IN THE SIXTH CHAPTER of David Cook’s sequel to his beloved Golf’s Sacred Journey: Seven Days at the Links of Utopia, the young Luke Chisholm is again getting schooled by his mentor, Johnny. This time, they’re setting out for a ride.
“You good with a horse?” Johnny asks Luke.
Not so quick to blow his trumpet these days, Luke replies, “I love to ride but have a lot to learn.”
“Confidence is king with a horse,” Johnny tells him, then offers a little crossover advice for the young romantic: “It seems to help on a date as well.”
Cook’s own confidence is growing in delivering a well-told story that conveys a lot of what he has learned through the years as a both a learner and a mentor. The original Golf’s Sacred Journey has now sold more than 400,000 copies, and the feature film that played in theaters in late 2011 got many people asking, “Did he make the putt?” That question was prompted by the open ending to that first story and likely will lead many to read the follow-up.
For both books, Cook owes a lot to a little town in the hills outside of San Antonio. That’s right, Utopia is a real place—the legitimate location for the filming of Seven Days in Utopia and the outpost for a lot of Cook’s work these days. He conducts retreats here, incorporating many of the locations from the movie: the café, the inn, the cemetery, and the golf course. But most of all, what Cook does here is dream. If it were a verb, a better description of Cook’s work is that he visions. He sees big pictures and goes after them. Then he turns them over to others.
The most famous of Cook’s big ideas is SFT. The letters stand for See it – Feel it – Trust it, and they comprise the preshot routine that he hopes will produce masterpieces—golfing masterpieces, that is. More than anything, SFT is designed to infuse a measure of confidence into the competitive crucible that can quickly melt a golfer’s easy instincts.
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