At the First Annual Deepak Chopra/ World Business Academy/Golf In the Kingdom Invitational

	Ron Tarrson was one of 50 golfers seeking success through enlightenment. Rich Frishman/SI

By Austin Murphy

The idea, pretty much, was that I would attend this kooky-sounding, three-day seminar, meet a wide range of well-meaning, highly earnest people, drink their Scotch and then make fun of them. The first annual Deepak Chopra/World Business Academy/Golf in the Kingdom Invitational, held this summer, was described as "your invitation to explore the linkage between mind and body in golf, in business and in life." With its mystical-spiritual bent, with Chopra riffing on "finding the now" and "letting the game play you," there would be New Age jargon to send up, and touchy-feely moments at which to roll one's eyes. Plus, it would take place at the Ojai (Calif.) Valley Inn & Spa, where golfers partial to guacamole could treat themselves to something called the Avocado-Oat Body Treatment. (The Pumpkin-Melon Scrub, alas, would not be available until the fall.) It was an easy mark, is what it was. But a funny thing happened on the way to my laptop. I got my mind opened. I hit golf shots I'd only dreamed of hitting.

Sure, it was cool to brush up against celebrity, whether it was discussing course design and poetry with Robert Trent Jones Jr. or eating barbecue with Thomas (Hollywood) Henderson, the former All-Pro linebacker and recovering drug addict who told me, roughly one minute after we'd met, "Golf is hard, but so is life, and so is getting off crack." Hollywood doesn't do small talk.

I would share an intimate moment with Courteney Cox, who happened to be at the Inn the same weekend. (I smiled at her; she, in turn, did not call security.) And I would be introduced to Malcolm McDowell, who was gone before I had a chance to tell him how much I enjoyed his work in Caligula.

I would bond briefly with McDowell's friend, Michael Murphy, the alter ego of Shivas Irons, the gonzo golfing philosopher animating the pages of Murphy's wildly popular 1972 novel, Golf in the Kingdom. He's also the cofounder of the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, Calif. "I think they have seminars there on tantric sex," my wife would later observe. "Did you get his card?"

THE ROUNDTABLE

The participants in this afternoon's round-table discussion in the Shangri-la Pavilion are seated at a long, rectangular table. Oh, well. I am at a smaller table with Claudine, a Deepak disciple, and a fellow writer, Joe Queenan. All of us had begun the day with a yoga session in the spa's Mind & Body Studio. Says Queenan, "I don't trust any sport where you don't keep score."

"And that," rejoins serene Claudine, "is why you need yoga."

I would like to point out, for the record, that it is only after Jones reads to us from his golf poetry that a pair of older "explorers," as we are called, nod off at their tables. (It is rather warm in the pavilion.) Later, another elderly gentleman shares this lament, "I used to envision myself driving a nail through the ball, but I've lost that capacity." I make a mental note to introduce him to the urologist I'd met in yoga.