![]() Murphy is now 89, his eyes as blue and alive as the ocean. I could interact with the gallery, I could laugh with my playing partners. Reading that allowed me to understand that, while I had to concentrate over the ball, the rest of the time I could just be myself. I love that line from Shivas, when he says golf is all about what happens in between the shots. It’s been very impactful on me in how I view the game. “It’s so rich,” he says, “that every time I read it, I take away something new. I said, ‘What is this?’ He growled, ‘Only the best golf book ever written.’ And he was right.” Jacobsen estimates he has read GITK a dozen times. “It gave us the language to talk about the spiritual side of the game,” says Brad Faxon, “which I had always believed in.”Īdds Peter Jacobsen, “In the late ’70s, I discovered my caddie Mike Cowan had one book in his possession - a copy of Golf in the Kingdom, which was all torn apart and held together by tape and rubber bands. But for golf’s soul surfers, GITK is holy scripture. ![]() For some readers it is simply too much philosophical woo-woo. The slender volume - just over 200 pages - includes cameos from Saint John of the Cross, Plotinus, Pythagoras, Parmenides, Plato, the Koran, The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, the Bhagavad Gita, Pharaoh Ikhnaton, Pablo Picasso, Matthias Grünewald, Joan of Arc, Jean-Paul Sartre, Goethe, Meister Eckhart, Alan Shepherd and Sandy Koufax, to say nothing of Ben Hogan, Bobby Jones and Sam Snead. When he came out the other side, the story of GITK emerged from deep within his learned and agile mind. Murphy spent the 1960s expanding his mind - through meditation, hallucinogens, the study of ancient texts, and commingling with mystics and shamans. It would become one of the epicenters of the counterculture (and is still thriving today). In the years afterward, he cofounded the Esalen Institute, a retreat and research center on the cliffs of Big Sur dedicated to exploring and realizing human potential. As a young man, in 1956, he had indeed stopped in St. The second half of the book is a series of musings on the game, purportedly copied from Shivas’ journals. ![]() They never find this specter-like creature, but Shivas makes an ace in the moonlight using an old feathery and MacDuff’s only club, a crude Irish shillelagh. Finally, at midnight, Michael and Shivas return to the course (the fictitious Links of Burningbush, which shares much in common with the Old Course) in search of Seamus MacDuff, a sage and a seer who is Irons’ mentor. This is followed by a convivial dinner party where the meaning and mysteries of the game are discussed and debated. The first half of it is a tale in three acts: a young Californian named Michael Murphy is on his way to India to study the teachings of the guru Aurobindo but first stops in Scotland, where he plays a round of golf in which, under Shivas Irons’ tutelage, his consciousness is altered and game unlocked. That the very spark of GITK remains a mystery to its author should come as no surprise considering the book has been disorientating readers ever since its publication in 1972. “Norman Mailer said every writer gets one book that is a gift from God,” says Michael Murphy with a twinkle, “and Golf in the Kingdom was mine.”īut which deity bestowed the gift? Was it Shiva, the Hindu god of destruction and redemption, whose name is evoked by Shivas Irons, the mysterious Scottish teaching pro at the core of the novel? Is it the Episcopalian god the young Murphy served in the 1940s as an altar boy in his hometown of Salinas, Calif.? Perhaps it is Buddha, whose teachings first entranced Murphy in the comparative religion class he took at Stanford, the seminal experience of his life, which set him off on a quest to become, in his felicitous phrasings, “an astronaut of inner space” and “lead a Manhattan Project of the psyche.” Maybe the book was a present from the very golf gods that beguile and bewitch us all, given to Murphy so he could help us make sense of an inexplicable game of which he writes, “How often have we seen a round go from an episode out of The Three Stooges to the agonies of King Lear - perhaps in the space of one hole?” When Murphy talks of the writing of GITK, his first book and, indeed, his first attempt to write one, he speaks in biblical terms, saying, “It came like a flood.” But to this day, the magical power and mystical musings of golf in the kingdom inspire, as does the unlikely story of its visionary author. Almost 50 years ago, Michael Murphy penned what many consider to be the definitive book on golf - not that he knew it at the time.
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