‘Twas in all the papers, or so folks told me. My shrug, my nonchalance, my soft sigh. All of it contrasted with their enthusiasm and their deep interest, so eyebrows were raised.
“Don’t care?” they asked.
Meh, said my body language. Mind you, there is no joy when things that do not directly impact me seemingly fail. There is no satisfaction gained at others’ lament. Oh, when there is confirmation of a firm belief – that is, money corrupts, and greed is nauseating – deep inside of me there is warmth and an even firmer grip on my beliefs.
So LIV Golf could be evaporating and rich golfers are asking for pathways?
So the PGA Tour is still embracing its change of stripes to become less inclusive and more extravagant, less charitable and more corporate?
It’s a set of circumstances that is generating much discussion, yes, but it hardly tickles my interest. That’s because my conviction remains steadfast – the professional tours aren’t golf; they entertain, yes, but they don’t drive the game. They do not play golf like us. They do not enjoy golf like us. Golf revolves not around rich, pampered professionals; it thrives because of us.
The heart of the game beats soundly in so many ways where it is real, very real.
Full tee sheets, most especially, and joyfully they are all around us. And to sit in a jam-packed hall of 1,500 people celebrating the brilliance of the Francis Ouimet Scholarship Fund is to feel the pulse of golf in all its glory.
Golf isn’t golfers standing on a podium spraying champagne because a team of four has defeated a handful of other teams of four. And it isn’t small fields with no cuts playing four days for money most people won’t make in their lifetime.
The soul of the game can be felt at U.S. Open local qualifiers or those 18-hole tests just to get into state mid-ams or state seniors, or heck, even for something called the Nye Cup.
Golf is real when emergency nines pop up on the radar, when rain falls so a bunch of 15- or 20-handicappers pull down the caps a little tighter. When a grandfather or even better, a grandmother, teaches a kid to play. When a club professional has a circle of junior golfers around he or she, hanging on every word.
It is real when passionate golfers join travel clubs and when buddy trips leave lasting emotions. It is real when indoor golf clubs generate enthusiasm and when a golfer appreciates that he or she can indeed improve with lessons and practice. It is real at tournaments like the San Francisco City Amateur or the Seagulls.
Want to feel the genuine joy of golf? Stand on a putting green in a sultry twilight and take balls numbered 1, 2, 3, and 4 and play imaginary games that award no money, no trophies, just a few ounces of pride.
Hats are personal. They reflect where the game is special or who makes the game so real.
There is pleasure in golf when you surround yourself in silence and harken back to a time when you had unbridled happiness on the course. That day at Tralee comes to mind, when it was blowin’ a hoolie, as they say, and raining sideways, to boot, but my smile couldn’t have been wider when my caddie watched me rip a 165-yard drive into 30 mph teeth on No. 2, a dogleg right of about 500 yards that was playing like 5,000.
“Jimmmeeee, me lad,” he said, anchored against the wind by the two golf bags he carried, “now here is ye 3-wood and I want you to hit’it and keep hittin’it till I tell ye to stop.”
Followed his directions for three times and Lord, how that bogey gave me goosebumps – praise that deft bump and run with the E-club and one-putt – because it enveloped all the splendor that golf delivers. Friends, caddies, weather challenges, humor, vistas you can’t stop looking it, a game you cannot get enough of.
“It’s not a game; it’s something other than game. I couldn’t define it,” said Sean Connery on a social media post that captured my attention. “It’s obsessive – and revealing.”
Indeed, the acclaimed actor and golf nut is correct. Golf is exhilarating, invigorating, addictive. It captures your imagination and your penchant for camaraderie, for solitary walks, for staying young, and for growing old gracefully.
To chip and putt for a few hours is to be enriched. To chip and putt for a few hours beside a dear friend is the embodiment of time well spent.
Stepping through morning dew and ducking around the sprinklers. Real golf. Battling through 6 p.m. rush-hour traffic in a race against a falling sun to savor three or four holes in a warm twilight. Real golf. Showing disgust that four young kids beat you to the tee box, then standing there wide-eyed as each splits the fairway. Real golf. And when those four kids, each of them tutored by the head pro, play 18 holes in less than three-and-a-half hours? Real golf, to the max.
The wisest sage yours truly ever met, Jack Burke Jr., once bemoaned to PGA Tour Commissioner Tim Finchem that all he ever heard was “branding this and branding that, so I asked him, ‘Tim, are we raising cattle or playing golf?’ ”
Funny, and spot on, but the great man often was. Like the time he said that the health of golf has nothing to do with money lists, major championships, or TV ratings. He insisted that you could measure the health of golf by how strong it was at the amateur level, which is why there is a smile on my face.
It’s not there because a megarich golf league that was disruptive to the nth degree, but never a great product, is by all reports fading away. It’s not there because pathways will be opened for more elite players to rejoin the PGA Tour.
No, it’s there because golf is great where it’s real and vibrant and reaches your soul.
