Shooting His Age

The Love and the Craft.

Shooting his age…

I played 18 holes with a 72-year-old gentleman this summer. 72 is the year (maybe the last) when shooting your age still means more than shooting your age. It (usually) means shooting even par or better.

Mr. Spiller’s swing is smooth and sweet. He does not thrash at the ball. It is as if he gets just beside it at impact and whispers to his ball “just go right on down there, little fella,” like he has just unsaddled a trusty work horse and sent him back to the barn. The ball knows where to go, his swing is just the friendly slap on the back, the ritual that says it’s free to leave. **(The distance that it eventually travels is the only thing jarring about the whole event)**. His clubs look like the tools of that same farmer. These implements are not new, but not outdated. He acquired them when he needed them, and he will use them until they need to be replaced, and no sooner.  Some of them are modified with lead tape on the back, but all of them show the softening signs of wear on the grips and the grooves that serve as the aspirational reminder to the Indians among us who are always searching for newer more magical arrows or us bad craftsmen who too often blame our tools.

Mr. Spiller pays attention to things around him. He can tell you which three holes someone from the other cart used their 58 degree wedge so that they can go back only as far as they need to find it. With a mixture of nostalgia and hankering he notes which holes on this course that he has never birdied before (there are not many). When you hit a bad shot, he doesn’t tell you what you did wrong on a swing, he welcomes you back to sanity and says something like, “Maybe we got a little handsy on that one, we’ll see.”

The first time that I played with him, we talked about how hot it was but that it was not really bothering us. We talked about when he started playing golf, when he stopped, and started again.  You can tell that his imagination is captivated by the game as he recounts how much he enjoyed seeing some of the best college players in the world compete on his home course. “I like to see how different today’s players are…and the different ways that they attack the holes that I have played so many times.”

We had met several times over the last 5 years but reconnected and committed to “play sometime soon” as walked around the course at The University Club in Baton Rouge as part of a small gallery following a group that included Neil Shipley, who had already earned low amateur honors at The Masters a month prior and would go on to earn low-am honors at the US Open a month later. 

Mr. Spiller can go deep, not just on his scorecard, that comes as a corollary to another kind of depth. You can tell that he sees things that not everyone sees. Maybe he feels them the way that he does when he plays the drums with the praise band at church. He seems drawn to simplicity. When he says that he loves to watch Bryson (which he plans to do later that day) you get the feeling that it is not for the mammoth drives or the YouTube stunts but for something that presents itself to his mind’s eye in a way that relieves it from a blurry background. At one point he says to me, “I see something in your swing that I have seen somewhere before, hmmmm, it will come to me.” He did not bring it up again, although I did admit that Scottie Scheffler’s now famous footwork had rescued me from years of concerned comments like, “looked like you slipped when you hit that one.” Maybe it was my Schefflerian footwork that he noticed and filed into his memory, but it won’t surprise me if it was something much more minute and subtle that occurs to him at some later date, when he sees it in someone else.

Mr. Spiller shot a -3 (69) that day. He finished by making a long par putt that I had assumed was for birdie. I wrote him down for a (68) before I remembered that he had in fact gotten up-and-down from the bunker on 18. It was his first sand shot of the day. Maybe his subconscious would not let him leave without hitting all the shots.

It was the quietest sub 70 round that I have ever witnessed.  A title once held in my mind by a young touring professional who silently shot (65) at Colonial playing with the local “Big Group” of mostly men twice his age. This was the opposite. Mr. Spiller beat me by -6 strokes and +27 years. But I didn’t consider it a loss, it was more like a masterclass for how to love something and be good at it. 

This is a painting that someone commissioned for the members of a golf trip to Bandon. I found out after I painted it that man putting was Lindsey Spiller. A worthy choice for the representative memory for the trip.