Golfpocalypse
I took 12 stitches to the head for golf before I even loved it
Apiwan Borrikonratchata
Golfpocalypse is a weekly collection of words about (mostly) professional golf with very little in the way of a point, and the Surgeon General says it will make you a worse person. Reach out to The Golfpocalypse with your questions or comments on absolutely anything at shane.spr8@gmail.com.
I sometimes get a little sad that my six-year-old daughter isn't gung-ho for golf yet. I have visions of spending hours of quality time together for the rest of our lives in a way that doesn't involve screens, but when I take her out to the course, she likes to drive the cart and not much else. I don't want her to be a professional or anything crazy like that—even on the off chance that she had the talent, my years of covering sports have left me convinced that most fathers of women who make it pro in golf and tennis are psychopaths who damage their relationships with their kids along the way—but I would enjoy being a golf dad. I don't push it, though, and that's partly because I know it would be futile, and partly because I remember my own childhood, when I also thought that golf was incredibly boring. How can I blame her?
My stepdad is a diehard golfer, and at various times during my childhood he would try to get me to play. I wanted absolutely nothing to do with it—I was fully into baseball, basketball and football, and the entire extent of my relationship with golf was that it would piss me off when he put it on TV on Sundays instead of the NFL. The very few times I hit on the driving range, the difficulty just reinforced my instinct that this game sucked. It took until I was past 30 for me to understand the appeal and then fall for it completely, but in my younger years, while most of my Digest colleagues were already sporting single digit handicaps, I was a consummate hater.
Once, when I was about 9 or 10, my stepdad convinced me to come to the driving range, and the only way he could get me to agree was to let me stand out in the field and catch his 9-irons with a baseball glove. Now, if you've ever been to a driving range before, this may sound strange to you, because you are probably used to many people hitting at once. If you saw a child standing 120 yards away shagging flies with a glove, you would probably alert CPS. But at Whiteface Golf Club in Lake Placid, frequently there would be only one golfer there, so my stepdad's system was to bring one of those red shag bags with an aluminum tube, hit the balls, then go collect them one by one and repeat. So when I went to catch flies for the first and only time, there was only one person hitting at me.
As it turned out, one was enough. What I remember from that morning is that a golf ball hit with a 9-iron is much harder to judge in the air than a baseball, and I was way off on the first few chances. The other thing I remember is that my glove had criss-cross webbing in the pocket, with four holes in the corners that were small enough to ensure a baseball couldn't go through, but perfectly sized for a golf ball. My contention is that when I finally settled under one of my stepdad's shots, the ball flew through one of those holes directly into my forehead. It may be that I missed it entirely—I can't prove anything. What I do know is that the ball hit me directly on the forehead, and in a split second I was on the ground covered in blood.
Oddly, it didn't really hurt, although the sheer amount of blood on my hands was alarming. My stepfather's immediate concern was that he'd have to tell my mom, who was nearby playing tennis. We drove to the courts, she evaluated the situation, and then we were off to the hospital, where 12 stitches put my head back together. I had to wear a helmet when I played baseball for a couple weeks that summer and I still remember being stuck in right field, seeing a line drive come my way, sprinting to get it, the too-big helmet rotating on my head, and then dropping the ball.
I still have the scar just above my right eyebrow, though it's faint now (it kind of looks like half a swastika, which for my money is much better than a full swastika). The real lasting effect, though, is the metaphorical pattern this set for my entire golf-playing life. I should have seen it coming that day. You start out resistant, you grudgingly relent, everything seems extremely difficult, and just when you think you have things figured out, you get plonked in the head. But somehow, despite the pain, you keep coming back. That's pretty much how things still go today, with slightly less blood.
ONE TOUR THOUGHT, OFF WEEK EDITION
1. I didn't watch an ounce of PGA Tour golf this weekend, due to the fact that I was busy winning my friends' Ryder Cup that I wrote about last week. You will be delighted to know that Team C&C (Carolinas and Canada) defeated Team World 14.5 - 5.5 for our second blowout victory in a row, and that I personally went 4-0 to improve my lifetime record to 12-3-1. I am basically Ian Poulter. In terms of the Tour, good for Patton Kizzire, but it's hard for me to focus on anything but the abysmal TV ratings, which were a major "yikes" even in the context of having to go up against the NFL. I'm starting to think that perhaps a schism in the professional game is bad! If only someone could have seen this coming...
