With a certain alienated majesty

It is often said that thinking the thought prior to the swing
is not in and of itself going to lead to bad results or confu-
sion, so long as the thought is just like a trigger (akin to
the physiological movement of the waggle of the club) and not
something on which to get fixated. Some people play better
three beers deep to get the mind out of the way.

I was always a worrier, congenital or hereditary maybe. The
yips and the bleets - a kind of athletic Tourette's - sometimes
came at inopportune times early in the season, when dirty gray
piles of snow, pitiful and sickly - something you wanted to
end for its own sake and for mercy's too - sat in the little
mini-coulees where young cottonwoods were competing with one
another to see which could last until the eventual drought year
came.

A swing thought is what it's termed.