“The supernatural is only the nature of which the laws are not yet understood.” – Agatha Christie
In 9th century Bangladesh, according to legend, the venerable Mahasiddha Virupa left Nalanda, the monastery where he had served as Grand Abbot, and journeyed on foot into southern India. There, he came to the small town of Dakinitapa and its local tavern. He ordered wine, and the tavern keeper asked for payment. The great Virupa cut a deal; he drew a line in the sand just before the tavern’s shadow; he would drink until the sun’s movement caused the shadow to touch the line, then pay in full. The tavern keeper agreed. Virupa drank for three straight days before the town, in disarray after three days of constant sunlight, sent its king to the tavern. There, the king realized that Virupa had stopped the sun in the sky. Virupa asked the king to pay his bar tab. He did, and the sun immediately set.
In the Vajrayana Buddhist tradition (of which the venerable Mahasiddha Virupa was a part), consciousness is considered to be three-leveled, from coarse to subtle to very subtle. Awareness of each deeper layer brings a practitioner a closer understanding of the Buddha’s teachings. With these subtler realizations nearing the Buddha’s total understanding, practitioners would be liberated from the cycles of karma, incapable of bringing about anything other than total goodness for all.
To assist in practicing awareness of subtler and subtler consciousness, the Buddha advised his followers to abide by five precepts: no killing, no lying, no stealing, no illicit sex, and no taking intoxicants. These are, traditionally speaking, activities that make conscious awareness coarser, thus generating poor karma that negatively affects oneself and others. Following the precepts helps practitioners manifest the virtues of subtle insight and generate karma toward all beings’ liberation from suffering. Abiding by the precepts is considered wholly possible, and clergymen should be above committing violations.
For this reason, when monks at Nalanda Monastery accused their Grand Abbot of eating meat, drinking alcohol, frequenting pubs and brothels, and killing insects, these accusations were assessed with utmost seriousness. The monastery found Virupa unfit to continue in his role, and they dispelled him from their ranks. Virupa accepted their verdict, composed a song to cleanse the community of his misdoings, and left, parting the River Ganges to allow him passage on his way out.
With his various miracles proving his enlightenment, the community had to reassess their understanding of Virupa’s actions, recommitting their knowledge that understanding the path as a universal set of absolutes neglects the fluidity of the highest truth. The venerable monk has been known since as Mahasiddha Virupa — “Mahasiddha” being someone who has attained enlightenment and mastered “siddhis”, or supernatural capabilities. While precepts and natural laws remained good practice for ordinary practitioners, they did not represent the highest ideal. True liberation is of a form only intelligible to those so liberated, and there exists no rigid path to it.
I’ve wondered just how much psychological progress can overcome physical limitations. A crude but lucid example: could Virupa drunk drive? (Author’s note:don’t.) The process by which alcohol depresses the central nervous system is scientifically understood as clear and unambiguous, and Virupa, a man like any other, was just as susceptible to its effects. But then again, he should be just as incapable of parting rivers and moving celestial bodies. Any contemporary scientific understanding suggests no means by which the brain’s chemical impairment wouldn’t correspond to a proportional cognitive impairment. But neither does contemporary science have an explanation for consciousness itself, or any other of life’s miracles, large or small. After all, that’s why they’re considered miracles.
Admittedly, I haven’t always been the biggest Scottie Scheffler fan.
I’ve never had anything against him. I’ve only rooted against him once, when he was my group chat pick not to win the 2022 Masters and he kept his foot on the gas, damaging my ball-knower reputation beyond repair. Otherwise, there’s not much to dislike. He’s a tremendous player, handles himself admirably, seems to treat people well, and otherwise appears a consummate sportsman.
It's just that he’s a drastically different player than the heroes of my adolescence. Rory was my first teenage taste of golf dominance, and he opened my eyes to the idea of perfect golf: omnipotent driving, effortless ball-striking, and a self-assured swagger I still try to replicate in bouncy walks down the fairway. By contrast, Spieth, my other hero, was the immovable object to Rory’s unstoppable force, his creativity and short-game manifesting complete control of the razor's edge. I grew up a nervous overthinking kid, and Spieth’s conversations with Greller showed me that people like me can win. If Rory made me want to play high-level golf, Spieth taught me that my best golf might one day be enough.
Compared to these heroes — one inspirational, one aspirational — Scottie was another quasi-star on the Class Acts Tour, one of the indeterminate-equine herd trying to fill Tiger’s vacuum in the aggregate. His “do everything above average” play style lacked a lightning-rod tool for compelling storytelling. His interviews, while more insightful than many, were humble, collected, and lacked controversy — the interviews of a skilled rhythm guitarist happy to keep the knob below five. He did everything well, and so nothing stood out. I didn’t know how to interpret his game, and so, admittedly, I largely didn’t.
Actually, one thing stood out: the footwork. I understand why his feet move the way they do, how technically sound his move really is, etc. etc. But my own feet are the source of all my technical problems, and the ground makes or breaks me. I’ve fallen short of goals, missed teams, and lost tournaments because of my footwork. So, it’s frustrating to watch Scottie win golf tournaments with his feet moving the way they do. It breaks all my technical precepts; it feels like a violation of some higher law.
