This Week, Simply Put

The mundanity of improvement, or writer's block. And Tracy Austin.

I’ve been thinking about David Foster Wallace’s essay “How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart.” More specifically, the ending — where Wallace concludes that Austin has written such an awful memoir that Wallace himself loses a degree of faith in the very beauty of the tennis that he’s loved watching, as it’s been written by the player of said tennis.

That’s a bit of a stretch — that I’ve been thinking about it lately, that is. Truth is, I haven’t been thinking of much at all recently. Which is due to the simple fact that I’ve worked harder on my golf this week than maybe any week I can remember. By some metric, at least. I’ve definitely hit more range balls or played more hours of golf than this week, and there’s been weeks when I’ve burned more calories on grip-wringing or jaw-tightening or brain-racking reg. my golf. But, this week, as some measure of the effort that I have to direct intentionally towards anything, I think I’ve directed more of that energy more efficiently at my golf than any other week in my young life.

In fairness, though, I’ve thought about that Tracy Austin essay a lot over the years (and have been thinking about it for the last half hour, when I got off the golf course and realized I needed to write something). It’s been one of those subsurface essay concepts that’s been meant for a newsletter for some time. But it hasn’t ended up happening, whether it’s because something else happened that week, or because I didn’t have the time or energy or motivation to write it any given day (God forbid I write something unworthy of the concept and burn the idea forever). I don’t think today is the day either — I don’t think I’m going to get anywhere near the bottom of what I hope to say about it all, though I guess we’ll see.

To a non-zero extent, Into the Weeds is a direct response to “How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart.” I remember reading it for the first time and immediately thinking, “There’s no way in hell he’s actually getting at something, here. That’s bullshit. There are people who can play a sport at a high level, and there are people who can write about sports at a high level, but there’s nothing that says that one person can’t do both.” This was the real bugaboo for me, that Wallace insinuated that there was something metaphysically dull about the act of playing a sport at a high level, and that anyone who thought the act of sport was any particular sort of beautiful was then immediately disqualified from achieving the highest level of that sport. He insinuates, in that essay (I should caveat, as I understood it four years ago and how it’s haunted me since), that a mind capable of elite sporting performance and beautiful sporting commentary are mutually exclusive. I think that’s bullshit.

On its face, this seems fairly obvious. You’d expect most athletes to put in the training time and energy because they find the experience profound and meaningful, which almost automatically disproves the whole thing. If anything, there’s then a survivorship bias towards the people who put in their 10,000 hours playing their sport vs. 10,000 hours writing, and the population self-sorts. Not to mention, most of the best TV commentators once played the sports they cover — not that most of them are poets, but surely they’re good enough.

I’ll admit, because if you’re still around by now I think you’re in the trust tree w/r/t my dreaming big, that Into the Weeds was meant to document how a person can go from middling levels of pro golf to a PGA Tour winner, and to do so in a way (hopefully) more profound than a laundry list or podcast interview. I figured, if I wrote well enough about how I got to the top, that was a proof by contradiction to Wallace’s whole slant, and I’d finally be able to sleep without waking up in a sweat.

Flash forward to today, and I’m reading the following (the last two grafs of Wallace’s essay):

What if, when Tracy Austin writes that after her 1989 car crash, “I quickly accepted that there was nothing I could do about it,” the statement is not only true but exhaustively descriptive of the entire acceptance process she went through? Is someone stupid or shallow because she can say to herself that there’s nothing she can do about something bad and so she’d better accept it, and thereupon simply accept it with no more interior struggle? Or is that person maybe somehow natively wise and profound, enlightened in the childlike way some saints and monks are enlightened?

This is, for me, the real mystery — whether such a person is an idiot or a mystic or both and/or neither. … As is so often SOP with the truth, there’s a cruel paradox involved. It may well be that we spectators, who are not divinely gifted as athletes, are the only ones able truly to see, articulate, and animate the experience of the gift we are denied. And that those who receive and act out the gift of athletic genius must, perforce, be blind and dumb about it — and not because blindness and dumbness are the price of the gift, but because they are its essence.

