It's a cold, sleety Sunday afternoon and I am home alone with a couple of napping girls. The Twins game has been postponed on account of the awful weather, so the Masters golf tournament is going on the TV, and this reminds me that some pretty smart people take a pretty dim view of watching golf on television. For example, David Foster Wallace, reaching for examples of "the most tedious things you can find," called out two: Tax Returns and Televised Golf. Is it really that bad? (Televised golf, I mean, not tax returns.)
I can see, kind of, why someone might find it boring. On tee shots, you see the ball in the air for awhile, then it lands and, most usually, bounces along the fairway until coming to rest. So what? Putting, however, must seem worse. The player spends an eternity preparing to strike the ball, which, when he finally does, either goes in the hole or barely misses. The crowd, which for some reason is called "the gallery," either cheers or groans; if it's groans, the player has to take another turn to tap the ball into the hole. In between the tee shots and the putts, players hit longer shots to the green. In a way, these are the most interesting (or least boring), because, as is not the case with tee shots, you can gauge how well they've done by how far away from the hole the ball comes to rest. But then comes the putting, the main thing that matters. You think it's pointless that the outcome of a professional football game is determined by whether the little European fellow's place kick goes between the uprights or not? Well, try multiplying by 18.
Then there are the humorless commercials for luxury sedans and financial planning. They shed a lot of light on who's watching. Maybe that accounts for some of the disdain. If so, it is probably augmented by the aura of all-white privilege emanating from the screen. Did you hear that Phil Mickelson is pissed off by how much tax he has to pay?
I allow all that, but as a golfer myself, however poor a one, I find watching a tournament like the Masters practically mesmerizing. Since I have proven to myself how difficult it is, there is a fascination in watching people do it superlatively well. It's not like the golfers on television are trying to hit a 100-mph fastball, or guard Lebron James--things neither I nor hardly anyone else will ever try to do. They're playing golf and all other golfers have personal knowledge of the difficulties involved. When the stakes are high, as in the Masters, and there is a failure, a ball trickling into a creek, you know that look of agony and you know it's true. Is that Brandt Snedeker looking as if he wants to take a bite out of the shaft of his fairway wood?
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