I’m told that my father was a funny man. But as I remember him, he wasn’t much for dad jokes. He did have one running bit, though: every New Year’s Eve, at some point in the afternoon, you could always count on him to say, “Well, if there’s anything else you wanted to do this year, you’d better hurry.”
The final thing I wanted to do in 2019 was to play golf. So on the last day of the year, at first light, I slung my golf bag over one shoulder, slung my toddler onto the other, and tossed them both into the car. One daycare drop-off later, I was on the road to Neshoba County, to Dancing Rabbit Golf Club.
Golf is a metaphor for life; that’s nothing new. But on the final day of the final year of a decade that’s seen our country slide from Hope and Change to hatred and duplicity, and on the cusp of a series of months when our future’s standard bearer might be chosen, a few hours alone on the golf course offer more reflection that a month’s worth of cable news.
Golf, at its heart, is an exercise in responding to failure and disappointment. Think about it: when you stand over a ball and imagine your next shot, how often does the ball finish precisely where you’d hoped? Ten percent of the time? Five? The other 95 percent of the time, you’re managing failure, to one degree or another. Sometimes, you miss your target by only a little, and the failure you confront is insignificant; other times, you miss wildly, and your next shot demands that you respond to failure that is dramatic.
Either way, golf is mostly about managing disappointment and figuring out how to get out of trouble. It’s not for the faint of heart.
The calendar’s turn finds America in just such a spot.
The past three years have brought moments darker than I ever thought this country could countenance. Fascists have been named “good people;” children literally have been put in cages.
The next few months will tell how, and whether, America finds itself out of this fix.
At the second hole, my tee shot wandered right of the fairway, just into the towering pine trees that line Dancing Rabbit’s routing. The second fairway curves left to right, so beyond the right edge of the fairway, surrounded by pines reaching a hundred feet into the sky, I had no view of the hole, much less a shot at it. Golf is pragmatic, and it has no room for sycophantic ideologues: sometimes, you just have to advance the ball. It’s not exciting, but it’s necessary.
Other times, golf — cruel though it is — gives when you don’t deserve it. The sixth hole at Dancing Rabbit’s Azaleas course is a short par-4, whose tee shot demands an undramatic drive between a fairway bunker to the right and pines to the left. But I badly pulled my drive, and inside the same second, I resolved to hike through the forest until I’d found my ball. By the time I made it to the landing area, though, I found the ball had deflected into the fairway; a knockdown 6-iron later, I was on the green, two putts away from an easy par. Golf, like life, has a way of working out.
And other times still, you leave your 8-iron leaning against a tree next to the 14th green, but you don’t realize it until you’re walking up to the 18th green, so you have to get in your cart and drive back four full holes to find it — which is to say that in golf, as in life, sometimes you lose a part of yourself, and you have to find what you lost, hard though it may be.
All of which is to say this: golf makes no room for demagoguery. Sometimes, things work out the way we always hoped; usually, they don’t. But either way, the game’s only options are to quit altogether or to keep moving forward, no matter what. Golf has no place for what-ifs; its only purpose is to put the ball in the hole, no matter what. Nothing else matters.
The new year’s first few months will be historic, and not for the easiest of reasons: for those who have pegged their hopes to how America should move forward in 2020, the year’s first few months frequently will bring disappointment. Eventually, one candidate will emerge, and it might not be who you’d hoped.
But in life, as in golf, disappointment and progress are not mutually exclusive. For many, the new year will bring both. But a choice that is less than perfect is no reason to quit. Life, like golf, is an exercise in pragmatism. Getting the ball in the hole is all that matters.
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