Teed Off

Teed Off

Greetings Golfers,

Last week, people loved hearing Mike Harmon talk about building and running a golf club. One guy even said it was my best blog. Ouch.

But there are wise people whose thoughts about golf should be shared. So I’m doing it again. However, this writer - Ed Curtain - I’ve never met, but we’ve corresponded over the years … and he sent me this a few days ago. I love how he thinks … and I think you will too.

Here goes:

TEED OFF WHILE RELAXING

Sports only matter because they don’t. And because they don’t – are forms of play meant, most importantly, to be fun – they change depending on whether one is playing them or watching them being played. While both participants and observers can take the playing seriously, in today’s world the spectators, who vastly outnumber the players, tend toward fanatical seriousness. And the television corporations that present sporting events have become fanatical techno-scientific numbers crunchers, mathematizing every aspect of all the playful contests.

My son’s two dogs are growling and wrestling in the next room, jumping from couch to floor to couch, nipping and pinning each other in a joyful game of pure play. They are doing what humans do when they allow themselves to play for fun, even as it looks and sounds as serious as do the dogs to those who never met the dog in themselves. Playing sports is fun and irrational; it’s all dogs’ play, self-limited in time and place and leading nowhere. It is meaningless in its meaningful ways, especially when it isn’t fun.

Nevertheless, like many people and like my son’s dogs, Steve and Rex, I love sports and have spent a lifetime playing and following them. If you wish to call me shallow, that’s okay with me. I am shallow – some of the time. Which is good and suggests its opposite – depth at other times.

There are times to shoot hoops and times to jump through hoops, trying to grasp the meaning of life and the truths behind political and economic life. There is a time for everything under heaven, as some wag once said.

“It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible…. ” said Oscar Wilde, a witty Irishman.

I was reminded of this a while ago when I was watching a few minutes of the Ryder Cup golf tournament on television (sports being the only thing I watch on TV), when on the left side of the screen a blood pressure measuring gadget appeared.

Was it real? Surely I saw it; it was visible, but at first it seemed mysterious. I realize that much of what appears on the TV screen is only a screen image and not a reflection of the world beyond the screen, but I briefly wondered if I were hallucinating? But no, for the announcer chimed in that as the American golfer Justin Thomas was about to tee off, we were going to see his blood pressure monitored on the device. Which we did. It went up a slight bit and down again, not much variation, as those gadgets tend to do when attached to thirty-two-year-old athletes doing nothing more strenuous than swinging a stick. But the fact that this was being done startled me, although it should not have.

I was well aware that the socialization of technological medicine was well underway, but this bit of morbid, medicalized nonsense in the midst of a sporting event that was supposed to be a fun competition between a European and American team was a hypochondriac’s fantasy. I wondered if I kept watching would they soon be offering the sound of Rory McIlroy’s heartbeat as he stood over a putt or another golfer’s temperature fluctuations as he sweated out the flight of his ball over a water hazard. Was the whole world becoming a hospital?

It was, of course, an absurdity piled on absurdity. For only one devoid of any sense of humor would fail to realize the comical nature of men hitting little white balls down long grassy fields over and over again to try to get them into a hole in the ground. To try do this in less than seventy or so strikes on the ball and to celebrate it if they can. You might think the ball would be celebrating being struck less, not the ball’s abuser.

As the announcer spoke in his anticipatory hushed voice appropriate for a funeral home, church, or the hospital bedside of a dying person, I assumed Thomas was hooked up with a blood pressure gadget; that he was a willing participant in this further degradation of a sport that he seems to love and that has made him very wealthy.

But then I realized that the socialization of technological medicine was fully out of control and was about to make another leap into cultural life, a life where health has become an induced obsession where people and machines are becoming indistinguishable and one’s health is determined by numbers.

The analytics that dominate the world of sports, the posting of numbers for everything from the speed a ball leaves a baseball bat, a tennis ball a racket, and in golf the speed, height, curve, apex, carry, and launch angle when a ball is driven – all these are part of a larger mathematization and medicalization of society at large.

The rising and falling blood pressure numbers came and went and the golf tournament proceeded. Thomas survived his barely elevated blood pressure and walked after his little white ball. I turned off the television and went outside to find some wild beast to wrestle for fun.

As the etymology of the word sport attests (from old French, desporter to divert, literally “to carry away”), sports are a diversion from something. Let’s call it “real life,” the place from where, as Ernest Hemingway so aptly put it in the title to his short story, “The Winner Takes Nothing.” Trophies are handed out after golf tournaments and at post-season dinners, but as the American philosopher William James said, “The skull will grin in at the banquet.”

Although sports can inspire one to think deeply, for most people, athletes and spectators alike, sports are a diversion from existential matters involving relationships, fears, politics, deep feelings, wars, life’s meaning, love and loss, death, etc. While surely fun, entertaining, and lucrative for professionals, sports are also absurd since they involve movements through time and space toward unnecessary and fictitious goals where someone wins (lives) and someone losses (dies) in a game of unreality. In sports, we play to overcome artificial and superfluous obstacles for fun and money – and for deeper reasons we may not realize.

To play for fun and to wonder about the meaning of fun are a lot of fun. 

How good was that? I knew you’d like it. Next week, I’m sending out a blog on Weds about the Holiday Passes. And then on Friday, I’m sending out my usual type of blog written by me … get ready!

Cheers!

Tom Abts
GM/Head PGA Professional
tabts@deerrungolf.com