Sights and Sounds: Dothan, AL
Some looser thoughts from midseason Q-School week.
Author’s Note: I’m playing Q School this week, and the final round is on Friday, publish day. Honestly, I don’t have the brain-space to sketch out and storyboard something this week. Bigger fish to fry, especially considering how hard the newsletters would bang if I qualified and was patching in from Edmonton this summer.
So I’m trying something new this week. I’m just going to write as the week goes on, day by day, and at the end I’ll send it. In lieu of the storyboarding, it’ll be a moment-to-moment series of vignettes as I’m able to put them together through the week. I’m calling it “Sights and Sounds,” and, if its successful, this is how I’ll produce things during tournament weeks. Cheers.
Editor’s Note[1]: As it turns out, this actually ended up on the long side. I’m not sure I should be surprised — the editing process, after all, is mostly taking things out. But yeah, it’s a stream-of-consciousness bit this week. Have fun!
To get to Dothan, AL from St. Simons, GA, you mostly take GA Route 122 due West. At some point, you leave GA-122 W and take US-221 S to US 129 N back to GA-122 W. I’m not sure why you don’t just take GA-122 W the whole way over — my generation doesn’t pay much attention to these things, because we grew up with a computer in our pockets that can calculate the fastest route between two points using real time traffic data, and we just stick it on the dash and do what it tells us. We don’t so much drive someplace as we follow a digital blue line for hundred yard increments and suddenly end up there.
Every long drive I’ve taken has felt different. Going to Jax or Savannah is easy, right up and down I-95, as with anything else up and down the coast. It’s a familiar interstate highway that feels like it’s getting you from point A to point B. Going to Orlando feels a little different, breaking west on I-4, and it really feels like going into the bowels of Florida — Orlando feels like what I’d imagine a French socialist imagines America to be when they say we have no culture besides strip malls and chain restaurants. The drive to Augusta just feels like driving through Anywhere, USA — although it left a bad taste in my mouth after I got a letter in the mail, that I got nabbed by one of those predatory speed trap cameras after they stick a “Speed Limit: 35” sign behind an overgrown tree to rake in out-of-state ticket revenue.
It’s a different flavor, going due west. It’s local knowledge that storms coming from the east tend to break up over I-95 — it’s a good 25 minutes from the coast, where I live, to the interstate. But you go straight under it, when you’re going west, and it feels like leaving the walls of some medieval city and out into the wild. Except this wild is farming supplies and peeling paint on the sides of houses, houses set back on long driveways to keep a little further away from passers-by. I’m not sure I can blame them. The floes of capital and investment and attention have drawn back from places like this, drawn back by people from where I’m from — honestly, by people like me. And the air even smells like it knows it as I pass through.
About 90 minutes in, somewhere around Hoboken, GA, I stopped to take a leak and grab something from the mini mart. I’ve been big on the Reeses Outrageous bar for a while, a six inch Reeses log with Reeses Pieces embedded in it. But, as tasty as they are, they make you feel pretty ill afterwards, so I’ve been looking into other options. A recent favorite: a bottle of milk. I’m sure the anti-milk people will be up in arms[2], but there’s something about a drive with a bottle of milk that just feels right, somehow, the way sunflower seeds just feel right. That you’ve found something nice and tasty to keep you busy on the road without pumping your body full of whatever latest food dye the Hershey company has come up with.
When I said I was going to Dothan for Q School, Paresh asked if I needed a gun. I told him I didn’t know. He asked if I wanted him to lend me one. I didn’t say anything. He asked if I knew how to use a gun. I told him I didn’t. He rescinded his offer to lend me a gun, but suggested he teach me one day. I agreed. I asked him if I’d be alright with my knife. He said I should be fine.
Going out into the parking lot, I noticed there was a man standing next to my car. He wore a black and white hat (probably for a racing company, if I had to guess) with electric green sunglasses on top. He was smoking a cigarette. He looked at me as if he wanted something.
Paresh has taught me the best way to avoid confrontation is to look confident enough not to fuck with. I’ve made a habit of puffing my chest out and setting my jaw a bit when I’m someplace I don’t quite trust. I didn’t quite trust this man. And so, while this part of me mean-mugged a bit while I opened my car door and made note of where my knife was in my pocket, the New Yorker in me, who keeps his eyes below head level to avoid acknowledging people at all, got a good look at the front of his shirt. It read:
“I’LL KEEP YOU IN THE TRUNK WHILE I HELP PEOPLE LOOK FOR YOU: DON’T TEST ME.”
I slipped into the car and backed out of my parking spot. Shifting from reverse into drive, I saw the man look around the rest of the parking lot, his next puff of the cigarette burning it down near the filter.
