"My daughter is learning to crawl," Geoff Ogilvy says, and you write it down.
"She never does the wrong thing twice," he says, and you write it down.
"It's the same thing with golf," he says. "You're taught how to stand, how to hold the club. Maybe a better approach would be, 'Here's a club, here's a ball, here's a big field. Figure it out.' "
You write it all down because you've traveled a thousand miles to pick the brain of the reigning U.S. Open champion. ("Ogilvy has this reputation as a deep thinker," said the assignment editor. "Look into it.") On the plane to Charlotte, you thumb through the clips. One writer points out that Ogilvy has "an unusually inquiring brain for a professional golfer; he likes to read heavy tomes such as Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time." Another writer sees in Ogilvy "a gift for the aphoristic that is about four decades beyond his years."
So when you meet Ogilvy in the men's locker room at the Quail Hollow Club, site of the Wachovia Championship, you're mildly disappointed that he's dressed in slacks and a polo shirt instead of, say, a toga and laurel wreath. A slender Australian with a receding hairline, he hides behind a shy smile until you raise the sorts of questions that used to cost him sleep after a round of golf. Questions like: If a golfer falls in the forest and no one is there to hear him, will he make a sound? How many angels can dance on the head of a flagstick? What is the meaning of golf? Given license to expound on these subjects, Ogilvy, who'll turn 30 on June 11, becomes animated. His eyes dart upward for inspiration; he embellishes his arguments with arm gestures, like a painter touching up a canvas.
And the second writer was right: Ogilvy talks in aphorisms. To explain why repetitive golf drills tend to be ineffective, he says, "It's like throwing pebbles in a bucket. At some point it gets boring and you lose your feel." To a question about swing technique, he replies, "The only variable in golf is the person playing it. You're not trying to work on the game; you're working on yourself."
This last nugget cries for an example, and Ogilvy provides one two days later, during the first round of the Wachovia. He's in the right rough on the par-4 9th hole, needing a par to complete a solid round of one-under-par 71, and he's having a scholarly exchange with his caddie, Alistair (Squirrel) Matheson. You can't hear their discourse, but Ogilvy seems to be employing the Socratic method, throwing out questions for Matheson to answer. Ogilvy finally pulls a middle iron and swats a sweet-looking shot toward the green, a high draw that swans above the tree line for perhaps a beat too long before dropping to the right-front fringe and stopping 50 feet short of the hole.
