Playing the Role
Mini-tour golf and lessons from Sociology 101.
Back in the 30s, Einstein would give lectures at the Princeton physics lab from time to time. The Institute for Advanced Study, where he was on faculty, held no classes and awarded no degrees, being purely a research institution. So Einstein would come to Princeton to teach. As the university expanded, the physics lab moved south, and its former building has been converted to a student center. But Einstein’s lecture hall, Room 302, remains in use. Returning from my COVID year off, my first lecture, Sociology 101, was held in this hall.
Two kinds of professors teach introductory classes: those who resent outsiders to the department looking for easy As, and those who welcome them for a survey of what their discipline has to offer. Tim Nelson is of the second sort. He serves as director of undergraduate studies in an unbuttoned dress shirt over a tee. He tells you that, statistically speaking, students who sit in the front row of lecture do better on exams. And you listen, because it’s not a plea but a kind suggestion. He seems happy for non-sociologists to leave his class with the simple gifts of a cross-departmental education: a rudimentary understanding of the discipline, a subtly refined intuitive sense, and one or two concepts embedded in their head for the long haul.
For me, the concept that stuck was the theory of “dramaturgy.” Popularized by Erving Goffman in the late-50s, the sociological world is considered, metaphorically, as a theater production. People in a society assume roles and portray characters. Just as “river bank” and “bank teller” refer to two fundamentally different “banks”, people are given different “parts” in different social situations. In this sense, the self and the society are continually recreated in service of a greater theater, and people genuinely become the results of their interactions as they learn their roles and how to play them.
I never much liked this idea. In my written work, I preferred to argue for other modes of thinking: that a situation was better understood as a conflict between two interests, or as parties making rational choices to maximize their utility. These preserved a sense of self-determination, while dramaturgy seemed like a helpless submission to the whims of the environment. It’s more convenient to consider ourselves as individual, free, and responsible. But, admittedly, this sometimes feels like saying a financial institution and a riverbed are the same. The context does seem to matter. Maybe that’s why it’s stuck with me so long.
Ask anyone around pro golf for their advice, and they’ll usually give three pieces of insight; one broad, such as “play your own game” or “figure out what works for you”; one hyper-specific, from personal experience, like to put an airtag in your bag to track it on flights; and last, universally, to play as much competitive golf as you can. Which is why I drove down to Orlando last week and played in the FPGTour’s Christmas Classic at Wekiva Golf Club, the final event on the 2024 mini tour calendar.
I’d worked hard going into the event, and I felt great about my game. I’d dialed in my lag-putting distance control and developed this high, spinny chip that seemed to play about anywhere. As it turns out, Wekiva was in tough shape. The greens stimped around seven, and balls around the greens usually found themselves in a sandy soil mixture, rendering the bounce effectively useless. It was too tight off the tee to make use of driver, my strength -- or two-iron, for that matter. I hit a good number of five irons off par fours. It didn’t set up great for the game I’d brought.
But I’d done the work off the course too. I’d been building up my confidence, training my belief muscle. Instead of making rational assessments of my game and letting those determine what I thought, I’d let my confidence come first. I am a top player. I can beat anyone. I am going to win. Through 27 holes, I hung around par, just outside the money, and a bunch of putts had hung on edges. I made the turn with a full head of steam. I was going to make a charge on the back, cash a solid check, and close out 2024 as the winner I was.
I bogeyed the 10th, a par five, after a snipey tee ball. I scrambled for par on 11 before bogeying 12 and 13. I three putt for bogey on 15. By then the four-footer I had for par on 17 didn’t matter much, but I put a good stroke on it anyways, because that’s what professionals do. It bumped right a foot off the face and missed. My ten-footer for birdie on the last caught a lot of hole and settled three inches behind it. Getting back to the clubhouse to sign my card, I watched the leaders come in, playing the last few holes to see who’d go home with my money.
I’ve come home for Christmas, and I write this from my desk in my childhood bedroom, a room that’s been mostly the same since I was four years old. I’ve rearranged the furniture once in a while, and we took out a closet about a decade ago. But I’ve slept in the same room, used the same bathroom across the hall, worked at the same desk, and looked out the same window on the same dogwood tree as long as I can remember. My whole life has happened in this room.
My parents are in the process of redoing the house. My dad, who, when he works from home, sits at a desk in the basement, is getting a real office. The laundry room, also in the basement, is moving upstairs, a shorter walk to the bedrooms. And so the new laundry room will take over my bathroom, and a new bathroom will replace my current closet. It’s a big change, for me. By now, I can picture the inconsistencies in each shower tile where I washed off every loss, breakup, and bad day. When I was younger, I hung a sheet in that closet to hit pitch shots into during the winter. Earlier this week, the dogwood I climbed most days after school, long sick and dying, finally came down.
I don’t think about this newsletter while I’m playing. But it crossed my mind, as I watched the leaders play into the clubhouse, that I had planned to write about my long-awaited breakthrough, my first professional check, how I was coming into the next year. As I let my mind wander, I thought back to SOC101, dramaturgy, actors on a stage. Once again, I was someone who paid for golf instead of being paid. I’ve played competitive golf a while, am familiar with the setting. I’ve gotten to know this role well. It feeds me lines and finds a way to put me in my place. I don’t want to play it anymore.
The thing about newsletters is that they come out on Thursday, whether you’ve wrapped your head around the takeaway or not. I feel stuck in the same role, wanting a way out. By contrast, at home, I’m uncomfortable with the change, wanting to hold onto the constants in my life. From these two facts, it seems that change is both uncomfortable and necessary. Back in SOC101, I never liked the stage theory — it made me feel disconnected from my own will — but it was never a social law, just a means of description. And so I’ll change roles. The “how” of the matter is to be determined, but it’s a lovely time to be a week away from a new year.
Happy to have found this. Great story