must be very tired, Mr. Keeler.”
On the contrary Keeler was energized, electric. “I won’t sleep a wink after this,” he said, “but I suppose I must try….”
— The Legend of Bagger Vance, Chapters 10-11
Author’s emphases are in italic. Mine is in bold.