Dothan is “The Circle City,” and it’s not hard to see why: Routes 84, 431, and 231 form a continuous loop around town, so circular that I wonder why they’re designated as different roads. The food, Publix and Chipotle and Starbucks and Jersey Mikes, are all on the northwest spur. My hotel is on the west spur, eight minutes counterclockwise by US-231. RJT Highland Oaks, the site of this weeks PGA Tour Americas Midseason Q School, is 14 minutes away on the west spur.
I got to Dothan from the East, and so I drove about 200° of arc from the southeast over the north side of Dothan to the Chipotle. I was on my third podcast of the drive, the latest America This Week with Matt Taibbi. I find most political updates/commentary these days more upsetting than informative, and I’ve cut most of it out of my media diet. But Taibbi kept a spot on my plate for suggesting that bombing a country’s conventional air force doesn’t do much to inhibit its capacity for destruction when that country is a nuclear superpower, and such actions probably did more to tempt the apocalypse than bring about peace. If I’m going to insist on being somewhat informed about general goings-on (which I am, going to insist), then I’ll get it from a guy who’s platform is, first and foremost, anti-nuclear-war.
It's been oddly comforting. There are people out there trying really hard to prevent anyone nuking anyone right now. If I play good enough golf this week, I’ll get to travel around Canada playing golf; if not, I’ll travel around the southeastern US playing golf. There’s something October-1962-ish about it, that I’d feel pretty dumb if I was genuinely stressed about golf before being reduced to nuclear ash.[3]
At the hotel, I leaned on the front desk for a few minutes waiting for someone to help me get a key. When someone did show up, I was thinking about confidence — it’s a quality you project, either onto others or onto a golf course or onto yourself and your own doubts. It’s an outward-facing quality. A late-twenties guy rounded the corner and saw me, and it took him less than a second of confidence to get me from slightly-impatient to comfortable. He’d been doing laundry in the back, and he said he should’ve left a note to holler back down the hallway, and could he get a last name so he could get me out of here quickly — it’s the subtleties, the confidence, the we’re-understaffed-and-I’m-doing-two-jobs-here-and-it’s-the-two-of-us-against-corporate-to-hook-you-up-with-this-key.
It’s a universal skill, one that plays just as well in a boardroom or a dive bar. It’s the ability to convince whomever you’re talking to that you’re on the same side. It’s a reminder that there’s more options than “just doing my job” or “liberating you from your belongings in a gas station parking lot.” More than any of that, it’s a reminder that you can usually make the world a pretty good place for whoever’s standing in front of you, at least for a little while — and that the world’s usually not as bad as they’ll tell you if you don’t look too far past the fronts of your shoes.
Sometimes these jobs don’t overlap too well, golf and whatever I’m writing. Leaving my hotel room this morning, Tuesday, I gave the hotel maid a “how’s it going” on the way to the elevator. She responded:
“Good. A little tired, honestly. I have a dog and a bearded dragon at home.”
I desperately wanted to ask a follow up question. In part because it’s a damn compelling lede, on her part. And in part because she sounded like she was one of the people left behind by the digitization of socializing, and that she hadn’t gotten these sorts of things off her chest in a while. But I had to get a workout in quickly if I was going to fit it in before my practice round, so I had to get going.
As it stands, as I’m writing right now, we’ve been in our second weather delay of the day for two hours, so the practice round was going to be difficult anyways. Not to mention that they only announce further delays in 15 minute intervals, so we’re stuck here in the locker room with the perpetual hope that we’ll have a ball in the air in 20 minutes.[4] But I’m jumping ahead of the timeline.
You can do far worse than the Candlewood Suites in Dothan — it’s newish and mostly clean and I haven’t found any dried blood yet (shoutout Pensacola). It’s not, as my mom puts it, “one of the hotels corporate forgot about.” It’s a good hotel room with a bed and a desk and a shower and a kitchenette, and I feel I’m getting a good value for my $94/night.
But, generally speaking, hotel gyms fascinate me. I’m a professional athlete, and my trainer has access to any equipment I can imagine. When I go to the gym, I bring my own special handle for the cable machine, and I get frustrated that the dumbbells only go up to 60lbs.[5]
Here, in the hotel gym, there’s a sign that says, “NO SMOKING.” You have to assume that this sign is there for a reason. Meaning, that someone was smoking in this gym, requiring the hotel to inform its guests that this isn’t allowed.
There’s another sign that asks that you wipe down equipment after using it. A fair request in a gym. The wipes themselves were hidden in a corner, without a wipe sticking out the top of the dispenser. The first wipe I did manage to dig out was bone dry. Clearly there wasn’t much wiping going on — better to wipe down equipment both before and after using it.
