When he was answering his phone, I held up my pocket camera to see what my mouth looked like.
It felt like it had a balloon stretched across it. Then there was the Emmett Kelly nose, except it was gray and feeding me NO2.
But I wasn’t prepared for the pathetic absurdity, the wires sprouting from my head like wires from an old-time radio, and the glowing red of the hole in my molar.
It had a diseased nerve root, which was getting Roto-Rootered with the tiny files you see in the second and third pictures.
When the canal was as clean as the inside of a new clarinet, the doctor reached for the flexible toothpick-like things you see in the last picture.
I asked him what they were made of (though it’s hard to ask questions when your vocal apparatus is under elastic quarantine) and was delighted to hear that the answer is gutta percha.
The doctor was astounded.
In his two-decade career, almost none of his patients had ever asked him that question, and those who did received the answer with a blank look that said, ‘Never mind, let’s get this over with.’
But being a golfer who had just written an article about the history of the golf ball (a superficial survey of only the last 150 years or so) I knew that gutta percha–the sap of a Malaysian tree–is the substance that made golf a people’s game.
Before that moment in the late 19th Century, golf balls were handsewn from leather pouches stuffed with feathers. Very expensive to make, and not especially durable. A game for the rich.
Then the solid gutta percha ball was introduced.
It could be mass produced at low cost. Gutta percha was plentiful and all the rage. Suddenly, any Scotsman on his way home from work could afford to buy balls and treat himself to a round on the linksland.
In America, golf would remain a game for the rich for quite some time. If, like me and most other golfers, you’ve never been invited to play Pine Valley, you know that some things never change.
But gutta percha and the more advanced balls that followed it made golf a game not just for stars like Jackie Gleason but for his bus-driving, moon-faced alter ego, Ralph Kramden.
As I left the endodontist’s chair that day, I felt sure that having a mouth full of gutta percha would take strokes off my game.
I was wrong about that. But I think it’s made me a more flexible person. And when golf wags shout, "Be the ball!" I smile, because after a certain age most of us already are, but not all of us know it.