This morning I will be
shedding one of my most tightly guarded secrets. In twenty-four years of preaching--giving
sermons and chapel talks, I have never preached on this subject. Never,
not once. Even people who know me
well have never heard me speak of this personal obsession. It’s my little secret. Here it is:
I am fascinated by the game of golf.
Ok, I spoke of it once before in 2013, then went back into hiding like
an FBI witness. Where this passion began
exactly, I don’t know; but it has been coming on strong since the late
1990s. Maybe it was when the novelist
John Updike, one of my favorite authors, said that sports writing got better
the smaller the ball. The smaller the ball, the better the writing. I was intrigued, instantly. Baseball sports writing is good, but golf
writing is even better, I’ve discovered.
The game appeals to my perfectionist side, but then it explodes this way
of thinking, almost completely. If you
are swinging a golf club, you cannot be a perfectionist...without going
crazy. The golf swing has so many moving
parts—it’s like trying to keep trying to keep fifty ping pong balls underwater
all at once. It’s so simple, and
impossible, at the same time.
When people ask me if
I play, I always say no. No, I don’t. I’m just a friend of the game—a fan, a golf
intellectual perhaps. I look at the game
from the perspective of a writer, like Updike; with detachment, appreciation,
and a nose for irony. But the truth is I
secretly play. My swing is awful, but it
is mine. I am a hazard to myself. It is a little like becoming really
interested in someone because they don’t
like you, or they have rejected you.
That’s golf for me, a fickle and capricious lady who tortures me, and
turns the screws. For what it’s worth, I
follow the men in the PGA tournaments, but I prefer the Ladies Tour. I actually watch women’s golf more than
football, basketball, and baseball seasons combined. Yes, I’ll say it, their clothes are fabulous, and they can really play. The outfits often match the caddy (always a
man) with the lady in charge.
So what do I like
about golf? I already mentioned that I
like the clothes, and this is true for both the men and women. For me, it’s the way in which perfectionism
and realism, the ideal and the real, collide in the most beautiful of
settings. A well made golf course is a
work of art, and yet the artist is still nature herself. But the real collision of the ideal and the
real is in the mind of the golfer just before the swing. The mental game is everything in golf. I don’t have it, but I know its ring of
truth.
I took my daughter
Beatrice, who was eleven years old at the time, to her first tournament several
years ago, just before school started.
We went to the Barclays Tournament played at Liberty National Golf
Course, a course along the New York Harbor, and just under the shadow of the
Statue of Liberty. Beatrice loved the
Barclays Tournament, in particular the choice to go wherever you want to go,
and to watch whatever you want to watch.
There is so much to see: from people watching—lots of fashion choices to
study--to the animals on the course in a peaceable kingdom. Turtles, herons, hawks. Like many children, she was mesmerized by the
errant shots. These are shots that go wildly off course, and often into the
crowd. This is also one of my favorite
parts of the experience as well, the collision of perfectionism and realism, the moment when everything goes wrong. Within ten minutes of arriving at the
Barclays, a golfer hit a ball at least a hundred yards off course. The ball landed in the food court, next to a
pretzel stand and a line for the beer concession. I didn’t have to worry about my daughter
being bored; she was hooked by the crazy physics of it all.
A professional golfer
hitting a shot wildly out of bounds is schadenfreude for the crowd. I used a word there: schadenfreude. There is no
direct English translation of the German, but the word means something like
“pleasure (or glee) in response to the misfortune of others.” One of the most disturbing human tendencies
is the real pleasure we get from the mistakes of other people. As the writer Gore Vidal once said: “It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail.” But in golf, schadenfreude goes in surprising
directions; it changes shape, becomes something very different.
Let’s go back to the
errant shot that can give the crowd so much pleasure. Let’s find where the little white ball
actually landed.
The crowd knows more
about the shot than the player, as caddie and pro make their way to the
gathering spectacle, the new station of life after the disastrous tee shot. The
children are ecstatic, so happy—it’s
like an Easter egg hunt, except you can’t touch the magical egg. You’ll be stupefied
if you touch it (Harry Potter reference there).
In many cases, the spectators help the golfer locate the ball if it’s in
the woods or tall grass. Is it pleasure
the crowd is feeling? Sure, you can see
its gleeful ripples, but there is something else as well. People
deeply identify with the golfer.
