The Fairway Less Traveled

By John Skow

Think of him as Dan Quayle with brains and a degree in psychiatry. Call him God's golfer. It's hard not to roll your eyes when M. Scott Peck, M.D., personal-enrichment guru to the nation's conflicted upper middle class, author of The Road Less Traveled, a self-help manual whose sales have placed it on the New York Times best-seller list for the past 566 weeks, announces that he is sponsoring a $10,000-a-foursome golf tournament to promote "spirituality, golf and the fine art of business management." Business biggies will tee off this weekend at Peck's home course in Bodega Bay, California, hoping to enhance both market share and their own spiritual levels by developing a healing sense of community.

Or so says Peck, an addicted and "struggling" golfer, who admits that his sport is "seemingly silly" but feels that its "blend of agony and ecstasy, work and play, caution and risk, painful serious learning and exuberant relaxation" offers something like an 18-hole way to enlightenment. Peck doesn't exactly say that if Jesus were to return to earth, he would have a 3 handicap, but wisdom and baloney might be added to his list just after agony and ecstasy. Both qualities are evident in his writings and his personality, though a surprising range of critics clearly feel that what predominates is wisdom, or at least solidly grounded common sense. And if you aren't willing to risk a little fatuity, you probably aren't going to sell 5 million copies of a self-help book.

Peck wrote his The Road Less Traveled in 1978, and it is still racking up some $300,000 a year in royalties. It is an earnest and generally inoffensive advice book that begins with the admission that "life is difficult" and stipulates immediately that "without discipline we can solve nothing." Its astonishing appeal may not be that people actually read it and are elevated. Rather, it appears, they buy it to give to irritating friends. Making a present of The Road Less Traveled has become a socially acceptable way of saying, "Estelle, your insulation is beginning to char." Everyone knows people with dodgy insulation, and each of these flakes, it seems, knows and donates copies of Peck's book to a dozen other loosely wrapped souls, chain letter-fashion.

The author, who has written several other self-help best sellers, now says that Road bores him, "but that's where the money is." Mildly cynical wisecracks of this kind seem merely to assure believers that Peck is a regular guy, as do revelations that he smokes, and drinks fairly heavily. At 58 he is trying to scale back his incessant speaking engagements to about 25 a year, at $15,000 apiece. But the guru business, like the Mafia, is hard to retire from. He and his wife Lily generally suffer his adulators tolerantly, but they have been heard to refer to persistent hem-of-garment touchers as "leeches."

Waves of adoration can be delusive, and in 1983 this amiable man seriously considered a presidential run. Going gaga over the spiritual qualities of golf must be regarded as sanity, relatively speaking. And so Peck, serene in his house overlooking the sixth green at Bodega Bay, contemplates his First Annual FCE Cutting-Edge Corporation Win/Win Golf Classic. Proceeds will go to his Foundation for Community Encouragement, formed to apply his spiritual and psychological nostrums to group amity. The FCE's central notion, which Peck sees as revolutionary and which he has outlined in a book called The Distant Drum, seems to be that if people understood each other better, they would + behave better. But golf . . .? "I read that there was a sect of Buddhism in Japan that owned four golf courses, and their temple was the 19th hole. I believe that the skills necessary for playing golf were the same as for enlightenment." Among points of enlightenment to be considered, a prospectus indicates, will be the conceding of putts. Other topics, an observer reflects, might include: 1) Do plaid pants cause Republicanism? 2) Are hooks and slices, in extreme cases, evidence of demonic possession (a condition in which Peck believes)? 3) Are large corporations really life-forms, not under the control of human managers? Do they have moral values? Do they get depressed, and is there some way in which corporations (as distinct from managers) could be taught to play golf?

Clearly Peck is on to something, though the first thrown or broken seven iron by the first exec who foams at the mouth and shrieks curses may persuade him to revise the great initial perception of The Road Less Traveled. Life is difficult? Nah. Life is easy. Self-help books are easy. Golf -- now, golf is difficult.

With reporting by Patrick E. Cole/Los Angeles