The gym has: a treadmill, an elliptical, a yoga mat, one of the things you pedal with your feet but isn’t quite a bike, and some free weights. I’m usually a bike guy — more specifically, I find the fan bike does the job better than anything else. But I’m shocked that you all have managed to hide the elliptical from me for this long. The elliptical kinda slaps! I don’t have anything more insightful to say there, but consider me a new fan until I get back to my fan bike.
Author’s Note: I’ve been filling up my notes app all week, but man, I am gassed. It’s Thursday afternoon now. I haven’t written anything since Monday afternoon. And things are about to get a lot looser from here.
You might not know this about professional golf tournaments, but there’s a starter, there to hand you scorecards and inform you of local rules and generally keep things on time. But he’ll also announce your name. It’s just like a major championship, where your name gets announced and the crowd claps.
Except, at this level, there’s no crowd. So your name and hometown are announced, but just to you all, the players and caddies. Maybe someone’s dad.
The moment of truth comes after the first name is announced. About half the time, you’ll just watch him put the peg in the ground. But the other half of the time, by some unspoken consensus, we’ll clap for the guy. Then, when your name is called, they’ll clap for you.
It’s usually halfhearted, and it decays after four or five claps. But I’ve come to like it when it happens. We’re doing something, out here. We’re athletes. There’s something to celebrate, what we’re about to do. At its best, it’s a preview of the applause we’ll get when we’re on the first tee someplace big. But even at its worst, it’s a recognition that we’re out here. It’s odd. But it’s nice.
It’s Thursday evening, now. And, to be honest, I’m almost even too tired to watch the US Open. It’s oddly exhausting, playing tournament golf. It’s just golf. But it’s also a billion degrees here, and I have to be there an hour and a half early to get a full warmup in, and then it’s a 7500-yard golf course where I’m carrying my own bag, and it’s not not-hilly, and you really can’t take any time off while you’re out there. You’re mostly locked in. And, when you play badly, you go to the range to grab some swing videos for future reference, and you sit on the putting green for a while trying to find something.
So now I want to do what I did yesterday, in my attempt to be a little better at resting and recharging: binge watching Billions. Sidebar: I thought Billions was a bit of a cousin to Succession. I didn’t realize it was a soap opera with financial crimes. But it’s entertaining as hell, and it’s been nice to get off the golf course, lay down in bed, run my laptop to the hotel TV, and feel my brains start to ooze out my ears and onto the pillow.
There’s plenty to say about the way I’m playing. In short: everything I’ve been writing about has been working. You can get a lot done by pure visualization, and I’m hitting a lot of shots that are coming out of proper windows. That’s been really fun to see, and it’s a proof of concept of sorts. For years, I’ve been wondering, “how the hell do people who are worse than me and less knowledgeable and less talented keep beating me?” Now I know. They’re better visualizers.
It’s a bit more complicated — it’s not just literally seeing the yellow tracer in your head before you step into the ball and ripping it. There’s an execution part to it, being practiced to know how the ball will react off your face, knowing how to produce that consistently, etc. But there’s that more subjective, gooier, human part of golf that I’m just starting to learn.
Really, Michael would tell me that I’ve known how to do it for a long time — nobody gets this far in golf without having a good feel for the game. But it’s a new dawn insofar as actually implementing these things consciously, seeing things in my mind’s eye and excecuting them. All of this deserves better commentary than I’m providing right now, but man, there just aren’t many good coherent thoughts going through my head right now.
But I’m also pretty pissed off. I’ve fired 74-74-76, and I just haven’t been able to get anything going. And all of this is because my technique sucks right now. All the bad swing things came back. I threw down a mat on the putting green with a bunch of gates for my putter to go through, and I was hitting the hell out of the gates — meaning, my stroke stinks.
Three problems with all this. First, when your technique is bad, you spend a lot of your energy getting the club on the ball instead of what the ball does after contact. If you’re on plane, you can just make swings and focus on the target; if you’re not, then you have to get it back on plane, and that’s physiological energy that gets taken away from your target focus.
Second, when you make compensation moves, the ball will come out of a different window. Right now, I have to drag the club through the zone, so the shaft is leaned forward. I’m hitting way down on it. Both of these add up to a really low ball with a ton of spin on it. That sounds nice in theory, but in practice it means you have very little control of what happens when the ball hits the green. If it skips, it’ll roll out a bit. But if it grabs, it’ll spin back hard. It’s really hard to play great golf if you don’t know how the ball is going to react once it’s on the ground. Not to mention, I’m hitting a pull cut instead of my usual push draw, which again makes it really hard to visualize and execute a golf shot.
