The first warm breeze of spring whispered across the city, curling its way through the trees and putting romance in the minds of young men and women.
In the middle of Lincoln Park, shortly after dawn’s break, a young man named Thom Baker gently slid his arms around a young woman named Betsy Mendolsohn, pulled himself close and spoke into her ear: “Keep your eye on the ball.”
And fueling a young man’s romantic fantasies are . . . the perfectly struck five iron, the 260-yard drive, the curling 12-footer for birdie–GOLF.
Baker and Mendolsohn were among a handful of the devoted one early morning last week at the Diversey Driving Range. Here people of all ages, colors, shapes and sartorial styles come to spend a frustrating hour or so trying to hit small white balls into the sky.
In this place, the day after the Bulls had won more games in a season than any team in basketball history, the talk was not of Michael Jordan but of Greg Norman.
“I couldn’t watch,” said a gray-haired man named Benjamin Bailey. “It was too painful.”
Last Sunday began with the Australian Norman leading the Masters golf tournament by a seemingly insurmountable six strokes. It ended with shadows creeping across that prim and pristine slice of greenery known as Augusta National and with Norman losing by five strokes to Brit Nick Faldo.
To many golfers, this was a television tragedy of Shakespearean proportion, Norman playing the most recent symbol of America’s tortured love affair with golf.
There are approximately 30 million golfers in the U.S. In 1989 the National Golf Foundation estimated that a new course would have to be opened every day to comfortably accommodate the number of players expected by the year 2000.
Some of the reasons for this are obvious:
– The clothes. Robin Williams once observed that golf is the only game in which middle-class, middle-age guys can dress like pimps. (One friend plays in a pair of red, white and blue pants; “100 percent polyester,” he says, “and proud of it.”)
– Aging Baby Boomers are taking up a sport that is not so physically demanding as softball or bowling.
– Overweight people can play without much risk of having a heart attack.
– Golf carts are fun to drive.
– Finishing a round of golf provides a socially acceptable excuse to have a lot of cocktails and then, as does another friend, go home and announce, “I’m giving up this stinking game forever.”
But there are other reasons too.
After the final round, Norman said, “I screwed up. Yeah, I screwed up. But it’s not the end of the world. I have a good life. I have 40 million bucks. Sure, I’m sad about it. But I’m not going to run around like Dennis Rodman and head-butt an official.”
He might have mentioned Nick Van Exel. Or Magic Johnson. Or Albert Belle. Or any of the other surly sorts whose antics are becoming numbingly familiar.
The country’s other major sports are overrun with cry babies and malcontents who seem to take no pleasure in anything but the size of a paycheck. But pro golfers are an increasingly admirable bunch, almost reverential about the game, its rule, its fans and its arenas.
Ben Crenshaw, who won the Masters last year–collapsing in tears after his final putt–has said, “There is almost a spiritual quality to Augusta National. I mean, you come here to win a golf tournament, but there’s so much more. And in a good way, so much less. Peace, quiet, the subtle winds.”
Rod McKuen eat your heart out.
But in Crenshaw’s bit of sappiness is a key to golf’s appeal. People, men and women, often can be heard talking about golf in love-poem language.
Golf is a romantic pursuit, a flirtation of fleeting successes and more promise than delivery. And one is attracted to the game precisely for its fickle beauty, its frustrating and unpredictable emotional currents; of hope renewed with every shot.
Thus can it turn otherwise gentlemanly sorts into screaming and swearing messes. It can transform all of us, even the finest players, into quivering masses of doubt, self-loathing and gloom.
That is why so many suffered empathetically with Norman’s anguished Sunday march. We have all been there, and not just on the golf course.
In three days he had successfully courted the most beautiful and desirable golf track in the world and then, at triumph’s doorstep, had his love go unrequited. But there he was again this week in South Carolina, teeing up again at the MCI Heritage Classic.
And so, back at the driving range stood the young couple, he instructing, she trying to launch the little white balls. And one after one they skittered along the ground.
“What am I doing wrong?” she asked.
“Here, let me show you,” he said, wrapping his arms around her once more and helping her swing.
