"The Nature of the Fun"
A double dribble, our hardwired superpowers, and what it takes to do everyone proud.
In their Final Four matchup against UCLA last Saturday, Azzi Fudd had scored 19 points at the half to help UConn to a dominant 42-22 lead. While the rest of her team went to the locker room, Azzi stayed on the floor for an interview with Holly Rowe.
At the time, I was standing in front of the TV with a wedge and five ping pong balls, chipping off the rug into a beer mug about ten feet away. My focus largely on a smudge on the back lip of the glass as I stood over another ball, the first question largely avoided my attention: Holly asked how she knew she was on tonight, and Fudd replied that “when it’s the Final Four, there’s no off, you’ve gotta be on.” Some hear this as standard coy athlete-speak, that they either don’t want to give a more insightful answer or don’t want to. Playing a sport for a living, I know that these answers aren’t uninsightful, just that they require translation: she’s succeeded in producing that special elite mindset tonight, and, in her current state of clarity, she’s genuinely liberated from ideas such as “off” — there is only “on”, to her, right now.
But the second question caught my attention as my ping pong ball bounced off the back rim of the glass. Fudd suffered knee injuries in both 2022 and 2023, and Rowe asked her, after waiting so long to be back here, “how you’re taking advantage of every second you’re on this court.”
Fudd, coming straight off the court, apologized for being out of breath, and Rowe gave her a few seconds to catch it. When she spoke again, she said: “Yeah, staying present. I mean I was here my freshman year, I don’t remember a single thing I was so nervous. So, just being able to enjoy everything about the Final Four, this is such an incredible moment to be in with my teammates, so making sure we’re leaving nothing on the floor, not taking anything for granted — this is a special team, so we’re getting out there and giving it our all every single minute.”
The observant (or psycho, or both) among you might have noticed that I’ve stolen this newsletter’s title from a David Foster Wallace essay of the same name, published in the September ’98 edition of Fiction Writer Magazine and subsequently in his posthumous collection Both Flesh and Not.
The essay’s primarily focuses on the metaphor of a half-finished work of fiction as “a hideously damaged infant.” Hideously damaged because, in that act of translation from magical mental-object to ordinary words frozen lifeless on paper, “the fiction always comes out horribly defective, so hideous a betrayal of all your hopes for it — a cruel and repellant caricature of the perfection of its conception.” But “you love your infant very much. And you want others to love it, too, when the time finally comes for the damaged infant to go out and face the world.” You want so badly to take the magic you feel in your self and reproduce it in other people’s selves, in all its fidelity — but you can only get so close by mere language, and so you’re mostly doomed to failure from the beginning. And so you come to have this love/hate relationship with your writing, this horribly deformed and deficient thing that you’re trying with all your being to bring to life.
Wallace is the unambiguous literary hero of my late teens and early twenties, and, rereading him here, there’s a couple things to learn. First: as much as I worry I massively overuse colons, I still use them way less than some. And second: my fandom has aged well. He had high quality things to say, and he consistently put his finger straight down on it. In my own writing — though my day job and frequent publishing schedule assuage most of the perfectionism — I can say he’s onto something.
You also can apply all this sentiment to golf. Golf and writing are both solo endeavors — you hone it alone before bringing it to the public eye. But golf carries its own cruel twist, its own additional tragedy: that you’re the one playing the golf in live time. In this sense, you don’t have the luxury of psychic space between you and your hideous infant, the ability to consider it as some separate thing.[1] That thing that’s “so hideous a betrayal of all your hopes for it” — that’s you.
You might be wondering why you’ve gotten a golf newsletter during the second week of April that’s gone 800 words with no mention of a certain professional golf tournament. In college, our home tournament, the Princeton Invitational, was always held this weekend. We’d play our practice round on Friday, play 36 holes all day Saturday, and finish Sunday after the leaders had teed off.[2] After graduating, I promised myself that I’d never schedule anything important during the Masters ever again. Which is why, of course, I found myself playing a mini tour event this week.
After my last event, in which I shot 85-78 to near-DFL, I had some soul searching to do. I’ve been putting a ton of work into my game, and I feel like I’m a much better player than I was just a couple months ago. But, when I tested this new game in competition, it failed miserably.
Any engineer will tell you: if you put a lot of energy into a system without getting much out, then you have an inefficient system. This much is pretty obvious. As far as I can see, I had two ways of getting more efficient. First, I could use my brain and figure out how to get more out of my practice: better drills, more focused reps, thinking through how to practice in a way that better translated to competitive golf. This, if you will, is a synthetic efficiency — you synthesize ways to make the system run better — and it’s how I’ve been approaching my practice for a long time.
