1. I was finishing up another relaxing acrostic puzzle, keeping track of TATurner and Byrdman texting about the BMW Golf Championship being played near Owings Mills, MD (about 50 minutes north of Greenbelt).
They both agreed as the back nine got underway that Bryson DeChambeau and Patrick Cantlay had separated themselves from the rest of the field and that the tournament was a two player, head to head contest.
I decided to tune in.
Not only was I in the mood for some riveting golf action -- and boy howdy! were the next several hours of golf action ever riveting!
I tuned in for the action, but I also tuned in to watch the fascinating contrast in personalities and golfing styles between DeChambeau and Cantlay.
A brief digression: when I was a younger guy, golf writers used to fret that the PGA tour was becoming a "cookie cutter" tour, made up of players who all seemed to look alike and play similar games.
I never bought that analysis -- what was cookie cutter about Lee Trevino? Hale Irwin? Craig Stadler? Calvin Peete? Etc.
But, if that ever was a legitimate concern, the contrast between DeChambeau and Cantlay today crushes it.
DeChambeau is muscular, power swinging pulverizer of the golf ball. He is tightly wound, expressive of every thought and emotion he has on the golf course, both verbally and in his body language. As he makes his way around the course, chin forward, striding as if he's about to miss a train, he lets out cries bemoaning his outcast state, grimaces, talks to himself, cries out like Job to the golf gods, wondering why they treat him so unfairly, and, on the other hand, he relishes his shots when they go long and straight and openly expresses his joy when a crucial putt falls.
Is DeChambeau a complicated guy? I think he is. Is he kind of a mess? I think he is. Can I take my eyes off of him when he plays? No. I enjoy the way his power and length off the tee astonishes me and I never know what mini-meltdown or oddball reaction might happen next. With DeChambeau there's rarely a dull moment.
Patrick Cantlay, on the other hand, epitomizes the stoic, nearly expressionless golfer. Today, he was almost eerily focused, unrattled, it appeared, by all the times he was on the edge of this tournament's cliff, about to lose the tournament several times.
Watching Cantlay play golf is almost like watching old episodes of Shell's Wide World of Golf. He has a classic golf swing, aims to hit his drives straight, not mind-bogglingly long. On every driving hole today, Cantlay's drives dropped about forty yards shy of DeChambeau's. As a result, Cantlay has to hit longer clubs into the hole. While DeChambeau hits, say, his wedge, an unimaginably long ways, Cantlay is often hitting a six, seven, or eight iron into the green and watching him do so with such precision is thrilling.
Cantlay was not perfect today. He hit some wandering shots into the rough. In regulation, his tee shot off 17 splashed in the pond. His calmness, his focus, and his resolve steadied him though, and while DeChambeau missed makable putts that could have clinched him the tournament, Cantlay scrambled, recovered, and made clutch putt after clutch putt under intense pressure, and after 72 holes of play, the two players were tied.
In the playoff, the putter was a magic wand for Cantlay and a tire iron for DeChambeau. Cantlay survived hole after hole by steeling himself and dropping putts that kept him tied while DeChambeau missed putts. Cantlay stayed cool as he dropped these putts -- hardly a fist pump, no dances, barely a smile. Just the look of focus. DeChambeau was all expression and disbelief, sometimes gesturing with a wide sweep of his hand that he couldn't believe his putt broke the way it did, other times protesting to the heavens with grimaces for the injustices being imposed upon him, apparently by forces outside his control.
In the end, on the sixth (YES! SIXTH!) playoff hole, Cantlay sank a slightly uphill 18 foot putt for birdie. DeChambeau had hit his second shot well inside of Cantaly, but he missed his nine footer, culminating his day of suffering thanks to his shaky short game and unsteady putting.
2. I'm not being virtuous, I'm not angry, I don't feel judgmental, I don't want to yell at people, and I'm not being a martyr. The fact is that the recent surge of the delta variant and the low percentage of people vaccinated in the Silver Valley -- and the way the local hospitals are close to or over capacity (depending on the day) -- has led me to be cautious about where I go outside the home.
I cannot adequately express how grateful I am during this current surge in the virus for electronic communication.
For example, today, as happens every day, I had a great session of message exchanges on Messenger with Stu.
Later, I joined Byrdman and TATurner on the text machine as we watched the golf tournament together.
Honestly, the texting while watching is so much fun that sometimes it seems like we are in the same room together watching the golf action.
At one point, Byrdman declared that the tournament was now going to be mano a mano between DeChambeau and Cantlay and, when he dropped that Spanish phrase, I suddenly decided it was a perfect time to crack open one of my Full Sail Session beers: the Cerveza!
I cut myself a slight wedge of lime, popped open the Cerveza, and my enjoyment of watching golf and texting increased many fold.
Then, as the tournament never seemed like it would end, I cracked open my other two bottles of Cerveza -- I was crushing lagers now -- and I decided to also enjoy a couple of 2 oz shots of tequila.
What a perfect afternoon! Golf. Buddies on the text machine. Awesome lager beer. Sipping tequila. Total enjoyment.
Confining myself to quarters doesn't have to be so bad. Often, for me, it's really enjoyable.
3. So, I've been thinking a lot about doing all I can to keep anxiety at bay. I wrote about this yesterday.
Today I had a few moments when my mind traveled back to all those school years in the 1990s when Rita and I team taught philosophy and English composition.
The winter quarter focused on epistemology and it was the first time, thanks to philosophical skeptics like David Hume, that I confronted the idea that cause and effect might not be a reliable way of explaining what has happened or a predictor of what will happen.
I bring this up, not to argue philosophy, but to point out that often when, say, a friend tells another friend that they have been suffering depression or anxiety, the listening friend often responds, innocently enough, with the question, "What caused it?" or "What brought that on?"
Often the answer is nothing.
The depression or the anxiety just came over me.
It's puzzling because we put, legitimately, a lot of trust in knowing what we think we know through explaining it by causation.
But in the realm of moods, mood changes, being overwhelmed by anxiety or depression, we live with the impact, but often it's futile and can even be of little help to try to determine a cause or the cause.
No comments:
Post a Comment