Editor’s note: in advance of this weekend’s U.S. Open, this is the first in a series of posts exploring the metaphorical relationship between golf and writing.
Golf can be a bit of a mystery to those who have never played. Mainly it probably appears (a) boring and (b) much easier than it really is. Writing can also look that way to the uninitiated, and in fact golf and writing have a lot in common.
Both are solitary, addictive pursuits of an ultimately unreachable perfection. How, you ask, is golf solitary, what with all the crowds and the playing partners and the caddies in the pro game, let alone the beer-imbibing camaraderie-filled version more common to hackers like me? First because, even when you’re betting (thanks to a handy little invention called the handicap system) you’re always pretty much competing against yourself. Second, golf is intensely mental in its requirements – you have to try to remain calm and make measured decisions in the face of literally infinite small disasters and somehow shake off the feelings of deep depression and self-abuse that can accompany them: golf looks so doable and yet it’s so insanely difficult – again, like good writing (watch Tiger Woods: his menacing rage after a poor swing is always transformed in the space of half a minute into what I can only call a fierce serenity of absolutely purposeful concentration as he prepares for the next shot)
. For comparison, think about those blues you get when you receive back your dissertation draft all marked to hell by your advisor — it’s really hard to stop moping and continue sometimes.
The mental pressure in golf results in large part from the fact that one spends drastically more time thinking about hitting shots than actually executing them (as writing takes so much longer than reading). A swing takes about a second; it can take you ten minutes to find your wayward shot in the bushes, as cac.ophony blogmaster Luke Waltzer can tell you. And what does one ponder while walking from tee to ball or lining up a putt? Where are my feet? Is my posture right? Am I standing too close or too far from the ball? Should I try under or over those trees? Is my grip too tight or too loose? Am I keeping my left arm straight? Am I keeping my head down? (Yes, simply watching the ball proves to be very, very difficult.) Full swing? Half swing? Wind direction? Topography of the green? Location of water? (It pulls putts toward it if it’s sizable.) These are just a few questions that go into every shot.
The key of course, like with writing, which has its own army of minutia to consider in each sentence, is, through practice and patience, to make as much of this as possible automatic. If you never spend time either writing or reading, each comma and each “its” vs. “it’s” decision can be a tiresome burden. If you never spend time either writing or reading, then it can be hard to even know where you went wrong – just like in golf, merely figuring out what to work on to improve can be an extraordinarily daunting propect all its own.
This Thursday the United States Open begins at the beautiful Torrey Pines Golf Course in California, where almost every hole offers up a vista of the Pacific framed by those craggy little west coast tress that look so picturesque against an evening sunset. So we will take the opportunity this week to talk about where golf meets communication/writing. I encourage everyone to tune in to watch a bit of the action and then (consistent with public safety) to grab a club and try to hit a ball where you’re aiming – beware: it’s as easy to get hooked as it is to slice. (Also, everyone interested in pinnacles of human achievement should consider taking time just to witness Tiger – in golf he’s Bird or Jordan, he’s Gretsky, he’s Ted Williams or Dimagio, he’s Faulkner or Dickinson, he’s Rembrandt; he’s someone your grandkids will have heard about.)
Fore!
I truly had never thought of Golf as akin to writing. But Ryan you have begun to change my perception of what I originally thought of as a boring and rather elitist past time.
Reply to Suzanne
No one is saying it's not elitist.
great post, Ryan. Let's add golf to the list of useful metaphors. I've found that asking students come up with metaphors for writing and flesh them out a bit is a very good exercise towards demystifying writing. I have never heard golf before though cooking, baking, and sculpting show up often.
Reply to Mikhail
It was ungentlemanly for the author to reference the trials and tribulations of my game, for which there is a poetic nickname: Long and Wrong. I'll just respond to Suzanne's comment by noting that there's absolutely nothing elite about Ryan's swing, or the language he uses on the course.
Reply to Luke
Thank you Luke, I pride myself on being at one with the language of the people.
Seriously though, I'm glad that Suzanne (and Mikhail) mentioned the elitist question about golf. It's a common perception, but only partly true. In the movies all the courses are beautiful country clubs where people are dressed expensively, are white as the driven snow, have black caddies, are all male and mostly rich. Golf, is, compared to some other sports — say, playing soccer in a yard — relatively expensive. So it's fair to say that if you're poor you will have less opportunity to play. Also, golf is in many respects a strange bastion of old-school sexism — hearing something like "$%^&*! I'm hitting the ball like a woman today!" is totally unremarkable on a golf course; a putt you leave short will get you called "Alice." But in other respects golf is impressively integrated and accessible. If you play on a public course in NY (the vast majority of golfers everywhere play on public courses for $15-40 per round) you will encounter firemen, plumbers, school teachers, bartenders, lawyers, retired military men, bouncers, freelance writers, computer geeks, insurance men and young people on summer vacation — all in every variety of skin color, nationality, even language. Go to a golf course anywhere and you'll get a pretty decent cross section (though, again, not gender-wise) of the town or city you're in.
Reply to Ryan
So instead of Elitist I could say something else, which I wonder, would it have gotten as much of a response…?
Reply to Suzanne
So when is the first annual BLSCI summer golf tournament?
Reply to Yukiko
Great idea Yukiko!
Mikhail…? Here's the link to a course in Bklyn that accepts events.
Reply to Ryan
I will be playing a round of Father’s Day golf this Sunday, during which time I plan to conduct careful research on the questions raised in this conversation. Thanks, Ryan, for introducing this perceptive analogy. I just hope my golf game doesn’t rub off on my writing technique–if so, my dissertation is in big trouble.
Reply to Tom
Oy caramba, how can we even think about golf when the FIFA World Cup is going on. The World Cup people! That’s football. That’s right, football, not soccer. I said it! Poland is playing Croatia on the 16th. It is very hard to be writing while your team is on:) But how about this writing analogy: unlike in solitary golf, it is the team that matters here. Success in writing depends on the “team “ as well. Think of it that way: peer review, multiple edits by many people, many hours spend with a helpful communication fellow. And in a longer view: good writers are made by the “team” assembled through your life: the teachers which cared about your writing, the authors you love, whose books are like family members, writing mentors, etc.Ultimately though, one thing that matters the most is being able to yell: “Gooooaaaaaaaallllll
Reply to Agnieszka
Eurocentrism alert! The World Cup is in South Africa in 2010… the European Championships are happening now, and the Dutch are looking fantastic.
Reply to Luke