As it turns out, there’s another way. People have had to do hard things since the dawn of people, and there’s a baked-in, naturally-evolved mechanism to help us do them: fun. When we do something fun, it often requires a good bit of energy, but we enjoy expending it and feel rewarded and accomplished afterwards. Thus, opposed to that left-brained, focused, thinkative stuff, fun is a natural efficiency — it’s not so hard to keep grinding away at something, week after week and month after month, under whatever sort of pressure we feel to self-actualize, when we’re having a good time doing it.
In the men’s Final Four game between Auburn and Florida, with 1:01 on the clock, Auburn got the ball off a tie up down 6 points. After inbounding the ball, Chad Baker-Mazara ran to the other side of the floor. There, he received a pass, pulled up for a shot, saw a hand in his face, and bounced the ball off the floor back to himself. A double dribble. Florida took over possession and captured 16 seconds, 2 points, and a foul to all but seal the win.
The broadcast[3] cut to a close-up of Baker-Mazara’s face, wondering how he’d react to this pivotal misstep. You can see his teammate, Denver Jones, mime a “double dribble” signal as he walks over and leans his forehead on Baker-Mazara’s shoulder. With the game slipping away, the two teammates stand on the floor, laughing their asses off.
You might ask if March Madness anecdotes are like quarterbacks: if you have two, do you really have any? But I feel like I need the Auburn game to help unpack Azzi Fudd’s quote. I’ve played a lot of golf where I was so nervous that I only remember fragments. I was very curious to hear how Fudd grew from these nerves into someone who dropped 19 points in the first half of the biggest game of her career.
She mentions that it’s “such an incredible moment to be in with my teammates.” And, watching Baker-Mazara double dribble in the final minute of a Final Four game, it’s easy to see why. The moment is a lot to handle alone. But great teams find a way to do it together, to build a network of strength that supports each player and makes them more than the sum of their parts. In pledging support, win or lose, there’s nothing left for any player to do but enjoy the moment. Freed from the fear of failure, they’re given permission to spend all their energy on success.
I’ve been asked a bunch whether pro golf is “fun,” including in my Nest podcast interview with NLU a few months ago. It’s hard to answer anything other than “yes,” but I’ll normally call it “more rewarding than fun,” or something like that — because, the truth is, golf hasn’t been that much outright fun for a while. In fact, I haven’t had that much fun since I became a college golfer. I wanted very badly to produce results and write myself as an all-time program great in the record books, and then, once that ship sailed, I just wanted to make the traveling team and earn a memorable weekend of travel with my friends. I’ve spent a lot of the last six years of my golf career coming up short of things I really wanted despite all my best efforts, and it’s weighed heavy on me. In all honesty, those moments where I do break through and remind myself that I’m really good at golf — I feel less fun and more relief.
I’ve had three weeks to think on things since my last event. I began with a question: if I wasn’t having fun, should I keep playing pro golf? To answer this, I asked, is there something else that I’d rather be doing? If there was something else that my heart deep down wanted to do instead, then I’d quit pro golf immediately. But there wasn’t. And that told me that it wasn’t golf that was the problem, it was the way I was playing golf.
Which led me to a second realization. I’d played plenty of up-tight, white-knuckle, will-it-into-existence golf. This golf has been, by and large, less than the sum of its parts. To make this mistake again would be to prevent myself from learning anything new — and burn a thousand dollars of developmental entry fees in the process.
So, this week, I gave myself full permission to play too loose. If I pay the price with a sloppy double or two, so be it. If I play loose, then at least I can see the true state of my game when I’m not forcing myself through a round. No bad wedge or strategy mistake would be more costly than failing to do something different. And, who knows — maybe, when I took the weight off my shoulders, I’d be able to pull off something special.
There’s two ways of looking at professional golf. On the one hand, if you’ll remember all those Spieth interviews and his use of “we”, we don’t do anything alone. I have a coach, I have a trainer, I have a sports psychologist. I have a family. I have friends who play pro golf and friends outside of pro golf. I have you all, following along here each week. Nothing I do is done alone — there’s a village behind me.
On the other hand, I’m the only one hitting the shots. I’m also the only one who’s job is to play golf. A whole network of people do real hours at real jobs so that I can spent my days doing what they wish they could do, and what they’ll do when they have a spare day on a weekend, if they’re so lucky.
