Golf

The other day I was roaming around the TV dial. For young people who may find that phrase unfamiliar, there was a time before now when everything wasn’t streamed on demand and consumed on social media; where people looked through a digital TV guide or changed channels incessantly to select something to watch from a list of live offerings. Instead of selecting one program, people kind of roamed around from channel to channel watching bits and pieces of different things, usually to avoid commercials. Some people surfed the channels ( ‘channel surfing’ was a common term for what I’m describing and was considered a cool way of phrasing it, for a time) just to pass time and not commit to one specific show or movie or event. I still do it from time to time, though the experience is a little different on a streaming devices that have the same content but no longer have numbers associated with each channel. There was comfort in knowing that a channel was associated with a number, and even that the number for broadcast networks was different by region. It gave the whole thing some much needed ballast. The point is; what was my point?

My point is that I wasn’t in the mood for anything specific. I was open to whatever the programmers of the legacy cable and broadcast channels had on tap for me. The problem with my strategy is it’s hard to commit to anything once I’ve found something suitable. There is always the idea that something else, better than whatever I’m watching, is available on one of those other channels. It nags at me, eats away even, and forces me to keep seeking something better. Life is a lot like channel surfing when you think about it. There is probably an arcane academic treatise somewhere in that nugget.

I finally settled into a decent enough show. It didn’t ask much of me and I didn’t have to pay full attention to follow the thin plot. I could watch with limited attention. When a commercial break came I reached for the dial, remote, whatever you want to call it (dial is an old timey, pre-remote, device used to change channels on the television itself, and I’m using here to refer to a digital device used to change channels and control volume from a distance), and cycled through a number of channels before landing on a golf tournament broadcast. Now I hate golf. I hate playing it and watching it even more. I’d be hard pressed to think something more boring. This time I was a little different. I was captivated by the anthropological elements of the broadcast. It made me look at golf and really assess why I hate it so much. That’s where I came up with the following list, as I imagine an ethnographer would, if they hated golf and were embedded within golf culture, or this simulacrum of it, to catalog and understand it in deeper way.

1. I hate the way golf announcers talk about the beauty and design of different courses. Players do this as well. What I see is roughly the same eighteen hole circuit cut into what would otherwise be pristine nature or sandwiched into the middle of an exurb of gaudy McMansions. They all seem to cherish the most elite and exclusive courses over all others, described in terms of beauty instead of privilege. I think there is a weird correlation with exclusivity and perceived beauty: the courses the average person has no chance of accessing are deemed beautiful because the tastemakers of the sport say so.
2. I hate how it’s a niche sport but somehow manages to be everywhere. It’s like luxury clothing. A tiny sliver of people play the game or shop at ultra high end stores, and the general public is forced to follow it, albeit from the margins, because it appeals to our sense of striving, and it has its own value logic that is divorced from the way the regular economy works. Everything about it is expensive so it doesn’t need very many customers to flourish.
3. I hate how the clothes, which in any normal non-elite context, would feel foreign or bizarre, but in our everyday lives pass as normal. A person could be wearing the slacks, polo shirt with elite crest (a signifier, I presume to others in the know, of courses someone has played or even more impressively, belongs to), and cap combo to work, a restaurant, shopping, or doing nothing at all in public and it would be acceptable. What I see is odd colors and what in effect is a sports uniform. If I decided to wear shorts, knee-high socks, and a jersey out to a bar people would wonder if I’d just finished a soccer game, and not selected that particular ensemble because its part of my public identity. I would look crazy. The same applies for many other sports uniforms.
4. I hate that we have reverence for the best players even though the pool of people they’re ostensibly competing against is very small. It’s like being good at water polo or squash or fencing or rowing. The people are the best of a mostly elite group of people who’ve ever had the opportunity to put in the time and massive monetary investment into getting good. Most people don’t know or care who the best water polo player is, and I find it curious that many know about the best golfers.
5. I hate the way announcers whisper during broadcasts. The main announcers are in a booth far away from most of the live action. They are not going to impact play by speaking in a normal, intelligible voice. It’s a choice they’ve made, which to me is a way of reinforcing for the audience the special nature of whatever they’re watching. The audience is made to think they are watching something historic, something that can almost speak for itself, and the little talk track of inane statistics and personal insights is secondary to that act of god the audience is witnessing on screen. There is a man or woman tapping a ball into a hole on perfectly manicured stretch of grass; kneel and pay your respects to that awesomeness of the divine moment.

After compiling this list I surfed for another hour or so, then turned off the television and found something better to do.