A long time ago, when I was just a boy, my dad would take me to the golf course to caddy for him. It was the way I learned to play and I was fortunate to learn from a very good player. My dad's amateur career includes a Massachusetts State Amateur and several trips to the final and semi-final matches.
One of his friends was a U.S Amateur Champ named was Ted Bishop. I played well enough in the State Am as a teenager to win a few matches one year only to be defeated by dear old dad and it was back to caddying for him.
These two golfers were a great deal of fun to watch as a kid. Ted was older than my dad and a bit hard of hearing which I believe he would use to his advantage in match play and really in general when he was on the course. He would just kind of tune out everything and just play.
There was this one time that I was with my dad and he was playing Ted in a friendly match. Ted had hit his ball down the right side of the fairway on a par-4 hole and his ball ended up just in the rough of a tree-lined fairway. They were elm trees, the big lush kind with summer leaves and branches that hung out almost to the edge of the fairway.
Mr. Bishop waved me over, I wasn't sure what for at first. He had not lost his ball, it was in plain view. When I got there he said, "Now take a look at what I have with this shot son. There's a creek up there some 130 yards to carry and about 15 yards of hard pan with a bunker to follow. That pin is cut directly behind that bunker, it's got to be no more than three paces off the front edge. That gives me a grand total of roughly 150 yards, most of which I have to keep my ball low enough not to catch any branch."
He paused a moment and then he pulled a club from his bag. Then he said, "If I can just punch this ball with a little 5-iron cut, hard enough to carry that creek I believe the grass looks burned up over there so that ground should be quite firm. My ball should bounce pretty fast through there and with any luck it may even bounce through that low lipped bunker. Indeed, this should be interesting."
He gave the club a few swishes and a few waggles, he diddled and fiddled his grip and swung. From where I watched it was just the prettiest trajectory a ball could have -- low with a little rise to it. It preformed magnificently. It was just like he said. The ball struck the ground on the far side of the creek and it bounced hard once and into the bunker where it caught the lip and danced up in the air, it looked like it was waiting for something and then it disappeared.
There was a group of golfers on the next tee and they started to clap. Ted Bishop turned and looked at me and said, "Picasso."
I walked behind him in astonishment to the green where his ball was no more than a foot from the pin. It was as if Picasso was playing. The golf course was the canvas, the club was the brush and the ball was the paint. He saw the shot and would just go into his own world where you could not disturb him and he would paint.
Frankly, the man could not hear you if you tried to disturb him, he would turn off his hearing piece most of the round.
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