Friday, August 31, 2007
Sports
I like to watch
The psychological voyeurism of golf
After skipping last year’s Tour Championship, Tiger Woods plays at East Lake this month.
CREDIT: Stuart Franklin/Getty Images |
By Joel Lindsey
I don’t play golf. A few rounds with my grandfather, who was a fine athlete and could shoot his age into his 70s, and a couple more with an old college pal who needed to the learn the sport to schmooze with his bosses, are the extent of my experience. He quit inviting me when I kept beating him despite all the C-notes he was pouring down the drain for private lessons. I’m no hack, but I never possessed my own set of blades either—I just don’t need any more expensive hobbies.
I do like to watch, though.
Formally reserved for the elites, golf has been greatly democratized in recent years. Sure, you can spend $500 for a round at Pebble Beach, but the greens fee for the municipal course in Candler Park cost about as much as the pitcher of beer you’ll share afterward with your buddies.
Democracy beats the alternatives, of course, but with it comes baggage. You didn’t have idiots screaming “Get in the hole!” after every shot in Bobby Jones’ day. More importantly, though, the free market of ideas has heightened our fascination with spectacles. Media outlets give us what we want. If that’s all O.J. or JonBénet all the time, then so be it. We’re drawn to a spectacle like moths to flame. And where golf is concerned, that spectacle often takes the form of a player crumbling under pressure in a major tournament. Aaron Baddeley’s final-round 80 at this year’s U.S. Open comes to mind. Greg Norman at the ’96 Masters is another.
Jean Van de Velde, however, takes the croissant for choking. He stood on the 18th tee of the ’99 British Open at Carnoustie needing double-bogey to win. He drove into the rough. A shot into the bleachers. A shot into the creek. A wade in the creek. Then he found the bunker. It only added to the surreal excitement when he managed to sink a 6-footer to save triple-bogey before losing in a playoff. The somber British television host intoned “I can’t watch anymore,” but we were all glued to the screen. Everybody loves a train wreck.
What greater ignominy is there than to make a verb of yourself—to pull a Buckner, a Van de Velde, or a Merkle? We all wonder how we’d perform under such pressure, whether we could hit driver in the fairway on the last hole of the Open or whether we’d spray it out of bounds. Most of us would probably be OB, which is to say that we can all too easily see our own humanity in the spectacular failure of others.
Van de Velde, to his credit, went back to frozen Scotland in the dead of the following winter to exorcise his demons. He would try, as an analyst opined after his collapse, to “play the hole with his putter and still get better than a seven.” It took three attempts, but with his excited children jumping on the green and cheering for him, he managed to three-putt for a six. Vivé la France. SP
Tiger treks
Tour Championship comes early this year
In Atlanta, autumn signals more than the arrival of football. It also brings forth the now-annual descent of the world’s 30 best professional golfers upon historic East Lake Golf Club. And because of this year’s inaugural FedEx Cup, Tiger & Co. hit town almost two months early.
This month, East Lake plays host to the Tour Championship for the fourth straight year (and seventh overall). But unlike past tournaments, which were contested in late October and early November at the home course of the legendary Bobby Jones, this year the likes of Phil Mickelson, Vijay Singh and other golfing greats will compete Sept. 10-16.
The FedEx Cup is a NASCAR-like points race that began with the top 144 points leaders (minus one very big one in Tiger Woods) competing at the Barclays, which was won by Steve Stricker in New York on Aug. 26. A total of 120 golfers battled at the Deutsche Bank Championship outside Boston over Labor Day weekend, with the field trimmed to 70 for the BMW Championship, to be held Sept. 6-9 in the Chicago area. After that, the top 30 head for Atlanta.
What does it all mean? Well, for one, despite some confusion about the whole FedEx Cup points system, East Lake will again be tested by the game’s greatest shooters (Woods and Mickelson skipped last year’s season finale at East Lake), competing for a huge financial prize—as in $10 million huge. Secondly, the tour will conduct seven more additional events (Annandale, Miss., say hello to Bo Van Pelt and Steve Flesch) in determining who receives full-season exemptions to the following year’s tournaments.
And finally, it means we’re not too far off from Peach Buzz gushing about how Tiger and Elin were spotted shopping at Bellini for a new travel crib for little Sam Alexis. And of course, the staff will say they were just divine.—Hunt Archbold