The Idea Blog

I have played a good bit lately, all special occasions (to me, at least) and many of them offering me a chance to reflect on the game and why I play it, usually after the round over a pint.

For me golf is inherently social. It encompasses so much of the way I am: slightly competitive, but I’m not out to beat your brains in; expansive as the big outdoors, but restricted by boundaries; mechanical, yet (my game, at least, is) based on “touch” or “feel.” I love the rules (another boundary), but I love more that the rules are there for me to enforce on myself.

At least for me, golf is like business. Golf is like my personal life. Which means, I suppose, golf is like life … in almost every way. You can get me talking about this, but you’ll need to pour a pint. In the meantime, consider the following two articles I’ve come across in my weekend reading.

First, “My Shot” from Arnold Palmer in the June Golf Digest. “The King” isn’t a good interview usually, and he’s really not a very good spokesperson or speaker, but with good questions and some editing, I’m sure, you can get at some of what makes him so special a person. Here are two highlights from the interview in Golf Digest (which you can find online here):

1. “I sure wish the decorum around our game was better. If we just dressed a little neater, I’d be happy. There’s a trend in some circles to not care at all - wear your hat backward, don’t tuck your shirt in, don’t iron anything. That isn’t style, it’s just not caring.”

2. “My whole career, I never missed a tee time. Not once, which I suppose is saying a lot for a career that’s spanned 60 years and thousands of rounds of golf. Now, for many years I’ve had a recurring dream that I miss my tee time. In the dream there’s no consequence because I wake up abruptly. You can’t imagine the relief, realizing that it was just a dream. Now that I’m retired, I’m hoping to hell that dream will go away.”

Next, in SI, a wonderful surprise from Michael Bamberger. He interviews a guy named Thomas Hearn, who lived in New York and retired in south Florida before recently passing at age 82.
“He was an insurance man and a duffer, and John Updike would have put him in his novels had he ever known him. Tom Hearn spent a day when his days were numbered assessing how golf fit into the last 66 years of his life, the freckled early ones and the speckled ones at the close.”

I won’t pull another quote from this piece. Instead, just go read it. It’s here.

Yes, I play a lot of golf. No, I’m not embarrassed about it. No, golf is not my life. But, yes, it guides much of what I do, of who I am. And so far, it’s been a very good guide.