Golf And The Super Bowl

     My son involved me in golf. He was only 12, and could not have understood what he was doing. He could not yet have seen that his father lacks even a scrap of physical grace. Eye-hand coordination is a foreign concept. Manipulation of a dinner fork is a complex undertaking.
     Nor could he have known my inner ridicule of the game and those who ate, drank and breathed it.  The wardrobes and the jargon were subjects for arch conversations with myself. Ditto the sotto voce commentary of the television sportscasters. The world of golf was beneath serious regard.
     But the boy came home from summer camp, bright-eyed with new experiences. He had been introduced to golf and wanted me to join him in it.  And so we plunged in.
     We took lessons at a local driving range. He progressed. I floundered. The pinnacle of my achievement was in losing my grip on a club that flew so far down range the proprietor had to stop all the other customers so that it could be safely retrieved (see dinner fork, above).
     Being a bright and diligent young man, my son eventually moved on from golf to other pursuits. Not being as bright or diligent, I stayed on a slippery slope. I bought golf magazines in reams. I became a compulsive student of grip, stance and swing arc. I must have tried a hundred remedies for my slice. (None worked. See dinner fork, above.)
     Finally I was saved by arthritis, and by a streak of the parsimony ascribed by tradition to my Scottish ancestry. The game began to pain my hands and my wallet along with my pride. I gave my clubs to a nephew and quit.
     Golfer-me now appears in life's rear-view mirror as I imagine reformed gamblers seeing themselves in retrospect. What was I thinking?
     Our culture tells every little boy he should care about sports. Even we who didn't care heard the message. Perhaps some inner part of golfer-me hoped that, by learning a game at last, I could stop being the kid assigned to right field in baseball because less happens there.
     But I did actually like golf, even from within my unconquerable ineptitude. Hindsight says one reason may have been that it remained, at heart, a gentleman's game.  Matches were to be won by mastering the skills and respecting the rules of the sport -- not by trash-talking opponents or manipulating officials.  Sportsmanship mattered.
     And games matter in remaining truly games.  A wise man wrote that the word recreation  means exactly what it says: Re-creation. It is restorative. Of what?  The far corners of health, I think.
     Insofar as we frame recreation around skills and achievement, we touch the part of ourselves that wants to do a thing well if we're going to do it. If we favor watching athletic contests, we hope to touch the part of ourselves that admires seeing a thing done well.
     But in the high-dollar sports frenzy made possible by our country's affluence, something else emerges. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that something is lost: The principled difference between surpassing performance and merely besting an opponent.  Winning becomes a value that need not be closely attended by other values. It is pertinent that this year's professional football championship featured one team of notorious cheats, and another team known for fans whose vividly unsportsmanlike conduct includes violence.
     Nor is such as this without consequence. The culture tells little boys they should care about sports, and the evidence of life whispers to them that if they are good enough they can be set apart. Winners are allowed to bend the rules. Winning matters more. Principles of ends and means matter less.
     A bookish boy who was sent to right field can enjoy sports only vicariously. And I do like a good game. My favorite sport is college basketball. Properly played, it has balletic grace. Yet even in the best programs there, the winning-as-conquering ethic creeps in. If I settle down to watch, I must remain mindful that the performance of fine young athletes may at any moment be adulterated by cheap gamesmanship.
     It is a worm in my apple. Such is my attitudinal hangover from having learned years ago to appreciate golf. A little bit of golfer-me remains awake -- but only a little bit. I am not foolish enough
to try playing again (see dinner fork, above).  And I have always been able to observe certain self-chosen limits. I never adopted the wardrobe, for example. Even at my nadir I was not that far gone.