Gary Player in His Own Words

Photo: Wojciech Kulicki

I idolized a lot of golfers growing up, but for some reason Gary Player was not one of them. That is kind of strange, because we have some similarities. We are both diminutive. We both fall all over the place on our golf follow-throughs. And the same thing that was said about him and golf has often been said about me and economics: he did more with less talent than just about anyone else.
But, there was something about this passage in his new book Don’t Choke which will forever endear him to me. He is describing the situation as he stood over a daunting shot on one of the final holes of the 1968 British Open, tied for the lead, wind howling.
Here is what he writes:

I reached for a three wood and stood over the ball. Now came that moment. That moment when the entire world condenses into a dimpled sphere at your feet. When everything you are, and hope to become, crushes down upon you in the confined arc of a golf swing.
Do you want to know what was going through my mind?

This sort of sports hyperbole annoys me. What was going through his mind? I expected him to describe the usual mumbo-jumbo associated with positive thinking, mental preparation, staying in the moment, etc. But instead, he wrote something very different, and somehow so touching that it brought tears to my eyes not just the first time I read it, but every time I revisit it.

I reached for a three wood and stood over the ball. Now came that moment. That moment when the entire world condenses into a dimpled sphere at your feet. When everything you are, and hope to become, crushes down upon you in the confined arc of a golf swing.
Do you want to know what was going through my mind? It’s simple, really. I saw a nine-year-old boy sitting on a bench in the freezing cold of a winter’s morning in Johannesburg, South Africa. He waits for a tram to take him across town, where he then walks to catch a bus as part of the long journey just to get to school. It’s still dark, and he sits on that bench alone. His father is working deep in the gold mines. His mother has passed away from cancer. His older brother is far away fighting a world war. His sister is at boarding school. His only friend is an elderly black gentleman named John Mashaba, who makes him breakfast and dinner in the evenings, when he returns home to a dark house. And as he sits on that bench, the boy says to himself, “Someday I’m going to be a world champion.”