Evidence of a Higher Being

Golf is a perverse pastime. It requires concentration and nonchalance in equal parts. You have to care and not care at the same time. It is the blend that those of us not blessed with a carefree mind and natural athletic grace attempt to concoct to approximate the real thing.

It is our superstitious opinion that a putter contains only so many true rolls and that practice depletes that number. After all, why do so many sluggers forgo the home-run derby the night before the All-Star game?

And it is a truism, not a superstition, that a good big man will beat a good little man every day. Remember the look on Michael Spinks’ face when he saw Mike Tyson charge out from his corner? That visage of terror haunts us to this day. It wasn’t quite that bad with good little old man Tom Watson on Sunday at Turnberry, but you could tell when he pulled the putter back for an eight-footer that would have won The Open Championship that fear had conquered him.

Carrying the torch for us 50-somethings, he cared too much and then the wheels came off in the playoff. He was simply one stroke too old. As Vince Lombardi said, fatigue makes cowards of us all. And fatigue strikes the aging with much more frequency than it does the younger. This is the way God planned it and we must accept it

Now Stewart Cink, the fellow with a golfer’s tan that includes his pale pate when unhatted, a jarring sight, is no teen-age phenom, but his assertion that he felt no nervousness rings true. Doubt afflicts the older man as he grows tired. We must again go to the young genius Keats when he addressed the nightingale thusly:

What thou among the leaves hast never known,
The weariness, the fever, and the fret
Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;
Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last grey hairs,
Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;
Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
And leaden-eyed despairs;


Notice the modifiers preceding “man” – good, big and little. By taking one more club, the little man swinging with confidence can carry the water and set himself up for a birdie putt, while the big man with a grandiose opinion of his talent will take a pitching wedge and shank it into the wildlife clustering at the edge of the pond.

Similarly, the good young man will beat the good old man more often than not. Again, this is God’s plan. The Bishop in Caddyshack who “theoretically” could have beaten the course record in a thunderstorm missed the point when he declared in the bar at Bushwood that there is no God.

Of course there is, your eminence. He made Watson take the eight-iron instead of the nine.