And third, all the little compensations you make tend to amplify over time. Which means that, mechanically speaking, I’m in shambles right now. Once I’m back on the range and see my coach (The Wizard, JZ), I don’t think it’ll take long to put me back together again. But, in terms of executing over 72 holes of golf, things feel like they’re getting worse day by day. I was excecuting shots pretty well on Tuesday in round one, to be honest. But today I turned into a pumpkin. I’m hoping a couple things click tomorrow after watching some video, so we’ll see.
A couple thoughts from the past few days:
- When I left the hotel at 5:58am on Wednesday, there was a guy in the lobby talking to the bellhop, telling him about a “baddie baddie” that he’d met recently. At 5:58am. I found this hysterical.
- My group played round 3 in over five hours. But, coming out of a weather delay in round 1, we played the back nine in 1:58. This is notable, because my group both received a pace of play warning and was put on the clock during the sub-2-hour back-nine, but not during the five hour round. The good news is that they’re concerned about pace of play and enforcing the policy. But, in my opinion, 1:58 is fast enough. If it’s good enough to play Seminole on a weekend, it should be good enough for a PGA Tour qualifier.[6] Really not sure why we were on the clock there.
I went to get dinner last night, in the middle of the Billions binge. I also stopped by the supermarket, and I grabbed some kale to blend up and drink (nutrients are scarce out here — it takes some real effort not to get scurvy), as well as a sixer of non-alcoholic Stellas, which I’ve been on recently. They’re delightful.
The good people at Publix know their market, and they’ve got ping pong balls in the beer aisle. And I couldn’t help myself. So, after eating my burrito, as Billions played on the hotel TV, I put one of my hats on the bed and chipped ping pong balls into it. My technique still stunk, but I thought I was starting to find something. Apparently I didn’t last night, but it’s calling me back now to see if something will click. Stay tuned.
It’s 2:20pm CDT on Friday. Hopefully only a few minutes before this letter hits your inbox. I’m sitting in a Starbucks before I skip town.
Last night, I got a text saying that they’d be starting play at 6:35am today to get out in front of some inclement weather. For those not aware: that is an ungodly time to start playing golf. That means, for me, a 5:00am arrival at the course to warm up and get ready. I only went off at 7:35, so only had to get to the course by 6. Still, early.
I was here at this Starbucks at 5:45 this morning. It crossed my mind that, in an interview recently, Patrick Reed ordered a “venti strawberry refresher, no water no inclusions.” I’ve been curious what that means for a while, as have some of the NLU guys, and I figured it was time to find out.
I’ve been coming to this Starbucks all week, and they know me by now (I’ve taught them that Connor is spelled -or, and that the -ers aren’t to be trusted under any circumstances). I told them what was going on, that I needed to try this drink because some golfer got it, a strawberry refresher no water no inclusions. All three baristas looked at me like I was the wrong guy walking into an old west saloon.
“Yo, like, you want straight base?” Yes. He shrugged and gave me a small cup. The three of them watched me take a sip.
Guys: it’s literally just syrup. It’s just sugar, red 40, and whatever they put in candy to make it “tropical” flavored. It’s not hummingbird nectar — it would fucking kill a hummingbird on the spot. I might be prediabetic now.
In any event. I’m sitting here in this Starbucks after firing a smooth –4 68 in the final round today[7]. To be clear: this is cool, but not that cool. It wasn’t even the low round in my group. If today was its own tournament, I’m T-5. And even then, you don’t get far in this sport by hanging your hat on a low round — you kinda need to string a couple together.
Still, it feels nice going home on that note. I didn’t have much this week, to be honest. A lot of pieces felt off, and I felt like I was relying mostly on bat-to-ball skills for the week. I’m not sure I felt truly good over a single putt all week.
But I figured something out today. It started with a grip change: my left hand had gotten strong, and that was shutting the clubface on the way back. It’s testy to do this in real time; a lot of the time, you don’t know what other parts you’re messing with, and the strong grip might be the only thing keeping the ball on the planet. But I decided to commit to it, and it helped me keep my hands on plane during the takeaway, and the club set at the top better, and so I could do a better job of braking with my left leg going down instead of needing to keep smother-turning it to flight it on line. I could do a much clearer job of explaining all this, but honestly, we’re 4200 words into this thing, I want to get on the road, and you want to get on with your life.
