Larry Kilbourne's Website

By Larry Kilbourne

For years I've struggled as a hacker at golf.  In good part because I don't play/practice often enough.  And then there's my belief that golf is a mystery whose secrets few mortals can penetrate.  The latter's admittedly a large burden to bring to every tee shot and ensuing stroke.  But that's my point.

Long ago I discovered that in relation to most other sports, golf is in a class of its own. It is a head game unlike any other. Think not?  Just watch Tiger Woods on a bad day.  The greatest player in the world; perhaps the greatest player in history.  Hitting shots the average player could match on any given day: into the woods, into the rough, into the water or beach.  Matching a typical hacker's game. 

But, of course, if you are not a PGA Tour player or deluded, you don't conclude that your golf head game is on a par with his.

About the same time I took up golf as a kid, I began playing tennis.  At that time, my hometown, Salisbury, Md., was host to the National Indoor Tennis Championship.  Back in the day, this was one of the premier tennis tournaments.  Before professional tennis had really emerged as big-time sports and big-time money.

A neighbor, Bill Riordan, who was a tennis impresario from Philadelphia, managed to lure the tournament and its players away from New York City, where for some reason, people were too sophisticated to bother to attend in sufficient numbers.  In our small town, by contrast, the players were treated like royalty, and the entire citizenry showed up at each match for the tournament's duration.  Once, many years ago, Jimmy Connors played ping-pong in our family room.

There is a point to my digression here:

Golf is a head game unlike tennis - or any other sport - in my opinion.  As a so-so tennis player, I had a mediocre game punctuated by a fiery cross-court, top-spin forehand return that just skimmed over the net.  It was my arsenal of firepower, and when I was on game, it was a winner.  But even when it abandoned me, as it was wont to do, I still had sufficient ability to fall back on my basic backhand and forehand strokes to keep the ball in play.

And herein lies the critical difference that separates golf from tennis and places baking (pardon the seque), I now discover, in the same category as golf.  Although I suspect Michael Murphy (Golf In the Kingdom, The Viking Press, 1972) would have no difficulty understanding my premise, I'm not sure Johnny Miller would grasp it immediately.

In tennis, unlike golf, even on a bad day I always had a fall-back position that allowed me to remain competitive and get the ball back over the net.  I think of it as a 'neutral' position.  Ok, so the killer cross-court forehand is gone...you can still play the game, and with some degree of luck, you might actually win, or at least play competitively.

Not with golf. There, I find myself on one round (or one hole) striking the ball the way it should be - effortlessly, like cutting through butter.  And suddenly, I'm hacking or shanking, or committing any number of unpardonable and unfathomable sins.  It all feels the same!  Not only can I not figure out what I'm doing differently, but most crucially, unlike my fall-back positon in tennis, in golf there is none.

I did not discover that baking is in this same category until I began working as a commercial baker.

Here is what happens: One day you mix a batch of dough, allow it to ferment (rise), shape it, allow it to rise again, bake it....and perfection (or near-perfection).

The next day you attempt the same feat.  You believe you are repeating every step and every process of the proceeding day, yet the result is a complete disaster!  Horrible bread... baguettes you cannot serve to anyone and which you want to shovel off to an unseen place instantly.

And here is where baking gets into your head in the same way as golf: You go over your bake and at first it seems that you simply repeated what you did the previous day.  Then you reflect a bit deeper:  Well, was this a new brand of flour I used than before?  Did my mixing time vary perhaps just a bit?  Was the preferment I used (and seemed at the time) as ripe, or maybe in retrospect was it just a little past its time? Questions, questions, questions.

Suddenly the realization strikes that there are all sorts of things you never considered when you did your successful bake that are at play here.  (And why should you have considered them at the time?) So you have no way in retrospect of reconstructing every step you took that may allow you to discover why today's bake was a disaster.

It all begins to seem like an act of god over which you have little power.

Like golf - or at least my game of golf.  When I begin shanking, right after I have been hitting iron-after-iron dead straight.  When my solidly reliable and straight 3-wood suddenly decides to pull on each tee shot....

You try to think back to what you did when everything worked perfectly; but the more you think, the more you become aware of the host of small but perhaps critical things that went into those shots.  Was there a slight weight change in moving from the backswing forward? Did I slightly shift my position over the ball? What was the last thought in my mind before taking the club back?

A thousand things to examine and question, and suddenly what had been a natural activity is rocket science (of which I have no comprehension).

That's the way an unsuccessful bread bake appears to me.

My only hope, my one salvation, is that someday baking will become more like tennis than golf....