There are so many (or at least seemingly so) colorless golfers out there on the PGA Tour. Well, Bubba Watson is not one of them. After he tapped in on the second hole of a sudden-death playoff at the Travelers Championship to garner his first PGA Tour victory, to hear him speak honestly of its relative importance in his career and life (his father is battling cancer) was both poignant and refreshing. He’s definitely someone who knows not just how good he has it, but how to keep it all in perspective.
I haven’t followed his career much, but he’s such a likeable and offbeat character that I’ll be sure to root for him the next time he’s in contention. With his length and his overall game, my guess is I’ll have plenty of opportunities to do so in the future.
Contrast Watson with the “pouting prima dona” Sergio Garcia, who, as talented as he is, has yet to win a major tournament and is now struggling with a rather inferior game. Early on he too seemed like a likeable guy with his devil-may-care, Ballesteros-esque ability to pull off great shots from just about anywhere. Lately, he seems to be battling some inner demons and never appears to be enjoying himself – ever – when he’s playing golf.
…or, the troubled and increasingly surly Tiger Woods, whose true colors are coming out now that he knows he longer has to put up that “aw shucks, I’m just an everyday kind of guy” facade of his. After all the post-Thanksgiving revelations there’s nothing, or nowhere, left to hide. Me? I bet he dumps Steve Williams as his caddie sometime this year; after ditching his swing coach earlier this year, that will make his self-imposed isolation complete.
But enough about those clowns. If the PGA Tour truly wants to connect with the next generation of fans, they’d do well to promote the likes of players who appear to have it all together like the inherently likeable Bubba Watson.
A Few Us Will Stay On by Rod McKuen
N
Angels hover in the alcoves of the stone cathedral
disguised as choirs of children. Old women,
black shoes and stockings graduating to black dresses
and the midnight hood send time backward in a bounce.
Long silences well meant to stretch a conversation
sever it instead as we go back to rooms and lofts
long corridors of nothingness, great bushels full of
nowhere, armloads of emptiness.
Has reason lost its spokes and hub? Believing
fantasy to be the only highway into life I arise and go
into the street attempting to erase reality whatever
its disguise. Like the nag who knows the curve
of every track I am soon back at the starting gate
or heading for the barn.
I set out all my candles and leave them burning
in the wind. Not content to fire a bridge or two
I dynamite the dams and drain the rivers. I waste
not time by buying time, I squander it by always
reaching far beyond my grasp. I have insured myself
against memory and being remembered.
Some of us who know that we are fragments
do not even wish to be the whole. only part of
something larger, satellites to something.
If promises were guarantees I would by now
have given half my life away and owned a half
I will not know.
The sense of solitude is that it makes no sense.
It is not condition or religion but so of itself
to be beyond description. It is as pure as
unadulterated green and clean as seas unsighted.
I am on the cusp of something. And who of us
is not? Tension drags like drops of silver in the air.
It is everywhere. Some will surrender long before
the liberating troops arrive without the truth
as armor they will wither, others may get halfway
down the block before dementia or boredom
traps them in an alleyway.
A few of us will stay on till the end and be
rewarded with whatever endings are. Here for
the long haul, I am not impatient, only weary
of an afternoon when progress has not taken up
and carried on its shoulder the flag of pride.
-from “Rusting in the Rain,” 2004
This reminded me of you
Comment by Jana — June 30, 2010 @ 11:59 am
Wow, that’s beautiful writing, Jana – thanks. Rod always did have a way of turning a phrase. He’s one of the greats.
Along those same lines, yesterday I read this entry by Thomas Merton from “The Sign of Jonas”; he writes it on the day before he was ordained as a priest back in May of 1949:
“The truth is, I am far from being the monk or the cleric I ought to be. My life is a great mess and tangle of half-conscious subterfuges to evade grace and duty. I have done all things badly. I have thrown away great opportunities. My infidelity to Christ, instead of making me sick with despair, drives me to throw myself all the more blindly into the arms of His mercy.”
That reminded me of me as well.
Comment by The Great White Shank — June 30, 2010 @ 4:11 pm