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James Dodson

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   Mozart's Piano Concerto Number 21 in C Major wafts serenely from a small tape player perched on a stool near a digital video recording machine, and late summer crickets chirp softly on the periphery of the Blackstone National practice range 40 miles southwest of Boston, where the end of another golf season has all but come and gone.
   Kevin and his buddy Ken have ventured here, pilgrim-like, to be fitted with new shooting irons by the master. According to Kevin, a telecommunications analyst from New Jersey,

"Next year is going to be our breakthrough year in golf-mind and body." Getting out-rigged with new HG irons is only a first step in their plan to hoist themselves to a higher level of the game.


   "We heard from some guys at our company outing last spring that Tom Shea is, like, I dunno, a wild man," confides Kevin in a whispered aside. "We thought it might be cool to meet him."
   Happy to report, because of an afternoon lull in Shea's normally busy schedule, the unexpected bonus of their fitting pilgrimage is that they have indeed gotten to spend a few extra minutes up close and personal with one of the most brilliant and eccentric minds in golf, a teacher who seems to speak and think of the game in terms of particle physics and moon shadow, part Zen master, part stand-up comedian-George Carlin meets the Dalai Lama.
   Poor Ken and Kevin, one senses, have no idea what they have wandered into a larger-than-life guy who rises 6-foot-4 or so and is clearly operating on a vastly different frequency of perception than your average PGA Tour swing guru. Within their allotted hour fitting sessions and the subsequent run-over time, for example, Shea casually lobs several ageless profundities at them, ranging from the sayings of Lao-tzu to the tenets of the Alexander Technique, from the tantalizing idea that the quickest way to hit a horrible golf shot is to "try" to hit it well ("trying is always failing!") to the beauty of learning to ride a bike by "learning not to unbalance and not to interfere."
   Shea talks in a stream of higher consciousness about how one's learned beliefs influence behavior, which invariably hinders true growth, not to mention true gravity. Along the way, he merrily invokes William Shakespeare, Maria Montessori, and MIT educational theorist Seymour Papert. Planets spin ¬and so do heads ....

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