I first became aware of author Steven Pressfield because of his kick-you-in-the-face book on writing, The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles. It’s concise, stellar, and brutal. If you crave creative fulfillment, you need this book.

I was consequently delightfully surprised to learn that he wrote The Legend of Bagger Vance: A Novel of Golf and the Game of Life. And while I think I saw the movie, I can’t remember if I finished it. I picked up Legend about a month ago from a local used bookstore. I read it this past weekend. I’ve read a few other books on the “mystic” qualities of golf and life, but they all pale in comparison to what Pressfield did in Bagger. And while I plan to watch the movie again, I’m pretty sure the screen adaptation doesn’t live up to where the book took me. To wit, this passage, especially pointed for the smitten, frustrated golfer:

“The search for the Authentic Swing is a parallel to the search for the Self. We as golfers pursue that elusive essence our entire lives. What hooks us about the game is that it gives us glimpses. Glimpses of our Authentic Swing, like a mystic being granted a vision of the face of God. All we need is to experience it once – one mid-iron screaming like a bullet toward the flag, one driver flushed down the middle – and we’re enslaved forever. We feel with absolute certainty that if we could only swing like that all the time, we would be our best selves, our true selves, our Authentic Selves. That’s why we lionize men like Hagen and Jones and treat them like gods. They are gods in that sense, the sense that they have found their Authentic Selves, at least within the realm of golf.”