Golf:

About the Book

When learning Thomsen was writing Golf: Find Center: Enter the Circle, many had emphasized the diversity of golf due to its natural setting, and golf’s natural setting was open to amateurs, professionals, and all ages as well. Thomsen was quick to agree, “Golf can serve the needs of many. It’s my job to open up to more and increase the standards within the art form —golf.” Some have asked, “Who do you think will read it, Jack?” “Few” came the reply. “Golfers mainly—and only the most obsessive of those. There’s no popular market for this book. Materialism is too much in demand, and serving the spirit has become lost.” That brief exchange reveals an unvarnished truth: golf is essentially caught in a materialistic grasp as an overview of the game, and yet as an art form, independent players function in it. The artist Vincent van Gogh had sold few of his paintings. Someone else had done that. Is the treasure the money or the art? Golf: Find Center: Enter the Circle, a genesis from a personal journal’s beginning, has been imbued with a Joycean stream of consciousness that, in its intuitiveness, is likely to engage none but the determined reader. By way of contrast, however, the book’s title rightly distills Thomsen’s thesis. Golf, he asserts, can be a spiritual practice when done as an expression of the golfer’s essential self and if engaged in it for the sheer love of golf’s diversity, its wholeness, bringing on its transcendental nature. Accept Thomsen’s invitation, turn your attention inward, tap into the answers that are there, feel the resultant centering, the balance, and project that centering—enter the circle. “A liberated person possesses perfect senses and with perfect senses only can one serve the sense proprietor,” says the Bhagavad Gita.

About the Author

Jack Thomsen has followed his bliss by playing, teaching, and most especially—learning from golf through forty-seven years as a PGA professional. To follow one’s bliss—advice popularized through Bill Moyers’ 1987 Power of Myth interviews of anthropologist Joseph Campbell—is to embark upon a journey of self-discovery that is evolutionary in its championing of things becoming (as opposed to things already become). This evolutionary dimension makes the adventure “heroic” in that it affords on the opportunity to claim dimensions previously unacknowledged, to the potential benefit of both self and society. Journeying through golf—following his bliss—has led Thomsen to varied impulses of inventiveness expressed through the design of teaching aids and enhancements for ranges and courses, as well as through the art of the essay and other creative activities, including portraiture and sculpture. Thomsen-designed golf aids/enhancements include a mobile Wedge Course, used in teaching the short game, the internationally popular Pyramid Tray and Stacker, utilized by practice facilities, and the Crooked Lies, which replicates for off-course practice the undulating topography of golf courses. His essays—many included in Golf: Find the Center: Enter the Circle—have appeared in West Coast Golfer and in trade show publications, notably those of the New England: a publication of Back 9 Media LLC. A frequent guest on radio talk shows dedicated to golf, most recently Tee It Up, Thomsen lives in Pleasant Prairie (WI), where for thirty-seven years he has operated a golf learning center.