If you spend any time at a golf course, you’ll realize that, among other things, it’s a ~150-acre area of precisely grown grass. In between this grass are patches of sand and trees and flower beds, all of which are also kept neat within exacting specifications. It’s a massive landscaping project. And massive landscaping projects require lots of people to work very hard in maintaining them. I’m not even talking about your superintendent, though he deserves his own recognition. I’m talking about the rest of the groundskeeping staff. Here, at my home course, it’s at least a few dozen people, showing up to work early and leaving late, spending their days doing physical labor in the heat. Most of them are immigrants. I’d imagine they don’t get paid much. I doubt many people work harder.
Truth be told, the only things separating me from the landscaping staff — from anyone in the golf orbit who makes what I do each day possible — are a bit of skill and a mountain of good fortune. I find it difficult to justify that I’m one of a handful of people who’s exempted from doing a real job. People get to work before dawn to blow leaves and rake bunkers to feed their families (and not much more) so that I can chase my dreams and grab a hot dog at the turn. It’s hard to explain why this is fair without sounding like an asshole, and I think this demonstrates the nature of the circumstance.
There’s also the other side of the coin. There are a couple thousand people who want to play top-level professional golf, and over half of them are genuinely trying their hardest to get there. There are 125 Tour cards, and that’s shrinking to 100 next year. I’m currently a long way from where I need to be, still very much an infant and, compared to the top guys, very much deformed. I have to beat a lot of people at golf to get where I want to go, and I need to do a lot of work to be able to beat them all.
I have a big team, and my team does more to support me than I could ever deserve, and I desperately want all of us to win. But (see: two ways of looking at pro golf), golf is an individual sport. When it comes down to competing, I’m alone out there. I’m the one hitting the shots. I’m the one making the decisions. Whether this team wins or loses is entirely my responsibility.
You might have thought, a few paragraphs ago, when I said I was having trouble having fun playing golf all day, that I’m a total asshole. Maybe you still do — that’s not my judgement to make.[4] But, knowing how much effort by how many people has been invested in my success, it feels like fun is an auxiliary concern. What matters is that I give every ounce of what I have into winning. To spend any of that energy fooling around would be to dishonor everyone’s investment in me.
But:
While watching Azzi Fudd and Chad Baker-Mazara, I was chipping those ping pong balls into that beer mug. At first, I was working on my feels, trying to reproduce the move I’d make if I was hitting real chips. But, as I paid more attention to the basketball, I paid less attention to the wedge, until it was just something my hands could fidget with absentmindedly.
At which point, the shots started coming. A high lob. A bank off the door behind the mug. Ping pong balls are light and way easier to curve — I’d hit a big high cut, then see if I could work a lob right-to-left. My grip pressure got lighter. I started executing that better takeaway I’d been searching for. I could actually feel the clubface for the first time in months, and I felt as it melted both into my hands and into the target, the boundary between, self, club, ball, and mug blurring into one.
I’ve wondered for a while how I, as my own deformed infant, can successfully serve as this team’s delegate athlete in the heat of competition. I’ve been through peaks of intensity and troughs of discouragement, and I’ve waited for a breakthrough, an idea of how I’d square up this damaged self with the way I — and my teammates — imagine my potential. Watching March Madness, I think the difference between me and the stars on TV might be the willingness and the skill to have fun in the heat of it all, to play with a smile. And that both the greatest honor I can do my team’s efforts and the biggest jump towards winning us championships is to wear one.
A note: There’s a Mark Twain quote (that I’m paraphrasing), “I’m sorry this is a long letter; I didn’t have time to write you a short one.” My tournament this week started on Wednesday, and I had to turn this around today. I know these have gotten lengthy lately — this trend will not continue. My promise to you: things will get quicker and leaner. But, if you’re reading this, thank you for sticking with me. Cheers.
[1] Wallace does talk about the fiction being reflective of the writer’s personal shortcomings — it’s probably a bit unfair to suggest I’m doing something new here. But I think there’s two steps by which golf is more personal. First, while the act of transforming a personal feeling into a written word in all its life and glory is fundamentally impossible, it’s a totally human act to hit a wedge to six feet. And second, determining how “good” fiction is is a totally subjective thing. Not so in golf: there’s literally a board with your name and its score, ranked against everyone else’s names and scores.
[2] At this point, we’d get as quickly as we could to a Masters themed “Sunday Funday” party, a top-3 blowout of the year — I’ll admit, my memories of the last three Masters’s are very limited.
[3] Which I guess isn’t available to rewatch — I had to dig around some shadier parts of the internet to find it and be able to write this.
[4] There’s a quote whose origin I can’t remember, but it suggests that entertainers (eg. me, writing ITW) ask you to spend time and energy interacting with our work, and that this is all we can ask — demanding that you also like us and our work is a step too far and an inappropriate ask. You’ve done plenty already.