Class self-consciousness, Jim Nantz, and the Ontology of a Three Foot Putt

1) I am a golfer, and will remain one until I die. And in my leftie youth, I saw golf as class war. There were country clubbers, and there were the rest of us, and anytime anyone from the latter group represented in full I felt a little tinge of pride. I did not contemplate the idea that being able to spend four hours hitting a little white ball into a hole three or four times a week was indication enough of inherited unearned privilege, because I still worked forty hours a week and those fuckers with the pink collared shirts and the brand new clubs didn’t.

When I was a sophomore, I pulled a great round out of my ass (five birdies eight bogies five pars) and got myself in the last group of the last round of the biggest tournament of the year, as well as two lines on the front page of the sports page. I bombed the next day, and a very rich senior won the tournament and the acclaim, and a bitter young man was I. I knew him; he spent his summer days alternating between the golf course and his family's cabing. He was nice, a good person, and my entire team and I hated him.

My point is not to wax nostalgic on my experience of high school golf on the blustery plains of South Dakota, but to argue for a view of golf as a site of conflict, and not the boring equivalent of the sports world’s Christian right. CBS’s coverage of the Masters does what it can to convey the idea that golf is a game for rich people in tastefully colored clothes worn by people so refined that they cannot go below business casual even when playing a game. I submit that golf is more complex than that. Of course, it takes a tremendous amount of leisure time to play and practice a game that lasts four hours. But many of the greatest players were exposed to the game by caddying at exclusive clubs and exacted their revenge later on by working over the sons and daughters of those for whom they toiled. Sam Snead played barefoot in his father’s pasture, using the wide round discs of dried cowshit as launching pads. Chi Chi Rodriguez learned to play with a stick and range balls he stole from nearby course. Most tour pros now are reactionaries, but some – e.g. Notah Begay, Rich Beem, for whom I worked when I was 14 and he was a club pro in SoDak, and a few others – have breathed a spark of populism into the game’s highest levels.

Playing golf is not leisure time if you make money doing it, and it is ever the more satisfying when you’re taking money from people with six figure incomes and egos as large as their Chevy Tahoes. I played with guys who worked on the grounds crew, who took the game and its tradition very seriously, and saw the golf course as their place of work, and an apparatus through which a more equitable distribution of wealth could be realized. I played for money as a kid – my boss at the time would back me, and if I won I’d get 10% of the winnings and if I lost I would pay 10% of the losses – I loved it. There was nothing better than being handed money by doctors and lawyers who I had a hand in besting, not just because they were doctors and lawyers but because they were assholes, pure and simple. [In retrospect my very bourgeois upbringing makes whatever “class war” type affiliations I had with golf quite suspect, but there is nothing to be done about that now. When you’re 15, you try to look poor. (Cf. that one song by the Silver Jews)] So I get a little

2) Jim Nantz is no poet, his voice is not syrupy, and his whispered delivery comes at exactly the wrong time. Golf, like baseball, is best viewed when the television announcers have a healthy respect for the idea that silence is the mother of suspense. Just let it unfold, let the viewer give all of his/her energy to the gaze, and let the guys with the actual talent tell the story in bold strokes of action. Jim Nantz is . . . God, I cannot put into words how schlocky and cliché-ridden he is when covering the best golf tournament in the country. The Masters does not need human interest stories; it has Augusta National.

3) Three foot putts are not like free throws in that you do not look at your target. There is a strange “in your mind’s eye” effect with putting that is most tautly present with the short ones, the three to four footers you should not miss but nevertheless shake your knees. Three foot putts that you must make to win the $50 you’re playing for are like when your fourteen at a party holding a Budweiser and the girl you love moves in to kiss you: things should go smoothly, all but the easiest steps have been taken, and yet it is at this moment that you are held in the grip of potential paralysis, especially when you only have $20 on your person.