But then, slowly and then all at once, Scottie put together the best stretch of golf since Tiger. At this point, I had no choice but to pay attention. Clearly, he was doing something right. The question was, what?
I think we, as consumers of professional sports, gravitate towards pro athletes when two things are true. First, we see someone doing things at a level that’s simply above our comprehension. There’s a spectacular element to their performance, either in quality or style, that transcends what we, the viewer, are capable of wrapping our heads totally around. Even other top pros can watch Rory drive it or Jordan chip it and feel they’re watching something special.
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But something else must be true for athletes to be compelling: that we feel their greatness resonate with us or with a higher version of ourselves. In the same way that your guilty pleasure movie hits you a certain way or that some zillion-times-platinum album just isn’t your jam, athletes either meet us where we are or they don’t. The highest peaks by the brightest stars might now spark much feeling while the smallest victories by some no-name guys do. There’s a reason I haven’t latched onto the recent crop of stars while I’ve pulled my car over more than once to watch Spieth try to make a run on Sunday.
Without a doubt, Scottie has more than enough firepower to fulfill the first criterion. But, for a while, he eluded me on the second. I think it was my inability to figure out what exactly made him so special. Rory’s move at driver speaks for itself, and Spieth’s hands can at least be understood as the source of magic in themselves. Scottie, on the other hand, is blessed with the superpower to do everything a fraction better than anyone else. Over time, this adds up to him being better than anyone else at their best skill — he’s actually your favorite ball striker’s favorite ball striker. But he’s a non-specialist. If there’s a primary skill that’s the source of his powers, it seems to be “golf,” or “winning.” In the words of Michael Bamberger:“Scottie Scheffler is good at golf, and that really is about it.”
A quick comparison to another player of recent note: consider Bryson’s talk about new technology, statistics, ball speed, workout routines, etc. Bryson’s modus operandi is to accumulate an abundance of specifics that add up to good golf. Golf, for Bryson, breaks down into parts, each of which can be assessed, tweaked, or redesigned. On a lesser scale, players have been talking about the game in this way for years. Post-round interviews mention a balky driver or a hot putter, details that suggest the game is susceptible to subdivision. This is, largely, how we tell stories about golf. Some things go well, some go poorly, bounces go this way or that, and at the end someone wins or loses. If more things go well next week, I’ll win; if not, I won’t.
Except Scottie doesn’t talk like this. Of course, that’s not a rule: that he switched to a putter that looks like a mallet while feeling like a blade, for instance. His interviews can be counted on to give more detail, color, and insight than most. But I can’t think of any other player who’d respond to a question about legacy with: “Ultimately, we’ll all be forgotten.”
In his most insightful moments, Scottie talks about his faith, his family, and his desire to win. He’s spoken oncrying to his wife, Meredith, before the final round of the 2022 Masters, worried that he wasn’t ready for the moment. Two years later,he admitted to his friends that he wished he didn’t want to win as badly as he did, finding comfort and strength in his faith and his friends. There’s evena video where he stands on the 18th green at TPC Sawgrass to break down his 2023 Players victory where, instead of specifics, he focuses on how special and emotional it was to have his family there to watch him.
In these moments, Scottie doesn’t break down winning golf into any smaller parts or mention individual qualities that helped him to victory. There is just Scottie, and Scottie just wins at golf. This feels like a revolutionary way to think about the game. In an era more and more concerned with breaking down and understanding specifics (especially, as it turns out, for a young pro trying to improve), Scottie seems to shed the idea in favor of a unitary capital-G Golfer.
Of course, all of this becomes compelling given his recent success. But plenty of players win; look more closely at how he’s won. I simply do not understand how he was able to win The Players after pulling his neck on the 19th hole of the tournament (personal aside: I’ve played college tournaments with a good number of stitches in my body and hit golf balls 48 hours after separating my shoulder, but I’ve never come back from a neck pull after less than a week). But that’s his brilliance: he’s not concerned with necks, only with his entire self. Similarly, he’s shown the self-control to handle an unjust arrest with poise, stretch out in a jail cell, and go shoot 66 in a major championship. At the Travelers, after a disruptive protest on the 18th green, Scottie hit a perfect drive and flagged a wedge to win. He’s unphased by obstacles, be they physical discomforts or environmental distractions. He seems to tap into something above all of these. Considering the most complete player of his time, the question “how?” seems just as large as any spiritual question we can ask.
If we’re insisting on answering the question, I think we have to take it from Scottie. He continues to insist that golf doesn’t define him, that his faith and his relationships do instead. Every interview I’ve seen of his gives me the impression of someone with a remarkably healthy outlook on life. Not to neglect his hard work, his competitiveness, or anything else he’s put into his game, but it seems, most of the time, that Scottie Scheffler is very good at golf as a sort of byproduct of being very good at personhood.
