Mastering the sport much more than man and ball
After a soccer ball jammed against my tiniest, most useless finger on Sunday morning during an otherwise routine victory for the NY Shamrocks over Doxa (I’ve gotten used to the names of the soccer clubs over so it’s better that you do too), I quickly succumbed to that world-weary feeling of “this is going to be less about pain and more about inconvenience”.
That’s the feeling which defines pointless little injuries, the low grade ones which make the grind all the more tedious. There’s nothing like a broken pinky to remind you what life would be like without it. Typing is a little slower, eating is a little harder and I’m now up to nine separate innocuous brushes with a solid surface or falling handset that would normally be unnoticeable but suddenly bring a tear to the eye.
Golfers… us philistines sneer at them for their lack of athleticism and terrible fashion sense but it’s arguably one of the most difficult sporting professions out there.
We’ve all read it a thousand times, the good walk ruined and the rest of the grievances associated with a frustrating day wandering listlessly from pin to pin.
But we tend to forget how utterly dependent they are on an inordinate proportion of the body’s evolutionary gifts.
Not only can the mere pang of a back spasm or the twinge of a knee ligament deprive them of several rounds of dismay, their psychological togetherness seems to be as important as every little finger.
A footballer can be frustrated and deliver a decent performance with a broken hand but a golfer has to watch out for a depressing array of pitfalls.
Of course, that’s what makes it fun for the rest of us. On Sunday, it will be 39 years to the day since the 39th Masters was decided both in the favour of Jack Nicklaus and of posterity.
That passive construction of the verb is intentional because although this was Jack Nicklaus’ fifth win at Augusta, it was, as Dan Jenkins described it legendarily for that week’s Sports Illustrated, the stuff of movies, a farfetched and overwrought screenplay that left everything up for debate until the back nine: “Jack Nicklaus and Johnny Miller and Tom Weiskopf go out there and undergo the most unbearable of sporting pressure and provide the most inconceivable of thrills, hole after hole, until the whole business is ultimately decided by the vagaries of the game itself,” the unbelieving Jenkins wrote.
“You can take all of your double eagles and your playoffs and your Arnold Palmers and Ben Hogans and Byron Nelsons, and nothing has ever equalled what happened when Nicklaus bagged his fifth Masters and his 15th major. The record will show that Nicklaus stood up to, outgutted, outmiracled —whatever— a Johnny Miller who stung the Augusta National with closing rounds of 65 and 66 and a Torn Weiskopf who rushed home with 66 and 70.”
I have a new found respect for golf writers this week.
Imagine being forced to follow in the footsteps of Dan Jenkins. Last month, courtesy of Deadspin, we were all able to enjoy a dug-up, classic piece he wrote in 1985 about all the US Masters he’d worked at since first attending as a young aspiring sportswriter in 1951. He was still at college but he was embarking on a career, a perfect mix of awe and duty.
Deadspin were celebrating Jenkins’ recently published book, His Ownself: A Semi-Memoir and that 1985 piece was full of the yesteryear anecdotes we’d never get away with nowadays.
His developing friendship in the 1950s with Bob Drum of CBS and, back then, the Pittsburgh Press was a telling summation of the profession before anyone every heard of a press ombudsman.
“Who could resist striking up a friendship with a man who would lean back and laugh so raucously, so often, at his own copy?” recalled Jenkins. “I confess that he would catch me doing the same thing on occasion. We were to joke in future years that if Arnold Palmer had ever actually spoken the lines we dolled up for him, he could have had his own lounge act in Vegas.”
I have a new found respect for all writers this week.
I flinched when given the task of focusing on golf this week. But then another transplant from Cork to Brooklyn, the comedian and writer Maeve Higgins dared her twitter followers to dare her back to write for an hour based on one word.
Someone gave her “wheelbarrow” and she promptly delivered back a powerful, beautiful piece about a back garden she avoided in London.
She was lonely, she wrote, and nothing seemed certain. As with writing, as with golf. The Masters will once again bring out the best in all of that.
njohnwriordan@gmail.com Twitter: JohnWRiordan