There’s a decent amount left in the notebook from this week. For instance: there are signs all over Dothan advertising “Dr. Duke,” a wound specialist who says that “even if your foot looks like this, we can save it before you amputate it!” next to the nastiest, most mangled photo of a foot I’ve ever seen. I’m shocked they let stuff like that be printed anywhere besides boxes of European cigarettes. It feels like I’m driving through the dark web.
But, in this limited space, I want to talk about the people. This Starbucks is awesome, and it truly put me in a better headspace going into each tournament round, talking to cheery people making an effort to be a good start to everyone’s day (shoutout Isabella and the gang). The guy at the hotel front desk who gave me my key in between doing laundry. The woman at the hotel desk last night, who, when I came down at 9pm to say that I had to leave at oh-dark-thirty and didn’t have time to pack up before checkout, said “don’t you worry baby, we’ll give you until 2.” The rules official who, when I told her my late checkout was coming up and our group was two holes behind and could she please put us on the clock, laughed and caught us up.
It's intimidating, a northern boy driving west on two lane roads through small towns and big farms, past I-95 and into the wild. Doing all this to go play a golf tournament that, in reality, is pretty damn important. I could’ve been playing around Canada on a real tour this summer. I came up short.
But three things are going to stick with me on the way back. First: once again, I can play at this level, and I’m on the right track, and I’ll get there. Second: really, truly, check my damn grip more often.
And then third: the people. It’s easy to just ascribe our ideas to a place and see it so. I, a northern kid, didn’t know much about South Alabama. I didn’t have much to go on besides what I’ve been told. Growing up in the NYC area, the narrative tends to be: low household income, some “outdated” political views, and a little too much interest in college football.
Of course, once you get here, these become comically misrepresentative. Because all you’ll find here is people, just like anywhere else. And people tend to be good. They’ll help you with your hotel room and give you a free strawberry refresher no water no inclusions for a research project. If you treat them well, they’ll treat you the same.
In any given golf tournament, it’s rare anyone fires on all cylinders; mostly, the trophy goes to the guy who manages their imperfect game the best. This usually boils down to the cliches: taking things one shot at a time, dancing with the swing you brought, and belief that things are going to turn out well.
I don’t mean to act like I’m solving anything in the last 300 words of a golf newsletter, but: I think you can say something similar for the country. Golf is really just hitting each independent shot well and finding ways to get the ball in the hole. The country is really just meeting each independent person and finding ways to leave them better than you found them. I’ve been paid this courtesy more times on this trip than I can count. I hope I’ve been able to repay people with the same. And, in the end, Dothan has gone from some middle-of-nowhere town in southern Alabama to a place I’ve really enjoyed and felt at home.
You can think of the golf swing in terms of lateral/rotational/braking forces, or ulnar deviation, or D plane, or dynamic loft — or as this shot, which I’m going to flight out of this window at this target. In the same way, you can read the statistics and historical records and narratives — or you can be here, in this place, in front of this person, here, now. It’s not to say that history or statistics or politics don’t matter. Spin rates and swing planes matter. But they’re a level of abstraction beyond this shot here and now, and it’s a level of abstraction that doesn’t help you in the moment. Less effective to go where your head wanders, better to be where your feet are.
That’s all for now. Hopefully we landed the plane. Cheers from Dothan. Enjoy the US Open!
[1] I’m my own editor. I’m also my own author. So the author’s note and the editor’s note are both me. Gave me a giggle. Whatever.
[2] For those of you who haven’t been in a cafeteria in a while: there’s a crowd out there that’s way anti-milk. Their concerns aren’t ethical or vegan or anything. They just find it deeply disturbing for some reason they’re usually too disgusted to even articulate beyond facial expressions.
[3] I don’t want to seem like a doomer psycho here — I don’t actually lose much sleep thinking about nuclear war. But it does put it all in perspective, honestly. When all else fails, the idea of nuclear war is pretty effective at prying golf stress off your shoulders.
[4] Reading some of this back, I hope all this isn’t reading as bitchy — if I’m breaking the fourth wall here, I’m hoping that I’m getting across how fucking funny mini tour golf is. It’s like living a long-lost second John Kennedy O’Toole novel. This shit writes itself.
[5]And, to be honest, that people don’t rerack the dumbbells with the logos straight up, like we did in school. I’ll admit I’ve gone through the gym and turned all the dumbbells and plates logo-up more than once. It does feel better, like I’m in a place where people pay attention to detail and do serious things.
[6] A PGA Tour qualifier on a 7500 yard golf course with 300 yard walks between greens and tee boxes — RTJ did not design the Trail with walking in mind.
[7] Bummer: I tried to shoot my favorite number, but I was just couldn’t keep the ball out of the hole for one more stroke. Too dialed.