When I was 7, my father gave me a cut-down 7-iron and showed me how to wrap my hands around the hard leather grip and interlock the little finger of my right hand with the index finger of my left. I played that way for years, until in high school I decided that I would rather overlap them.

More than 60 years later, that remains most of the formal instruction I have received.

There was one week in 1997 when Karen and I attended a golf academy at a Las Vegas resort, though I remember less about what they taught than I do the pro telling me I was "over-swinging."

As if I didn't know that.

I have always been an autodidact, a flattering way of saying I would rather make my own mistakes than follow someone else's instructions. My swing is much shorter than it used to be--I slipped on the ice during the pandemic, broke my arm, and did not discover the break until six months later--but still imagine it is ungainly and unsightly, more like falling out of a hammock than an athletic move.

Still, I look right at impact and can more or less repeat it. Golf permits a reasonably athletic person to construct a complicated system of compensations and mistake those compensations for fundamentals.

I once carried a plus-handicap, and these days I play to a 3 index. Golf is not unlike cocaine in that its users tend to believe they should either do more of it or quit forever. My position is that it is not adversely affecting my quality of life yet.

Still, I have been thinking about taking lessons. Not because I have forgotten how to play, though there are........

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