“The church door’s thrown open;
I can hear the organ’s song.
But the congregation’s gone.”
Bruce Springsteen, “My City of Ruins”
The unpredictability is what makes golf fun. The whole point of the game is to try to avoid unpredictability, of course — to control things that defy command: clubhead path and the flight of a ball; but also wind, water, the tilt of the Earth, the direction in which blades of grass lie, and other whims that answer to God alone.
Add to those whims now a virus from which, until December, no person in the history of the world had ever suffered — but which, as of this writing, has killed more than 143,000 people.
Ironically, though, the virus has treated us — or me, anyway — differently than wind or the false front on a green. It has made things more predictable. Or repetitive, anyway. Monotonous.
When the world ground to a halt on March 13, I was on Interstate 20, driving east toward Augusta for the final piece of a story I’d been working on for weeks. Halfway there, the e-mail came in canceling my visit. Not long afterward, my office sent word that we was going to teleworking-only, indefinitely.
This could be worse, I thought to myself. Think of all the range balls you’ll get to hit!
That first week, my family and I holed up at a little house in Orange Beach, Ala., trying to make the whole thing seem more like a vacation than an ordeal. The kids didn’t really buy it: kids crave routines, and theirs had been wiped out. And the spotty Internet access and cell service made teleworking tough. We were finding our footing in a new reality, just like everyone else — and not doing a very good job of it.
Even the driving range (Orange Beach has a decent public practice facility attached to a serviceable par-3 course) felt uneasy. I went nearly every afternoon that week. For the first couple of days, nothing seemed out of the ordinary; it was crowded, with duffers bunched together closely (a driving range mood-killer even before the days of social distancing). By the end of the week, the range’s hitting surface was more an homage to turf than an actual lawn; the thin grass chewed up, exposing the sand underneath. About that time, the daily mood at the range had thinned out, too. One afternoon, I spotted an elderly couple holding a few clubs and peering at the range from the parking lot. “Does it look like they’re leaving enough space?” one asked the other. There was no answer.
The weather all week was sublime — but for our moods, the break in the clouds never came. The next weekend, we piled up some unused groceries in our minivan and headed home toward, we hoped, a semblance of routine. Besides, I needed to re-grip my irons.
Back in Mississippi, Internet service improved — not that the news it brought did. Shutdown orders slowly popped up across the South. Schools closed until August. And God only knows where all the paper towels have gone. I took my clubs by the local Edwin Watts for new grips, but the lights were off, and the store is closed until who knows when. That’s the toughest part of the whole thing: who knows when?
After a few days, my kid asked whether we could go hit some balls, so I called my local driving range to see whether they’d remained open. Yes, they said, but with a few modifications: they’d take your credit card number over the phone, and then they’d take your balls out to the range. Wait in the parking lot for a few minutes to give us time, they said. So we did. It seemed like a good system until, mid-practice, he decided that he also wanted a Kit Kat. Have you ever given your credit card number over the phone to order a 75-cent candy bar?
The next time we visited, they’d loosened up a bit: no visits inside the clubhouse, but they’d at least take your card in person and hand you your own balls. They were figuring it out as they went, just like the rest of us.
Traffic on the golf course seemed to swing back and forth, too. Some days, it was chilly but packed. Other days, it was beautiful but deserted. I could never figure out why. But fear and anxiety are a room with a window and no door. On one side of the room, the room is dark, and you’re gripped by panic, convinced that the walls are closing in; without thinking, you amble to the other side of the room, where the sun shines through a bit — and for a while, the panic subsides. But you can’t leave the room. So you just wander it, from side to side, day after day. On some days, enough golfers are on the brighter side of the room to fill up a tee sheet; on other days, they’ve wandered back into the dark.
I grappled with playing golf, too — and not just from anxiety. I’m naturally skeptical of someone who insists broad rules don’t apply to them — especially when that someone enjoys exceptions to society’s rules as much as golfers do. When social distancing became the new normal, the immediate push-back that golf could continue with only slight modifications raised my eyebrows. Eventually, I settled on the view that golf could be played safely in the coronavirus era, but with deep reservations about whether it is being played safely. I still haven’t played 18 since before March 13, but that’s as much a logistical reality as a safety measure: throwing off the parenting yolk for half a day or longer is tough even when the rest of the family isn’t confined to the house. But they are. So mostly, I stay confined too.
I grew a beard; I shaved it. I ordered a practice hitting net; it got stuck in a warehouse for two weeks. Florida Gators coach J.C. Deacon and swing guru Tony Ruggiero (who probably could be a therapist if he weren’t a golf instructor) told me that they urged all their players to use the downtime to their advantages; I started sneaking in sets of 15 pushups whenever I could. And I usually break up the afternoons with morsels of golf drills: two minutes of chipping on the carpet here, a half-dozen full swings in the backyard there. I don’t know if it’s doing any good, but it breaks up the monotony.
Still, there is the monotony.
I miss pro golf, and I feel crazy for missing it. Professional sports offer few things more monotonous than the week-to-week of the PGA Tour, and yet weeks now feel incomplete without it. Most weekends, I pay little more attention to a Tour event than I do an old album playing in another room; but four days a week, just knowing that golf is on TV is a comfort. Now, there’s an emptiness. Everywhere there’s emptiness.
Pro golf coming back won’t change that: even the Tour’s new schedule for the rest of 2020 won’t allow fans to attend events until well into July. And even that schedule isn’t a certainty; the fairest view of it is that it’s a best-case scenario, to get Tour players ready in case the virus subsides by mid-June. And maybe it will. But it hasn’t abided by any best-case scenarios so far.
Any shred of normalcy, of unpredictability, would be a welcome change, though — even if it is just a moment on the other side of the room.
. . .
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