Shameless boasting aside, I am far from the only person to have "called" this, and unlike many, I think the situation is way too complicated to throw easy blame around. I feel the same urge to crucify a scapegoat, but when I get practical, it's hard to imagine anyone doing anything differently as the mess played out. And at this point, I'm not even convinced that a deal is going to change anything. Obviously reuniting is the best possible fix in a bad situation, but it feels like the damage may have been done when it comes to the viewing public. Anecdotally, the civilians I encounter—and by "civilians" I mean people not in the media and not pretending to be the rogue alternative media on Twitter—have an attitude of exhaustion about the whole thing, not dissimilar to how many people feel about politics. They don't even muster the energy to talk specifics anymore ... they're just stuck somewhere between disgusted and apathetic. If you hit people with enough bullshit for a long enough time, they eventually default to "everyone here sucks." I hope I'm wrong, but I'm not sure you can walk that feeling back, deal or no deal.
THE ABSOLUTE IRONCLAD LOCKS OF THE WEEK
The Golfpocalypse is not a gambling advice service, and you should never heed anything written here. Better picks are here.
Career Record: 4-28. TWO WINS IN ONE WEEK!!! Last week, we got both Team USA in the Solheim Cup (no, this wasn't a cheapie, shut up), and Steve Stricker on the Champions Tour. These picks are officially on fire, and I am advocating very strongly for my editors to remove the disclaimer above as this is now sound financial advice.
The PGA Tour is off this week, so we begin with the DP World Tour's BMW PGA Championship, where I'm riding with Rory McIlroy. He almost won the Irish Open last week before he got Reverse Hojgaarded, and the Euro PGA is exactly the kind of tournament that's pretty high profile without being very high profile that Rory would win in a year like this. It's impressive, but almost a little sad too, sort of like winning the Wells Fargo for the umpteenth time just before the PGA. It's screaming Rory to me.
Remember how Scottie Scheffler couldn't quite win on the PGA Tour, then went HAM at the Whistling Straits Ryder Cup and immediately started winning everything in sight for the next three years? I'm going to take a gamble that Rose Zhang's 4-0 Solheim Cup record is going to jump-start her in the same way, starting with this week's Kroger Queen City Championship.
The old fellas are in Pebble Beach! I'll go with Steven Alker here, because he's from New Zealand and my understanding is that New Zealand is entirely composed of hobbit mountains and beaches. I feel like Alker is more of a beach guy. Michael Campell? Hobbit mountain all the way. But Alker's a gentleman of the sand.
At the LIV Golf team championship, I'm taking Old Rabid Foxes GC to win narrowly over The Banjo Bunch.
THE "DUMB TAKE I KIND OF BELIEVE"
The holes should be bigger. Like, twice as big. Enough so that you see a lot more 60-foot bombs go down, and that 5-footers are almost automatic. Greens in regulation should be more valuable, chips and long putts should be super-emphasized, and short dinky putts should have less of an outsize influence on the round. People who make short putts routinely are too smug, and we must punish their arrogance.
THE READER STORY OF THE WEEK
Andrew B. has a solid golf injury story that doubles as a terrific dad story, and I'm running it because pretty much every other response I got to the prompt of 'tell me your worst golf injury' involved horror stories of people literally losing eyes:
One of my earliest golf memories doesn’t involve a great shot or winning a match, it’s the time I got taken out by a mini-golf putter. I was five, and my dad took my two older brothers (aged seven and nine) and I to our local driving range and mini-golf course. It started like a normal day, hit some balls aimlessly, and then headed over to mini-golf.
We started playing mini-golf, but my brothers weren’t just playing. They were full-on pretending to be Power Rangers, swinging their clubs like they were taking down bad guys instead of trying to get the ball in the hole. As the youngest, I was mostly just trying to keep up, totally unaware of the danger I was walking into.
And then it happened. I stepped right into one of my oldest of their wild swings, and bam, club to the face. I didn’t even have time to react before the putter sliced my eyebrow open. Blood was everywhere, and I stood there, stunned, while my brothers freaked out. But my dad? He was a surgeon, so instead of panicking, he was excited. This was his moment to shine. Forget the hospital, he could handle this himself.
My dad quickly grabbed my shirt and pressed it against my eye, telling me, “Let’s get home so I can fix you up.” No big deal. Just casually bleeding from my face while my dad, thrilled about using his new butterfly stitches, saw this as the perfect DIY project. So, off we went, my brothers looking guilty in the backseat while I sat there holding my shirt to my face, covered in blood.
When we got home, my dad set up shop in our living room. He carefully stitched me up, looking pretty proud of himself, while my brothers nervously hovered nearby. I ended up with a pretty gnarly scar on my eyebrow and a lifelong story to hold over my brothers’ head. And my dad? He still talks about those butterfly stitches like they were his crowning achievement.
Frankly, what is the point of having new butterfly stitches if you can't use them on your own flesh and blood?
Previously on Golfpocalypse: