Instead of inspiring people to greater speed, I want everyone the table passes to start going slower, thinking harder, laughing louder. Instead of people looking at me and thinking "What a mad man," I want to be so totally mad that without meaning to they start acting strange themselves. If people are looking at the table and wondering, "What does he do when it rains?" I clearly haven''t reached critical speed yet. So I''m winding up the throttle more. I want people merely to hear the table coming and start shaking hands and giving fantastic introductions. I want people just to see the table from afar and start scribbling poetry on scraps of guttered paper. And by the time the table arrives, I want there to be so much raw energy that the table is hardly noticed at all.

Not long into the first round, Denise and her friends saw Sarah''s true colors. "She was a Type-A, hyper-competitive, bad-tempered control freak," Denise recalls. Denise and her friends were enjoying the blustery, seaside golf. But Sarah wasn''t hitting the ball very well. One of the women, an 8-handicapper named Mary, was trying to be nice to Sarah, helping her with club selection and a few tips. But Sarah got more and more frustrated with every ball she hit. She began throwing clubs, kicking the turf, and basically having a temper tantrum. When Mary tried to help her again, she replied, "No thanks! I''m tired of your little golf stories and cliches. Get away from me!" (As Mary says now, "The word ''fore'' never left my lips again when she was in front of me.") The next day, after a game of high-low, which she clearly did not win, Sarah demanded to check Mary''s addition. It went downhill from there. By the fourth evening, the other women could barely stand Sarah''s company. Denise and Sarah had dinner themselves that night, and Sarah took the opportunity to unburden herself about the aspects of Denise''s personality that bothered her. Denise got up and left the table, mid-meal, and went to one of their group''s rooms to fume. Unfortunately, Sarah and Denise were sharing a room, so she had to go back to it eventually. "Sarah pretended to be asleep so we didn''t have to talk," Denise says. "Which was fine by me. We made it through the weekend, did not sit together on the flight home, said goodbye at Kennedy and I''ve never spoken to her again."

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