There is humor, but there is also a swelling compassion. Everyone knows all about mistakes; and here
comes the so-called celebrity, reduced to the common man, having to join the
peanut gallery. No other sport has the
player enter the crowd like the sport of golf, to play an actual shot. Caddie, golfer, and marshals give stage
direction to create a pocket for the shot, opening outward, towards the new
target for the golfer. The caddie, who
is much like the medieval squire, dutifully marches off the new, unusual
yardage in nobody's book. That is, he takes a walk to the flag, if that’s where
the golfer is aiming, and he then walks back, carefully counting his
steps. It all takes time; it is not over
fast. Though the crowd loves the
reduction, the humbling moment--the humiliation, they are all pulling for the amazing recovery. The recovery shot is right after the shot out
of bounds. Sometimes the golfer ends up
in better position than he or she would have been had nothing gone wrong. Everyone is rooting for the golfer because
everyone identifies with the mistake. I
saw Phil Mickelson early in the same summer, at the Firestone Country Club in
Akron, Ohio, hit a ball straight off a tree trunk, after already being out of
bounds. The crowd, the golfer, and I all had to scatter together to avoid the
ricochet. And we got to do it all over
again, in nearly the same spot. It made
the crowd love Phil even more. That guy
hits some crazy shots. And he is also
crazy good.
So, back at the Barclays, Beatrice
will never forget the shot a golfer named Jason Kokrak hit a hundred yards off
course. It was her introduction to the
sport. From the pretzel and beer stands
with hundreds of new friends around him, Kokrak then hit a recovery shot to
within ten feet of the hole. I had never
heard of Jason Kokrak, and I watch golf every weekend. I looked him up on the leaderboard after the
hole. Was he about to lose his tour
card? Was he on the edge of a nervous
breakdown? Was it time to find a new
career, maybe selling real estate or life insurance? Maybe go to divinity school? Jason Kokrak was in the top twenty of the
Barclays Playoff. He was having a good day at the office.
All of us are going to
hit shots out of bounds. I do it every
day. We make mistakes, sometimes big
ones. If you are not used to failing at
something, you haven’t tried anything very hard. But the disastrous shot doesn’t have to
define you. It doesn’t define your
worth, or your abilities, or your future.
It’s actually when you join the human race. But the very next moment—the recovery
shot--may very well define your character forever. How you respond to ordinary adversity is when
your character is forged.
So what does the gospel of Jesus
Christ have to say about recovery shots?
Here’s what Jesus has to say about the wayward sinner, and the mistakes
we all make:
“’Which one of you, having a hundred sheep and
losing one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go
after the one that is lost until he finds it?’
‘Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep that was lost.’
‘Or what woman having ten silver coins, if she
loses one of them does not light a lamp, sweep the house, and search carefully
and find it? When she has found it, she
calls together her friends and neighbors saying, ‘Rejoice with me, for I have
found the coin that I had lost.’ ‘Just
so, I tell you, there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one
sinner who repents.’”
It is clear from Jesus
that God loves recovery shots. To repent
is literally to turn around; to choose a new target of wisdom and morality, to
go for the right flag. God cares for us
most deeply when we are out of bounds, when we have run off the map of how we
think our lives are supposed to go.
Anybody can handle success. How
you handle a big mistake or a major personal failure are the moments when you
discover your faith, and the size of your heart. Courage is fear turned inside out, and the
recovery shot may be the most remarkable shot you have ever hit. You will find, in some cases, that you are in
a better position than you would have been had you never made a mistake. This is
the moment of grace; and we get a chance to participate with God’s grace
and become stronger at the most painful or embarrassing moments on the course
of life. Jesus says there is greatest
joy in heaven when one person does this.
This is because the recovery shots are the moments when we develop
compassion for other people. We get out
of our own heads and really learn to love each other. It is the moment when we reverse the
schadenfreude of Gore Vidal’s quotation.
“It is not enough that I succeed. Others must succeed too.”
This is Kent after six weeks of
school in our river valley. People are
hitting shots out of bounds every day.
Tee shots sail into the river, or off the chapel facing. They land behind dormitories, or roll past
the mail room into the student center. Oops, that one’s going in Macedonia Creek. It’s in the hazard. You’re going to have to take a drop. The disaster does not define you, the gospel
tells us. But the recovery shot, the one
that God is watching closely, can change your life; and it can land right by
the hole, making you richer for the wayward journey. It can be a great show here at Kent, watching
other people make mistakes. Or: your own recovery shot can change
how you see yourself and everyone around you, and their fundamental worth as
children of God. It is not enough
anymore that I must succeed. Others must
succeed too. Have a great seventh
week. I’ll see you on the fairway.
