The Idea Blog

Charles McGrath has a wonderful piece on Phil Mickelson in the NY Times special magazine, “Play,” this weekend. It’s here if you have a Times Select account, or if you’ll go to the regular site, search for it beginning on Sunday.

Mickelson, of course, is known as “Phil the Thrill” for some of his wilder shotmaking, especially the tragic events he perpetrated on himself and his fans last year at Winged Foot’s U.S. Open. I won’t recount that series, though McGrath does it eloquently and comprehensively in his first several paragraphs.

Instead, I wanted to highlight one passage McGrath uses to summarize a darker side of the game I love and not only its hold on me, but I think on all of us:

“There is something about golf that brings out the inner dolt, at once beating you down and also cruelly lifting you up, making you believe, against all evidence to the contrary, that you can do what you cannot. Every now and then, you pull off the impossible shot — the one that ricochets off the equipment shed just as you planned, or that carries the parking lot and ducks under the power line before skipping onto the green — and the blissful feeling that results is what keeps us coming back to the golf course. But failure, far more common, occasions crippling pangs of disgust and self-loathing: How could I be so stupid?”

There’s nothing more humbling than meeting anew our “inner dolt.” Golf gives us the opportunity, but the lesson, believes me, carries over.