How Can You Not Be Romantic About Golf?
Remembering why we play this game
by Shane René, IGA Administrator of Media & Communications
In Moneyball, the 2011 film adapted from Micheal Lewis’s book following Billy Beane’s quixotic, bargain-bin reassembling of the 2002 Oakland Athletics, you’ll find a scene that beats on the heart of any true sports fan.
After an early exit from the playoffs, ending a season that largely vindicated the general manager’s controversial approach, Beane (Brad Pitt) finds himself sulking in the clubhouse with his analytics wiz-kid, Pete (Jonah Hill). Pete plays him a clip from a minor league game featuring a portly catcher – who is notoriously afraid to run to second base – slapping a deep fly ball to center field and tripping over first base in a rare attempt to leg out a double. But once he crawled back to the bag, reeling in a nightmare come to life, he discovered that the ball flew 60 feet over the fence for a homerun. He stands up and trots around the bases to a stadium full of applause.
“How can you not be romantic about baseball?” Beane asks.
I was raised to be romantic about sports. I still cry when Kevin Costner asks his father’s ghost to play catch at the end of Field of Dreams. Watching Eli Manning steal the Super Bowl from Tom Brady twice in five years had a biblical effect on me. I wept in the office of my college newspaper when Tiger Woods hugged Charlie in the same spot Tiger hugged Earl in 1997 (the year I was born). This year, I spent five hours on Facetime with my childhood friend Sam watching Rory McIlroy conquer the Masters fifteen years after the baby-faced Irish bomber had captured our golfing imagination.
Golf, much like baseball, has especially potent romantic tendencies. It’s a difficult game, subject to the will of natural and metaphysical forces. It haunts us and delights us in decidedly unequal parts. And it’s the rarity of those wins that makes golf so easy to fall for.
I found myself relating to that portly minor league catcher from Moneyball this year as I struggled to navigate an unruly case of the shanks. I wondered if my own belly was the problem, propelling my hands out until the hosel found a home on the back of my golf ball, but the issue seemed isolated to a few select clubs – 7-iron through pitching wedge. These are not the clubs to lose faith in when you excitedly fill out your tournament schedule.
The club championship at Quail Hollow Golf Course in Boise naturally sat at the top of my list. I grew up at Quail Hollow and this year bought my first season pass, so I had a feeling that a weekend of decent ball striking and a well-behaved putter could put me in the running for a win. I just needed to avoid the hosel – or, at the very least, make the hosel rockets timely.
Of course, a hosel-adjacent strike sent my opening tee shot into the penalty area to set up a double bogey. After scratching and clawing for pars over the next three and a half hours, I made birdie on the par-5 16th to get myself back to +3 and on the edge of contention. The downhill par-3 17th with trouble short and bunkers long played 148 yards to the flag that day. A gentle breeze was in and off the left – everything said “9-iron.”
My heart sunk at impact – that empty, helpless, all-too-familiar feeling. My eyes shot up, frantically looking for my ball as it arched through the air like a wounded duck, crashing into the Boise foothills some 80 yards right of my intended target.
Lucky for me (so I thought), I found my ball wedged neatly between a clump of loamy soil and small bunch of cheat grass. And after talking myself into the hero shot, I promptly chunked it into the sage brush ahead of me. Then I rinsed and repeated, taking an unplayable before finding another bush. I dropped again, knocked it on the green and two putted for an early-August snowman (8).
This was my nightmare come to life – a cold, hard shank when wide right was the worst case scenario, leaving me six strokes behind the leaders with 18 holes to play.
The next day, my only clear memory from the front nine was standing on the back left fringe on the par-3 second looking to negotiate a slick 70 feet down to the hole. And when the ball clattered against the flagstick and disappeared, so did the next seven holes. I finally came to, tapping in for 29, turning toward the back nine with a renewed faith in miracles.
Of course, the only thing more powerful than miracles is the shanks. I found another hosel on the 12th en route to a triple bogey, and found myself back at the 17th tee with a 9-iron in my hand and no idea where I stood. I was thrilled to find the back-left bunker and overjoyed to hole the putt for par.
After a two-putt par on the 18th, awkwardly raising a hand to the crowd of players sitting on the hill behind the green, I was still in the dark as to where I stood with two groups to finish behind me. Then one of my playing partners walked up behind me and hung his arm around my shoulders.
“Congrats,” he said. “It looks like that’s gonna be more than enough.”
With the leaders stumbling early in the round, it turns out that I had made the turn with a comfortable lead. And all the torture I’d endured on the back nine (and on the 17th hole) had conspired to deliver me one of the most memorable weekends on the golf course I could have ever asked for.
So, as winter comes – and I hang up my clubs looking back on moments like this from a season gone by – I can’t help but ask myself: How can you not be romantic about golf?