Accepting that you’ll never be happy again yields a certain happiness, just as knowing that one’s favorite sand wedge, forgotten on a green in the shadow of War Memorial Stadium, will remain forever in the bag of a scoundrel who found the forlorn stick and kept it for himself. Your short game will never be quite the same, but there is satisfaction in believing that whatever metaphysical power guides the universe will invest the wayward wedge with the power to poison the gentleman’s game from here to eternity.
Oh, it was a cheap thing – a bargain close-out inscribed with the name of the “wee ice man,” the man who believed as we do that putting is not golf. The American League employs the designated hitter, so why not a designated putter for those of us challenged by this feminine activity? Our choice would be Paula Creamer. We’d even let her use the pink ball she favors.
Cheap or not, it filled us with confidence when we heard the magical click of club head striking the cover of our Titleist, sending it like an exploding kernel of popcorn to a designated area near the cup, the face of the shiny wand smudged with a new fleck of candy red from the identifying inscription applied by a Sharpie to the ball.
We miss it so. There is a permanent longing to regain it, an ache so sharp yet so sweet, that, as we said, it begets a wistful nostalgia, an ennobling emotion, filled with the grandiosity of self that we gain only by losing – in this case a bloodied scepter now serving another master.
This sporting life affords us few opportunities for this peculiar satisfaction, so we savor it more than the well-struck tee shot delivered by a brutish driver. No, it is a finer thing than that, this world we have lost, always on the horizon, forever out of reach but glimmering with the promise that it can be regained. Now, if we can only enlist Ms. Creamer to pinch putt for us.
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Our tattered flag is still waving after taking a beating, for entertainment purposes only. Let’s put 5,000 destroyers on Navy -7 over Army today to wrap up the college football season. Bowl picks to come.
