What Goes in the Bank
Gambling, logical contradictions, and an actual pirate.
I found a bar here. It’s on the second floor: you go in from the street and straight up one of those staircases where each step is painted like a small mural. Once you reach the landing, you can go straight into some lounge area, or you hang a right and walk into the bar.
When you’re young and single, there’s this sense in the back of your head that tonight could be the night you meet someone. Even if you tell yourself you’re not looking, you go to Bubba’s or Ziggy’s and there’s a little pregame jitter, the kind that locks you in and tells you to play hard and leave it on the field. But you walk into Rafters, and the weight comes off your shoulders like dropping a heavy backpack. She’s not here. There’s fifteen dudes here watching sports and playing pool and hanging out, and you’re here to watch sports and play pool and hang out. That’s all that’s required of you.
A game of pool is six quarters from the machine in the back. Darts are 50c a man. I don’t know what the TouchTunes costs because someone’s already playing something listenable. The TVs are undersized and far away and you have to squint to read the score. The wiring in the ceiling is exposed, not because it’s trendy but because it means your beer is cheaper. The billiard lamps still believe Bud Light is “America’s Favorite Light Lager.”
There’s an ashtray in every corner. A couple people smoke. One’s at the corner table, ahead by a ball, my age or a bit older, slicked back hair and a silk button down and black jeans. You swear you’ve seen him before, maybe standing on the corner in Hopper’s Nighthawks. He’s smoking because it’d be weird if he wasn’t. Towards the middle, there’s a group of late-20s guys in corduroys and quarter zips, and the shortest one is smoking. They’re cheering on Texas like alums.
There’s another smell. Not quite cigarettes, certainly not weed. Something sweeter and stickier. My friends and I smell it at the same time and look around. One places it:
“It’s the pirate.”
And there’s a pirate at the end of the bar. He’s in a frock coat with gold buttons and a tricorne hat, and he’s smoking a pipe. I’m not sure if he’s watching the game or not. But he’s somehow a perfectly coherent piece of the whole thing.
There’s a group of us young pros in our first year, without any status yet. Rookies. We play golf as much as we can (I’ve come around to the whole “practice is useless if it’s keeping you off the course” idea), and we play the same match. It’s a perfect game. Best ball, teams split by carts, $5 for the front, $5 for the back, $10 for the overall, birdies are worth $3. Go down two holes and you automatically press $3, which makes sure there’s always something to play for, even in a blowout. Two birdies beats one birdie, same with eagles. That’s it.
This week, however, we’ve switched it up: we’ve started playing Banker. If you’re unfamiliar, each hole has one banker, and the three other players play individual, one-hole matches against the banker. If you like the way your tee ball looks in the air, you can double your bet. So can the banker. Birdies double the bet as well. On par threes, everything triples.
I’ve always been the kind of guy who’ll go up $20 at the blackjack table and leave the casino. I hate losing money. I especially hate losing money when the math says I’ve made a bad bet. Hence blackjack: if the casino will eventually take my winnings back, I’d rather keep whatever I can.
In this regard, banker can get uncomfy. A $5 bet can double and double again, and someone birdies, and now you’re standing over a ten-footer to keep $40, and there’s two other bets open. And the geeks whisper in your ear that more likely than not you’ll miss it. And I’ll sit in the cart and wonder about strategy and expected value and how the hell his ball kicked back in the fairway, because wouldn’t it be financially stupid not to?
I’ve been passing this newsletter around to people I know. To a lot of people, I’m just living in a small town in the south doing, presumably, something or other. So the newsletter’s a weekly “what’s Connor up to?” And hopefully it’s evidence that I’m doing something substantive with my time.
I sent it to Joe, the father of my friend Jane who passed away twenty-eight months ago. I told him I was writing again, a weekly newsletter this time, and he could sign up. He wrote back saying he’d subscribed, that he’d read some of what I’d put out and was enjoying it, and he closed his note: “remember to go have some mindless fun every now and again.”
Once in a while, there’s an unstoppable-force-meets-immovable-object-type psychic event that forces you to figure something out. I’ve become something of a mindfulness zealot. They say maintaining awareness is the path to liberation — either from the entire “Suffering” thing or from annoying people in grocery store checkout lines. But Joe is one of those people whose words carry some extra credence, and when he said “mindless” he meant it.
Times like these, there’s enough rhetorical weight on either side to tell you there isn’t a contradiction, you’re just looking at it wrong. Conflict shows us something to straighten, like working out a knot with a foam roller. If you need to get technical, I think Hegel hit the nail on the head, mechanically. But really it’s just recognizing that the sides’ logical disagreement is less important than the fact they’re both right.
At the PGA Tour level, guys play golf for money, and they’re paid to do so because people watch. The consumer is the viewer. The perverse secret of professional golf is that, at any other level, the economics are flipped. Golfers pay the entry fees, and tournaments pay out less than they take in. The lower levels of professional golf are nothing more than organized gambling, with the house taking their cut off the top.
As such, my job is the same as a poker player’s: play what’s available to you, play as well as you can, and, when you see an opportunity, put as much money on the table as possible. Keep doing this until you earn your way into bigger and bigger games. The only difference is the game itself; the mechanics are identical. If you’re withholding money when you’re ahead, you’re going to lose.
I’ve stood over a lot of eight-footers this week for more money than I’d usually gamble in a month. They’re 50-50 putts — I’ve come out about even. But I’ve realized: I fucking love it. I’ve always thought of myself as risk averse, as not trusting the way the cards will fall. But standing over a tee ball, water right, I’ve had the swipe-cut Marine-Le-Pen ball cooking all day, two-days’ worth of lunch on the line — maybe it’s a step towards greatness, maybe this is how people end up in gambling debt, but I just want to be there, on that tee, with a swing to make things fall my way.
The world, time and time again, tends rational. To worry about logical contradictions is to miss the signal and burn energy on noise. The answer is not to ask the question. I’ve been missing right all day, but I’m hitting a great one here. You can be fully present in mindless fun. There’s 25 fewer Tour cards, but I’m going to get one. I’m at a bar in 2025, and there’s a pirate. It’s a weird, wonderful world we live in.