My own golf fandom — what’s been resonating with me recently — has started tracking my own development-to-be as a fledgling pro. Watching golf at the highest levels remains entertaining and inspiring, but it comes now with a feeling of intimidation. The guys on TV these days are so damn good, and I’m starting to realize what must happen to perform any one skill at an elite level. That I have to reach that level in every skill is daunting.
But as Scottie Scheffler — one of my patron saints of “I’ll never get there” — has become one of my favorite players to watch and root for, I’ve found myself teetering on the edge of a new belief. I know how much work is required of me to get my game to the next level — probably more hard work than I can even comprehend. Most of the time, it doesn’t seem like there are enough hours in a year to sufficiently practice everything I need to. But, as daunting as good golf seems as a long sum, watching and listening to Scottie Scheffler makes me wonder if there isn’t a better perspective. After all, through all the disparate skills golf asks of its competitors, there’s always one constant: the Golfer. It feels like I’ll need a little magic, but Scottie makes me wonder if we all have more magic in us than we realize.
In my junior year, I took a course called Religion 324: Mind and Meditation. The seminar met once a week for three hours on Monday afternoons. We discussed the place of meditation in traditional and modern Buddhism, contemporary scientific research’s place in understanding meditation, meditation’s own place as a pedagogy in itself, and — by far the class’s primary focus — learning to meditate. Our only homework, more or less, was to find thirty minutes each day to practice meditation.
Science has done much to validate meditative practice in recent years: Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), developed in the 70s by Jon Kabat-Zinn, remains one of the most successful courses of treatment for chronic pain, and fMRI scans show differences in brain anatomy and brain waves between meditators and non-meditators. But meditation remains fundamentally personal; the idea of measuring meditative progress objectively is basically nonsensical. The purpose isn’t to decrease cortisol levels or strengthen synapses or enhance any measurable quantity. In the end, you’re alone on the cushion. It’s an internal, fluid, subjective practice, and the only person who knows what meditation can do for them is you.
Despite being horribly inconsistent in my practice, I’ve considered meditation one of the most important parts of my life since taking that class. Things just tend to go better when I spend time on the cushion: problems feel more manageable, the world a little clearer and easier to move through. Most young adult breakthroughs of any staying power have been downstream of a little extra attention.
Four months ago, while I sat for thirty minutes and followed my breath, I was consumed by a vivid feeling of flushing the golf ball. Not so much a particular shot (I didn’t know if I was holding driver, wedge, or putter), but of total alignment of my body at impact, the clubface, the target, and the ball, like so many celestial bodies lining up for an eclipse. I felt like — I knew — I could hit any golf shot I wanted.
When we traveled to play golf that weekend, the wind was blowing thirty, the course was long and tight, and the misses were penal. It was a tough day of golf. But the sensation had kept returning to me through the week, and it was with me on the course. I was hitting my windows, flighting it down, carving shots through the wind — riding it, holding it up against it, or remembering the words of a pro: “If you hit it good enough, the wind doesn’t touch it.” I played some of my best golf of the year.
That next week, I met with my university chaplain, my touchpoint for questions about meditation, and told him about my experience meditating. I asked him how I could practice that feeling specifically in meditation and continue bringing the sensation to the golf course. If I could hold onto this feeling, I told him, it would change everything for me.
He told me immediately that the feeling I was describing was transient, that trying to chase it would do more harm than good, and that I should return to simple breath practice. When I pressed, he told me that yogis have long documented cases of supernatural abilities that can sometimes arise from meditative concentration — to read minds, or to predict future events, or to be in multiple places at once or fly around. But these powers can distract from the true insights of meditation, and getting wrapped up in them can do far more harm than good. Best to just continue my practice without golf in mind, and whatever magic came up would be a nice bonus.
I was raised agnostic, stumbling sometimes into hardline atheism at those times in a young man’s teens when he feels especially confident, edgy, lost, or Caulfieldian. I studied hard in school for the concrete answers it gave me, and I assumed the world was, at some point of sufficient knowledge mass, a well-ordered web of propositional facts, each the result of intelligible, replicable, causal results. My attainment, I believed, would be the grasp of more facts and the command of greater logical space. I had developed a healthy dose of skepticism and a serious distrust of anything supernatural or “magic.”
I told my chaplain that hitting good golf shots didn’t seem very magical at all. Flying around or duplicating myself would require a total rewrite of modern science. I watch people hit good golf shots every day. We understand the physics and the biomechanics. Hitting golf balls seemed extraordinarily human.
He asked, then, how I went about hitting a good golf shot. I started trying to explain in terms of measurable quantities, launch and environmental conditions, the science I knew. But I knew how complicated golf can be, how impossible it can seem when broken down into its physical parts, tenths of degrees and millimeters of precision. I told him that it’s complicated, physically, but sometimes you can produce a very specific set of launch conditions when you get some feelings to line up right. There’s a moment when you see the target, feel the clubhead, and execute a swing that aligns very precisely with what the shot requires of you. My chaplain replied that he didn’t know any meditation teacher who would understand that ability as anything other than magic.
Connor Belcastro is a recent graduate of Princeton University, where he majored in philosophy while playing on the men’s golf team. He is writing occasional pieces this year for No Laying Up while he pursues a professional career.
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