The One Iron

February 23, 2026

When I was young . . . fifty years ago . . .I could hit a one-iron. 

This one-iron. The 1974 Lynx Master Model.

If you are a golfer, this will seem an idle boast. Many claim they once could; few in fact did. It was, after all, Lee Trevino who said that the best precaution to take if you find yourself on a golf course during a lightning storm is to hold your one-iron high in the air because “. . . not even God can hit a one-iron.”

But I could and I did.

“So what? Big deal,” you might say.  “We’re not talking splitting the atom here, Rob.” 

No. No, we’re not.  Hitting a one-iron ain’t exactly on the top ten of great human achievements. Certainly, not the outcome. But for sheer friggin laugh in the face of the Gods audacity, it should be.

In golf, as in life, we all hope to find the “sweet spot.” The sweet spot is when you match the center of the golf ball with the center of the face of your club. Since this can seldom be done perfectly, the real question is how close can you come. How far “off center?”  How much deviation from perfection? The greater the deviation, the graver the outcome.

You know you’ve found the sweet spot when you feel it. A quiet, effortless sensation in your fingers that registers long before you look up to observe the flight of the ball. A ball struck off center . . . a “mishit” . . . feels like a tuning fork in your wrists. A slight mishit . . . a small vibration. A bad mishit and your whole body vibrates like you’re Wiley Coyote and the club just hit the Acme anvil. 

But when you hit the sweet spot, you feel nothing.

Not surprisingly, the bigger the club face, the more imperfection the club will tolerate. We say it is a “forgiving” club. It allows for mistakes.

Let me show you.

A golf ball is 1.68 inches in diameter. The club face on a modern driver . . . what we once called a “wood” because it was wood which drivers were once made of . . .  persimmon, actually . . . is 4.5 inches wide and 2 ¼” inches tall.   About this big.

A modern, graphite, oversized driver is a forgiving club. The sweet spot is as big as a Liberty silver dollar. Because of its size, its light weight, and a bunch of wizzy wig engineering marvels built into the face, it tolerates a greater range of mishits, but still sends the ball relatively straight and true.

Now, an old one-iron? That was an unforgiving club.  If a modern driver is your wife after you’ve said something stupid, an old one-iron is Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction. We’re talking bunny burn intolerance.

Why? For starters, the club head weighed probably twice as much as a modern driver and had a face half as big. It looked like this. Maybe 3 ½” by 1 ½” .

As one golf writer aptly described it, a one-iron club face is “as thin as pursed lips.” The sweet spot is the size of a dime.

So, your point Rob . . . is . . .?

Three things enable a golfer to deliver that dime squarely to that ball. A still head. Fluid balance. And soft and sure hands: Let me show you. See this diagram?

• See the circle representing the golfer’s head? It doesn’t move. Not up and down. Not left to right. Not forward and backward. It remains still throughout the swing. 
• See the shoulders? The hips? The feet? They all move, but they remain in balance. Weight shifts to the back foot and then to the front foot.  From takeaway to follow through the body remains in fluid balance. No lurching. No staggering. No step forward like a gymnast who missed the landing. Balanced.
• See the hands? Every part of a golf swing. . . every movement which delivers that club head to that ball . . .  is channeled through your hands. Sam Snead once said, you should grip a golf club “as if you were holding a baby bird.” By that, he didn’t mean a light touch; he meant a sure touch.  One must have soft but quiet hands.

Now, let’s talk about what you can’t see.

The most important thing one must have as he or she stands over the ball is . . . confidence.  Let’s face it. With all that can go wrong in a golf swing, any one of which will produce a mishit, it is presumptuous to dare to strike a golf ball cleanly. You’ve got to be a bit cheeky. More than a little audacious. More like fighter pilot cocky. 

The golf gods are a nasty gallery. They don’t like audacity. They find that level of confidence threatening. So, rather than strike us with lightning and thunder. . . parlor tricks . . . much too flashy. . . the gods send us two things far more subtle, far more insidious. One to bring us back to the course, foolishly thinking we might this time… just this time… approach, maybe even achieve, God-like perfection. 

That’s called hope. 

And one to mess with our heads once we’re back, to bring us back down to earth when, brave enough to swing a one-iron, we dare fly too high. 

That’s called doubt.

The trick for the Gods is to titrate the two. Just enough hope to entice us to care about something so inconsequential. Just enough hope to delude us that today might be different, so we continue to come back for more.  And just enough doubt, once we’re foolish enough to return, to shake that balance, move that head or quicken those quiet hands, so that we leave the course tormented, but not broken altogether.

This brings me to August 2024 and this place.

It was a beautiful day in Bodega. A soft breeze off the Pacific. The air crisp and clean. The warmth of the sun on my face. The sweet smell of freshly mown grass. 

I stepped to the fifth tee, struggled with my shaking hands to rest the ball on the tee, stood upright, struggled to overcome the dizziness that happens when I now stand quickly, searched for some semblance of  balance,  took a deep breath,  slowly brought the club back, paused, and then buried a five iron into the turf eight inches behind the ball, ploughing up the sod like a roto-tiller, so that the flap of turf that remained folded up and over my ball  still resting on the tee.

The earth shook. My Apple watch asked me if I had fallen and required medical assistance. But the ball . . . the ball had not moved. Despite the earthquake my buried five iron must have registered in the seismic lab in Berkeley 40 miles south, the friggin ball remained wobbling on the tee.

I felt like an old golfing gladiator who thankfully carried an airtight living will inside his helmet.  It seemed a good day and a good place to allow my golf game to die.

“No more”, I said, quietly beneath my breath. No resuscitation. No extraordinary measures. No more strife. No more struggle. Let it go in peace, Rob. Don’t ruin it at the end.

Parkinson’s is not kind to a golfer. I can’t keep my head still. My balance is shot. And my hands . . . my shaky, trembling hands. . . won’t rest. Doubt courses through my nervous system like an errant electrical surge and has finally, and I fear irrevocably, eclipsed hope.

Too many variables beyond my control have entered the fragile equation. The sweet spot has shrunk to the head of a pin. I can’t find it.

I know this must all seem silly, especially to those not afflicted by the game. Many . . . my wife, my family, my friends . . . might ask, “Who cares?” It’s a lousy pastime. Who gives a damn if you can’t do it well? You still have the ocean. A warm sun. A cool breeze. Friends with whom to share the time. Who the hell cares, Rob. They say Michael J. Fox still plays golf with his buddies. Why should you care how bad it’s become?

The trouble is . . . I do. I care. And I don’t know how . . .  to not care.

Maybe it’s because I could once hit a one-iron and frighten the Gods. Maybe the bastards sent this damn affliction because I offended them once too often. I hope so. I hope just once I scared the shit out of them.  

Being struck by lightning would be much easier.