When I was 7, my father gave me a cut-down 7-iron and showed me how to wrap my hands around the hard leather grip and interlock the little finger of my right hand with the index finger of my left. I played that way for years, until in high school I decided that I would rather overlap them.

More than 60 years later, that remains most of the formal instruction I have received.

There was one week in 1997 when Karen and I attended a golf academy at a Las Vegas resort, though I remember less about what they taught than I do the pro telling me I was "over-swinging."

As if I didn't know that.

I have always been an autodidact, a flattering way of saying I would rather make my own mistakes than follow someone else's instructions. My swing is much shorter than it used to be--I slipped on the ice during the pandemic, broke my arm, and did not discover the break until six months later--but still imagine it is ungainly and unsightly, more like falling out of a hammock than an athletic move.

Still, I look right at impact and can more or less repeat it. Golf permits a reasonably athletic person to construct a complicated system of compensations and mistake those compensations for fundamentals.

I once carried a plus-handicap, and these days I play to a 3 index. Golf is not unlike cocaine in that its users tend to believe they should either do more of it or quit forever. My position is that it is not adversely affecting my quality of life yet.

Still, I have been thinking about taking lessons. Not because I have forgotten how to play, though there are afternoons when the evidence points that way. Nor do I imagine that some patient professional will uncover a previously undetected reservoir of swing speed.

What interests me is whether I can still improve--or whether I can still be taught.

Beginners have little to protect. They arrive prepared to receive instruction. Someone who is accomplished arrives with an identity, preferences, theories, scars, crutches and workarounds. Their bad habits may have become load-bearing.

My golf swing is an autobiography written in muscle memory: my father's interlocking grip, my decision to abandon it, Jack Nicklaus' "Golf My Way," Ben Hogan's "Five Lessons," magazine articles I've read, good players I've watched, and the innumerable adjustments I've made on ranges. It contains the flexibility I once had, the strength I still possess, and negotiations I have made with an inevitably changing body.

Submitting to a lesson now would be to let someone take a red pencil to that autobiography.

Vanity is involved. I would like to hit the ball farther and straighter and discover that some portion of the distance I have surrendered can be recovered through improved technique. There is also curiosity. I want to know what a competent teacher would see before I explain what I think is wrong.

We are encouraged to keep learning as we age, though the encouragement is generally offered in the abstract. Learn a language. Take up painting. Play an instrument. Such advice carries the medicinal tone of a public-service announcement, as though learning French might be another form of fiber. We are assured that mental and physical challenges are good for us, but less is said about the embarrassment involved in becoming a student again.

It may be easier to learn something new than to seek instruction in something you do well. A novice expects to look foolish. Someone accustomed to being regarded as an expert, or at least as unusually competent, has farther to fall. To ask for help is to admit that repetition may ingrain an error as efficiently as it develops a skill.

The autodidact has spent his life trusting his ability to figure things out. Self-instruction becomes becomes evidence of independence and perhaps intelligence. A teacher is intruding upon a private arrangement between the student and the world.

I have strong opinions about equipment, ball flight, course management, and the proper height at which to tee a driver. I know enough about the golf swing to misunderstand it in sophisticated ways. The professional may show me numbers that contradict what I felt or, worse, show me the video. Somewhere between what I imagine I do and what the camera records will be the person I have become.

A week ago, we saw the Grandma Moses exhibition at Crystal Bridges. She began painting seriously in her late 70s, after arthritis made embroidery difficult, but had been making things all her life. She did not become someone new so much as discover another method of remaining herself.

Age is a shoulder that no longer turns as far, a stiff back, and a pair of tricky knees. I am not going to recover the player I was 30 years ago. The object is not to build the theoretically perfect swing but to discover the best swing this body can repeat.

A good instructor would therefore need to be less an architect than a preservationist, careful about removing anything that might be holding up the roof, and find a way to use the speed that remains without demanding impossible flexibility. The result may not be beautiful, but beauty has never appeared on a scorecard.

When I was younger, every improvement suggested the player I might become, and every setback threatened that possibility. A lesson need not be a referendum on talent or character. It can simply be a test of whether a lifelong autodidact can be told to try something without first deciding whether he agrees with it.

It would be pleasing if the instructor found some small alteration that gave me 10 more yards. But the better outcome might be standing on a practice tee, listening to somebody who knows more than I do and attempting, without argument, to do what I am told.

And if the teacher studies my hands and suggests that I interlock my fingers, I suppose I will have to admit my father was right all along.

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A lifelong golfer wonders whether he can still be taught