Las Vegas — BLAME my parents.
Dad was always working, so it fell to Mom to teach me one of the most important male rituals, and to her lasting guilt she did it backward: Mom, who was left-handed, innocently showed her right-handed son how to swing a baseball bat as a lefty. That meant that when I finally took up golf eight years ago, I would swing left-handed -- and would be made to feel odd, strange and weird.
Imagine, then, the feeling of salvation I experienced on a hellishly hot morning recently when I walked onto the lush driving range of a Las Vegas golf course and saw a line of three-dozen fellow outcasts -- lefty golfers! -- taking their practice swings. There was only one righty in sight, and a lefty or two was good-naturedly razzing him. It reminded me of a moment in "Field of Dreams" when the ghost of Shoeless Joe Jackson, banned from baseball for gambling, is resurrected 70 years later and asks, "Is this heaven?"
For the next four days, I was no longer a member of a taunted minority. I was one of 110 people playing in the 71st annual tournament of the National Assn. of Left-Handed Golfers. You heard me. This is America, where we cherish the right to mobilize in the face of the tiniest of social slights.
The NALG, which claims 2,500 members, exists because of this statistical conundrum: Although left-handed people comprise anywhere from 10% to 15% of the U.S. population, left-handed golfers count for only 5% to 7% of the 25 million Americans who golf. (By contrast, more than 40% of nonpitching major league baseball players bat left or switch-hit.)
If you're a lefty golfer, you must tolerate being advised by some witty right-hander that "you're standing on the wrong side of the ball." The right-handers you play with will park their carts in a manner that impairs your field of vision. You'll have less access to golf clubs -- a problem that, as late as the 1970s, encouraged many left-handed novices to give up and learn to golf right-handed. When you read instructional materials you will have to convert "right" to "left" and vice versa -- a major headache when you're trying to coordinate your right hip and left foot. If you are golfing in a quartet with three right-handers, you'll watch wistfully as they try out a new driver one of them has bought.
All of these annoyances disappeared during the NALG tournament, held at the Paiute Golf Resort, which rises out of the desert 20 miles north of the Vegas Strip. We were the dominant culture.