My initial discomfort (that there’s no way that these can be mutually exclusive) quickly — like, in a few microseconds — transitioned to the horrible realization that I was a decent writer, and that my experiences on the golf course were, to me, quite profound, and so maybe I was disqualified from being a truly elite athlete by that very virtue. In the time it took for the signal to go to my gut and back, I remembered that I had a horrible pattern of overthinking, that multiple coaches had told me that I’d play better golf if I showed up to the course drunk, and that I’d had a good bit of trouble getting out of my own way. A quick mental recount of every rake I’d stepped on while playing golf proved that most of them were interesting, in some way, and for a moment I felt some sort of doomed.

My response has been, by and large, to say “fuck it” and simply try to do both at once. I documented my first full year of professional golf in this newsletter, and I’m personally satisfied with the result. (The writing, that is — if you think I’ve been satisfied by the golf, I’m insulted, and please unsubscribe now.) I’ve come up with two pretty comprehensive plans for the last two quarters, and I learned a lot from the first, and the second is still in progress. Neither has been all that interesting, from a literary standpoint, and any bit of it takes 5000-7000 words to relay in any parse-able form (I’ve tried, and I’ll do it at some point soon), and so I’ve mostly been writing about music or movies or whatever.

Here’s the real trouble I’m dancing around: I’m finding it harder to write about golf as I’m (I really, truly believe this in my heart) actually starting to get better at golf.

There’s been a lot going on behind the scenes, and I’m sure a lot of that is interesting. My upper body, for instance, turns out to be much weaker than my lower body, and it’s inability to handle the forces I produce has created most of both my bad swing patterns and ball striking inconsistencies. I’ve gotten my upper body stronger, and now I can keep the club in front of me better. The club slots up nicely on the way back (whcn I pay enough attention to actually get it there — still a work in progress). On the way down, I’ve been pulling my left elbow into my chest to stabilize it, which snaps the face shut and creates a hard left miss. So I’ve been letting my left elbow float away from myself (abduct, physiologically speaking) through impact — a move that, before recently, I didn’t have nearly the upper body strength to do with any sort of control. But now that I can control it, it extends the impact zone nicely while keeping the face square for longer, and my ball striking has gotten a hell of a lot better. There are some further idiosyncrasies from the banal (stop sliding my head backwards on the way back) to the inexplicable (the tiny sensory perceptions as I understand how my new body can handle, distribute, and produce force).

Actually, I have one more tidbit: I like to trigger the start of my swing by feeling force in my feet, but this causes me to drift backwards, so I’m trying to train myself to trigger by pressing the club into the ground and letting it bounce up at me. If you watch Tour pros, they almost all have some trigger that starts their swing. Rory rotates his hips towards the target slightly. Plenty of guys bounce the club (Spieth used to). Watch, next time you’re watching golf, for no other reason than it being fun inside-baseball stuff.

But besides that, man, I don’t have much to say. Simply saying that I’ve been getting my upper body stronger and that I’m learning all sorts of new ways to use it — that really is a pretty exhaustively descriptive account of the situation. I’d love to make it all into some extended commentary on Kant or whatever, but it’s really far too simple for any of that.

I compete next week — my first time in about six months, not counting pre-qualifiers. I’ve spend a lot of time working on a lot of stuff. I’ve gone down some rabbit holes before finding some stuff that I think is genuinely working. To be honest, I don’t feel like any sort of finished product. I can’t tell you with much confidence how this week is going to go. I believe I’m a better golfer than I was this fall, and the path to some really elite shit looks very, very clear from where I’m standing. Who knows when I’ll get there. Maybe this week, maybe not. That’s why we play the golf, I guess, to find out and all.

I have a hell of a lot of belief in what I’m doing right now. The tragedy is that it all seems way to damn simple, mundane, or specific to talk about in any way that’s at all profound. And so I’m wondering if Wallace really was right, that there’s something about the mental state of great golf that’s just too damn banal to describe in the way we watch others.

That, or maybe I’m just tired as hell after this week and drawing a blank. Who knows. Time will tell. All there is to do is keep playing golf and keep writing, and I intend to do both for a while. Cheers.