Standup comedian Nate Bargatze likes to include a golf bit in each of his specials. He jokes that it’s an open signal that the 43-year-old resident of Nashville, Tennessee, would like to be invited to any and all golf outings. It has worked, as evidenced by his recent pairing with close friend Webb Simpson at the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am.
In his latest golf bit, Bargatze shares how his wife, Laura, abruptly left while caddying for him to go to the bathroom “15 seconds†before they were due at the first tee. He had taken out his driver and instructed her to meet him in the fairway when she came back. An hour later, his wife having gotten lost, Bargatze had played four consecutive holes with just his driver.
“Do you know how big of a psycho you look like when you hit every single golf shot with the least versatile club in the bag?†Bargatze deadpanned, before adding that he “luckily seven-putted†with the driver.
It’s appropriate to laugh about it because golf, more than any other mainstream sport, is pure comedy.
A ball, a “tire iron,†a “gopher hole,†hundreds of yards full of daunting obstacles and, at the end, “a little flat piece with a little flag to give you (expletive) hope.â€
“You do this just one time? (Bleep) no! 18 (expletive) times!â€
Robin Williams
We have always jokingly mocked the ridiculousness of a game that essentially mandates epic failure at every turn. Golf is one of the only athletic activities in the world that becomes progressively harder the worse you perform, rather than the other way around. A bad tennis player is out of his or her misery in two sets. A bad golfer, theoretically, has to extricate him- or herself from all the spots that require immense skill that is not yet possessed (but please, you can save yourself the trouble and drop by the 150 stake if you want).
Still, our collective love for golf is somehow connected to the insanity of the pursuit as we search for a hole just 4.25 inches in diameter. How could we not joke about it? Golfers were already neck-deep in self-deprecation for centuries by the time President Woodrow Wilson quipped that “Playing golf is an ineffectual attempt to put an elusive ball into an obscure hole with implements ill-adapted to the purpose.†(Wilson, who didn’t get into golf until age 55, became obsessed with the game and played more than 1,200 rounds while he was in office.)
Almost a century later, the late great Robin Williams updated Wilson’s description into a standup routine that still serves as the best representation for the comedy of the sport. Williams, recounting how he envisioned golf being invented, described how sadistic the Scots must have been to come up with the game.
And once we’re all finished with the round, we resort to the clubhouse to laugh at the journey we put ourselves through.
Sean Fairholm
E-MAIL SEAN
