A pioneer for the Pueblo, that is.
Is Notah Begay III not the victory of his mother's tribes, the San Felipe and Isleta? After all, it was in these Pueblo cultures that he spent much of his childhood, on 3,000-person reservations where he learned to pray toward the sun in the San Felipe tradition and respect the world he was given -- a form of spirituality that helps him become "one with the moment," a term he has used to describe times when his golf game is really on.
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| Begay's mother raised Clint, Notah (top), Carol and Mary in the San Felipe traditions. The youngest girl is Notah's niece Michaela. |
In that state, the ball is not an object trying to negotiate a hostile set of circumstances, and the club is not a weapon against danger. They are connected to their natural surroundings and work together -- along with the energies of other humans.
"Probably the easiest way to understand it is that it's a small world," Begay says. "We are continually reminded of that when we run into somebody who knows somebody who knows somebody who is close to you. We're all tied to each other, and we're all dependent on the earth and its resources -- the sunlight, the water -- for survival."
Says his mother, Laura Ansera, "We always tell him that he's not out there alone, that the spirits are with him."
The message is encoded in the boy's bones. At age 14, after watching some Pueblo runners, he started placing red clay under his eyes before golf tournaments, as a sign of respect for the challenge ahead. He remembers that it "scared the daylights" out of one early competitor, who thought it was war paint and squandered a four-stroke lead when they were paired up in the final round of a juniors tournament.
Begay kept dabbing his cheeks with the clay right through his college years at Stanford, telling the ignorant that it was for the sun. He stopped only when he turned pro in 1995, tired of worrying that he was perpetuating a hostile Indian stereotype. "Last time I checked, I hadn't killed anybody on a golf course," he says now with a wistful grin.
Billy Mills, the Lakota Indian and future Olympic champion runner, once quit a race after someone in the crowd yelled, "Go get 'em, chief!" That is not the style of Begay, who has learned to carry his heritage with grace in the face of slights. If a spectator looks at him funny because of copper skin, Begay is apt to smile and move on.
The Navajos were nomads who often lived far from each other -- even today, their homes are spread across their large reservations like dropped marbles. But the Pueblos know about negotiating tight spaces, as a people who for centuries have lived wall-to-wall in small communities along the Rio Grande river valley where they farmed.
The San Felipe reservation was compact enough that its residents could play an ancient game called Shinney that used the entire village. The joy on Notah's face two decades ago is what his mother most remembers as Notah, using a carved wooden stick not unlike a golf club, pushed a leather-bound ball of seeds the size of a hockey puck around the village with older men and other boys.
The game would only end when one side pushed the ball beyond the village boundary on the other team's side, or if the hand-sewn sack of seeds would burst.
"They would then go plant the seeds for the next season," Ansera says.
In other words, don't tell the Pueblos you can't control what a ball does.
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Outside the Lines
Notah Begay