The Dean
Jalen Hurts, a sense of belonging, and a pair of boots in Scotch Goat.
On Saturday, during a game of Banker, my buddy Nate tied his low career round, -7, 65, enough cause for celebration to go out for burgers. Such celebrations carry mixed feelings— on one hand, we’re happy for our guy; on the other, we express this sentiment by handing over a wad of cash. But Nate’s a good dude, and none of us felt like cooking, and the wins are worth celebrating when they come.
I’m far from a picky eater, but, when I find something I like, I tend to stick with it a while. So I rallied us to Certified, my favorite burger joint, and got my usual: the Bufford Highway, cooked pink with a fried egg, with tots and a draught beer, a DIPA that could have been fruit juice. And everyone had to try the chickpea fritters. I sold them well on the basis of “fried,” lost some support with the word “Greek,” and eventually two half-eaten fritters found their way into the base of an outdoor plant. But the burgers came, and they were good, and all was well.
In suggesting we go shoot some pool at Rafters, it came up that I must stick out like a sore thumb as a northern boy in these southern bars. I’ve certainly felt so, and, after describing what I’d been wearing, my friends agreed: I needed boots.
I pushed back. The only thing worse than looking out of place is trying and failing to fit in, and I’d rather just be me, the northern dude at the bar. But they were adamant. Down here, boots go a long way. They promised there were boots that anyone could pull off, no matter where they’re from. They agreed: “Tecovas. The Dean, in Scotch Goat.”
There’s a photo of Jalen Hurts taken after this week’s Super Bowl. It’s a bit grainy, an amateur photograph on a cell phone camera, lacking professional photography’s implicit style of expertise. It’s shot from an awkward angle off to the side, just Jalen, sitting against a wall, ski goggles around his neck, the Lombardi between his outstretched legs, the beginnings of a cigar puff hovering in front of his face. A face that remains as it always is: composed.
I’m a third-generation Eagles fan, and I remember some excitement when he was drafted in 2020.[1] I’d liked Hurts for a while. I remember being impressed by his reaction to being benched in the National Championship game, that he stuck around to back up Tua for a year and then quietly finished as the Heisman runner-up to Joe Burrow. Through it all, I grew to love his whole “never too high, never too low” bit. Something about Jalen Hurts made him seem completely impossible to rattle.
In the following years, Jalen Hurts won the starting job, finished as the MVP runner-up to Patrick Mahomes en route to a Super Bowl appearance, saw a turnover heavy season in 2023, then brought his team back to the Super Bowl and finished the job. But, even with a resume better than the vast majority of QBs, there have been questions. He doesn’t produce the same stats sheets as his contemporaries, and he hadn’t thrown for more than 200 yards in a playoff game until the NFC Championship, and Saquon Barkley’s historic season has (deservedly) gotten the majority of the credit. And so, as he sat with the Lombardi trophy between his legs, I was still getting texts: “He’s still mid.”
The Sea Island Mafia has been on something of a heater as of late. Patton and Harris both have wins in the last few months. Paul Peterson earned his Tour card and logged a top-10 at the Sony. This past week, Will Chandler, who earned his Tour card by finishing in the top-5 at Q School, played with Scottie Scheffler in the final round of the Waste Management and beat him.
When people ask me what these guys are like, I can give some general ideas: it seems that being a great dude is a prerequisite for living here. But I haven’t gotten genuinely close with any of the Tour guys yet. It’s my own doing: I’m not very social at practice, and I’ll mostly put my head down and get my work done. I figure they don’t need some rookie bugging them while they’re getting their wedges tuned up to play golf for millions of dollars.
I know they’d disagree with me here, but I feel like familiarity with the Tour guys should be earned. It’s silly, given how nice and helpful and supportive they’ve been when we do talk,[2] but the “I watch him on TV” feeling hasn’t worn off yet, and I want to be known as a solid up-and-coming pro instead of some kid practicing at their home course. It’s a thin line, between professional athlete and mid-twenties guy with the resources to blow in the wind for a bit — a line drawn somewhere around making money on the golf course. Maybe it’s insecurity, maybe it’s a chip on my shoulder, maybe it’s something else — but I want to be known as someone on the right side of that line or not at all.
Last week, I drove a member to the back range to watch his son’s lesson, and he waved to Jonathan Byrd, apparently a friend. As we rounded the corner, something hit the top of the cart, loud, and the ball dropped in front of us and bounced off the path. We both knew where it came from, and we laughed. And that’s the difference. I still tense up a bit over wedge shots. I’d prefer to be someone who can ping a wedge off a buddy’s moving cart before anyone knows who I am.
I think there’s a problem with the way we talk about sports in America. Athletes have become the aspirational superstars of our culture, whose coverage has extended past ESPN to TMZ. They’re successful and attention-worthy, and the natural question emerges: why am I not? and there’s a lot of money to be made in the answer. You can try to convince people the difference is simply your product, that they’re taking a vitamin or wearing a shoe that you aren’t, that you can get there — but this is far-fetched, and the consumer can smell bullshit. So instead, they sell the idea that they really are different from you. They’re working out at 4:30am while you’re still in your second REM cycle. If you did this, you’d burn out faster than flash cotton. But that’s because they’re not like you. The closest you can get to them is to enjoy a sports drink with 26g of sugar while you watch them on TV.
I think this second idea is just as much a lie as the first, that people don’t possess implicit greatness so much as know how to perform it. Think of Jalen Hurts. Watch his lone Super Bowl interception, at the beginning of the second quarter: he walks to the sideline, his expression focused, and he starts talking about pass protection adjustments with his O-line. He made the decision long ago never to get too high or too low. He went on to complete 17/22 passes for a 120 passer rating and a ring. The media would like you to believe Burrow or Tua are better quarterbacks, yet neither has a championship. Hurts does. At the end of the day, as much as flashy statlines and highlight plays sell Gatorade, winning championships comes down to nothing more than feeling you belong in the moment and getting the job done.
I had been pushing back on the idea of boots for a few minutes, that I’d look like I was wearing a Halloween costume, that my Connecticut voice in boots would make me a poser. They were adamant that anyone could pull these boots off — that, in a South Georgia bar, it was weirder not to wear boots. But suddenly, one changed tack. “Brother, what do you mean poser — you live here. You’re from here now.”
[1] Not that I called anything early — I was more excited with how incredible this Reagor kid must be if we were taking him over Jefferson.
[2] It’s tough to express this without sounding political — they really are awesome. Patton and Harris especially are guys you just want to be around, regardless of golf. Maybe one day I’ll have a real shitty interaction with someone and prove myself unbiased, but I don’t think it’ll happen on this island.