Local Man Turns Like a Revolving Door, Exits Fairway

This was going to be the week. I had a fresh sleeve of balls, a clean glove, and a swing thought I found at 11:40 on a Tuesday night from a man in a video who seemed very sure of himself.

The swing thought was: turn like a revolving door.

I said it out loud in the car. I said it in the parking lot. I said it to Big Mike while he tied his shoes, and he nodded the way you nod at someone describing a dream they had about their teeth.

Rancho Park is a city course on the west side of Los Angeles, and it is beautiful in a way that makes you want to deserve it. The fairways are lined with big, old trees that have been standing there since before anybody’s parents learned to slice. It is a par 71 that has hosted the Los Angeles Open more times than I have hit a fairway in regulation, which is a low bar that I still somehow trip over.

I did not deserve it.

I warmed up on the driving range, which is a wonderful place to hit golf balls if you enjoy watching them leave with no intention of writing. I hit forty balls. Two went where I was looking. I decided those two were the real me.

On the first tee, I set up, took a breath, and turned like a revolving door.

Unfortunately, I turned like the kind of revolving door that spins too fast and deposits you back on the sidewalk where you started. My ball went hard left, clipped a tree, and came back toward me with what I can only describe as concern.

Big Mike, who has never revolving-doored anything in his life, hit his drive down the middle and picked up his tee without looking, like a man retrieving his car keys from a bowl.

By the third hole I had a working theory. The video man was right about the revolving door. He just never said which direction it was supposed to go.

That is when I met the crow.

He was sitting on a low branch near the spot where my second shot landed, which was not the fairway, and not the rough, but a third, more spiritual place among the roots. I took a practice swing. He tilted his head. I took another practice swing. He tilted it the other way, like a judge on a cooking show who has tasted something and needs a moment.

I hit the ball. It traveled about nine feet and stopped directly under his branch.

The crow did not move. He did not have to. We both knew what had happened.

For the next several holes, he was everywhere. Or a crow was everywhere, and I am confident it was the same crow, because every crow I passed looked at me with the specific, quiet pity of someone who has read my emails. On the seventh, one stood next to my ball as if guarding it for an investigation.

I spent so much time under those trees that I started recognizing individual branches. One of them, I’m almost sure, recognized me back. At one point I found a ball that was not mine, then another, then a third, and briefly felt rich, until I remembered I had lost four of my own on the same hole and was, at best, breaking even.

The back nine brought a change in philosophy. I stopped turning like a revolving door and started turning like a sliding door at a grocery store: slow, reluctant, and only when something approached. This was not an improvement, but it was a change, and in golf a change feels a lot like hope.

Then, on the par-five eighteenth, something happened that I still can’t explain.

I stood over the ball. I forgot the revolving door. I forgot the sliding door. I thought, for no reason at all, about whether I had left the porch light on. And in that moment of pure, empty worry, I swung.

It was perfect. It went high and straight down the middle and landed somewhere near Big Mike’s ball, which had never happened before and which Big Mike acknowledged with one eyebrow.

I made a six. A bogey. On the hardest-sounding hole of the day, with the whole place watching, by which I mean the crow, who was sitting on a branch near the green.

I would like to say he looked impressed. He did not. He looked like he would be telling the other crows about the first seventeen holes.

Afterward I sat in the shade with a lemonade and a hot dog, added up my card, and arrived at 108. I added it again, slower, in case it was nervous the first time. It was still 108.

Next week’s swing thought is already picked out. I found it at midnight. It involves a screen door.