Category Archives: Entertainment

I guess it’s all the noise about Tiger Woods, but I can’t seem to escape golf this week.  I don’t understand golf.  I have tried over the years, but it just doesn’t make sense to me.  In fact there are three facets of golf I just will never understand:

1.  What is the point of golf?

2.  Why do people play golf?

3.  Most especially, why do people sit around watching other people playing golf on TV?

I have spent many years trying to figure this out and have had no luck whatsoever.

My father tried to get me to take up golf.  Growing up, we belonged to Tuscarora Country Club.  My father joined about the time my teenage years began.  For some reason, he thought it would be good for us.  Yeah, right.  He should have learned that lesson after the family camping fiasco.  I briefly dated a young lady there who tried to interest me in golf.  That, too, was a disaster on many levels.  No, I just don’t get it.

Based on what I saw there as a teenager, people would strap a cooler of beer on the back of an electric cart, throw a bag of sticks in the back of it and spend the day riding around outdoors-never my favorite place- getting progressively drunker and more obnoxious while beating a little white ball with a stick.  Mind you, I have nothing against drinking- in fact that was the only attractive part of the equation- but I prefer to have cocktails with witty conversation indoors- where it is air conditioned and they have nice comfy chairs.  These folks would eventually all end up back at the Tap Room at Tuscarora anyway, so why not just cut the golf step and go straight to the Tap Room?  I never understood.  Instead, I spent a couple of summers lying by the pool or playing tennis before I gave up the entire Country Club thing out of boredom.

But people seem so passionate about golf.  I can’t believe it when I travel and see people getting their golf clubs at baggage claim.  These are not easy things to drag around nor are they cheap to take along in today’s world.  The airlines charge them for taking them along.  Can’t you rent them or something?  This just seems a bit much to me…

And I’m convinced the fact that I don’t understand Phoenix is tied up with my lack of understanding golf.  The two seem to go together.  Lot’s of golf clubs come off the planes there!  And please help me understand why anyone wants to be outdoors playing golf when it’s 115 degrees?  I’m Southern.  We were taught that when it gets too hot, one retires to the veranda with a cocktail– one does not go traipsing off over the fields chasing a little white ball with a stick.  Well, at least not until numerous cocktails have been enjoyed…then who knows?

I hear today is the Superbowl.  Apparently that is something to do with professional football.  I don’t understand all this…

It always amuses me in the locker room at the gym to hear all the middle aged men talk about sports teams and say “we did this” and “then we did that”.   How does sitting in over priced seats in a stadium or sitting at home with a six- or twelve- pack make this a “we” situation?  How are they part of the “team”?  What is their contribution to the effort?  Why are they so engaged?  Admittedly, many of them sound over paid, but that’s the only commonality with professional football players that I can see…

After being amused, I am quickly disturbed.

See, everyone gets all worked up and passionate about football games.  They know statistics and team histories going back decades.  Why don’t they get this way about politics and things things that really matter in peoples’ lives?  I know they don’t know their US history as well as their NFL history.  That is evident in their other conversations.  They will challenge each other on sports facts, but blindly accept everything Faux News has to throw out there.  I don’t understand this…

Is it so important to escape into this fantasy of being part of the team?  What drives this behavior?   Has everyone become so disgusted with politics and the inequalities in everyday life that they just want to let it all go and ignore it?  Is this just another excuse not to think about the “real world” and to hide in a false kinship of sporting events?  Or are they just plain shallow…

I guess maybe all this relates to how, for some reasons, they don’t get worked up about steroid use in professional and college sports.  They assume everyone takes them and so it evens out in the end.  Do they assume that politicians are all the same and therefore it all evens out in the end?

That’s a dangerous assumption and one I fear is taking hold…