Now that my weekends are often spoken for, I watch a lot less golf on TV than I used to.
Is it better? It must be, though a small (no, make that microscopic, my dear) and wistful place in my heart sighs a sigh of longing.
Lincoln Park golf course, San Francisco, a nice place to play.
I played golf as a teen, with my father and older brother, with a few clubs from Goodwill and nary a greens fee. We just played a few holes during off times, never held up others, always replaced our divots.
Every form of competition was gold to me in those days. Baseball, basketball, football, hockey, tennis, Monopoly-- we played it. I never was good at golf, but I loved to compete.
My brother continued on with it and is a low handicapper with a yen hone his iron play mid-week, to the dismay of his wife.
The residue of my relationship with golf is an appreciation of the game on TV. To an outsider, the experience is worse than maddening: what could be the appeal of such repetitive, boring activity?
And to an extrovert that has to be chattering all the time, watching someone quietly watch a game where spectators must be quiet while the players silently go about their business in the slowest of fashions-- well, it must be torture.
But this is meditation in pure form, and beauty. It is the turning off of the mind, to enter into a world of deep green and sky blue, mediated by a sphere of white. So very Zen.
The fact that there is competition makes it all the better, and a delicious paradox. It's not just meditation for the sake of giving up all desires. Golf is desire. So you are totally quiet and contemplative, and yet totally full of adrenaline and expectation.
It's a big, silly, metaphysical waste of time is what it is.
Ah, well.
And now, the best player of all time, who always made the game a pleasure to watch, has been exposed as something similar to most famous athletes and politicians. We thought he was perfect because he played as meticulously close to perfect as he could. But we know, as the Greeks knew, that those who soar high always find themselves smashed to the ground.
It isn't a surprise to me, in other words.
In fact, I wrote an op-ed about it in 1997-- how it was going to be very difficult for him to remain the paragon of the American ethos we all wanted him to be after becoming the first African-American and the youngest to win the Masters, that prestigious event held at a segregated country club.
I've currently submitted another op-ed and if it gets accepted, I'll let you know.
In the meantime, I will spend time with my beloved. Because golf is not important.
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Posted by: Miniature Golf New Jersey | January 22, 2010 at 09:43 AM