Thursday, June 16, 2011
Even now, there are faint reminders of the calluses I cultivated from my adventures in golf, each of them a rough, fleshy testament to my particularly violent backswing. But while the battle scars may still be there, my backswing certainly isn’t, nor is my frontswing, my leftswing, or my rightswing. Indeed, any capital I established during my tenure as a terrible golfer has dissipated, leaving me the very embodiment of tabula rasa, with apologies to John Locke. Unless, of course, you enjoyed golf as much as you did philosophizing, Locke, in which case fuck you.
The last time I had any meaningful exposure to the sport was in Augusta–a different job, a different era, and, at the time, what I thought would be a fitting capstone to my dalliance with golf. I mean, even haters aren’t immune to the splendor of the Masters. My own clubs would languish in the hallway closet, never to see sunlight again until, hundreds of years later, archaeologists would unearth the entire set, minus the 3-iron, and marvel over what purpose these misshapen bits of metal could’ve possibly served. Weaponry? Implements of torture? I would tell them yes, yes to both counts.
It doesn’t look like these clubs will have to wait for centuries, though, because they’re going to see the light of day next week. And I suppose I’ll have to join them at the range, where I’ll be meeting the Professor for the first time in months. Truth be told, I’ve been secretly thinking about getting back into the game for a while now. It’s a skill that continues to be notably absent from my corporate toolkit, but as much as I’d like to fill that gap, the road to proficiency is painful. The plan is to approach golf from a different, calmer angle. No more violent backswings. The way I see it, I’m not going to invest time or money in a postgraduate degree, which frees up two years and a small fortune to pool into a wholly different kind of education. Let us call it a cross-disciplinary competency in walking a lot, swinging at shit, and anger management.