golf

Baseball and Golf

~ Lee Swanson ~ 8 Comments

I don’t like baseball. Never have. Never played the game, not so much as a single pitch. My parents enrolled us in little league—peewees, it was called—when I was, well, little. Went there with my brother and I just ran laps around the field. Didn’t go back the second day.

I like golf. I’ve been hooked on it ever since I first picked up a club, which is not to say I’m good at it, because I’m not. But I practice a fair amount and play whenever I can. People who don’t play golf don’t understand. “How hard can it be? The ball isn’t moving,” they will say. But here’s the thing—it may be the hardest game there is. It certainly is for me. Every golf course is different, every shot is different. You have to deal with distance and direction in the split second the club is in contact with the ball. And not only the physical but the mental aspects of it; overcoming uncertainty to be able to do as well as you can.

I can’t tell you the name of a single baseball player on any team today. Not a one. I’ve been to three major league games in my life. Three too many. Once when I was a Cub Scout, and twice because friends invited me. I brought a book. When I was 15, I covered high school sports for my hometown newspaper and would take my scorebook and math homework to the baseball games, to get the boring chores over with all at once. I’ve always maintained baseball would be a good game for a prisoner of war camp, where there’s nothing else to do but scratch and spit. Then again, maybe not. If someone hit the ball over the fence (which I think is the whole point), game over.

I follow professional golf pretty closely. Watch on television and have been to several tournaments. I know standings, records and famous shots, both good and bad. T.C. Chen’s double hit—that’s more famous than his double eagle—at the 1985 U. S. Open; Dustin Johnson grounding his club in a bunker to lose the PGA Championship; Greg Norman losing to Fuzzy Zoeller at the U.S. Open in ’84; Larry Mize’s chip shot to beat Norman at the ’87 Masters; Jean Van de Velde’s meltdown at the Open Championship in 1999; Tiger Woods 19-hole playoff to win the U.S. Open in 2008 over Rocco Mediate, for instance.

It’s bad enough that baseball games last for hours and hours, but the season goes on forever. I don’t know, because I don’t pay any attention to it, but it seems to me that twenty minutes after the end of the World Series people are going to spring training games. And what’s the deal with spring training? What do they need to train for? It’s not like they’re doing anything, and even if they were, they just finished the season yesterday.

Golf doesn’t really have a season any more. There’s a PGA tournament every week, and here in California I can play all year round. It’s great. Some of the tournaments are more significant than others and attract more of the higher ranked players. And, there are four tournaments each year that are considered “majors”; the ones that players build their schedules around, the ones that can make a career. The Masters in April, the U. S. Open in June, the Open Championship in July and the PGA in August. The first major I went to was the U.S. Open in 1982 at Pebble Beach. Showed up at the course early Thursday and went to the first tee and followed the next group off the tee for eighteen holes, because I wanted to see the golf course. It’s Pebble Beach after all, and in those days television only showed the last four or five holes. After that I walked the course again with a group I wanted to follow, to see the players. And for the rest of the week I followed leaders and the players I was interested in. I was at the 17th green on Sunday when Tom Watson hit his famous chip shot out of the rough, holing out to beat Jack Nicklaus for the championship. It was a great time.

A lot of baseball fans I know talk about wanting to visit all the ballparks. I know people who have taken vacations to places they would never go otherwise, just to go see a ballpark. It’s crazy. As though they are any different. Overpriced beer and stale snacks. I don’t even know what cities the teams are in. San Diego built a new ballpark a few years ago, and people seem really excited about it. I suppose it’s fine, if you like that sort of thing. I’ve never been there, don’t suppose I ever will. The thing is, after you’ve looked at the field and seen it has four bases and a fence, what is there to see? Walk around and see the concession stands I guess. Take in the ambience. Do you really even have to see the game? Watch batting practice, maybe, and then leave and go to dinner.

The Masters is probably the toughest ticket in golf. Held each April at Augusta National Golf Course in Augusta, Georgia, it brings together the best golfers in the world. There’s a lottery for tickets and I’ve applied every year for at least thirty years and been turned down for tournament tickets every year and given the chance to apply for practice round tickets. I’ve been turned down for those every year too. Like Pebble Beach in ’82, I want to walk the course, see the perfectly manicured fairways and the undulations of the greens. I want to see the clubhouse and the magnolias. And that’s why, this year, when I got the email that my name had been chosen and I had the opportunity to buy two tickets for the Wednesday practice round, I booked a flight. It’s Augusta for god’s sake. I won’t be there for the tournament, but when the practice round is over and I’ve bought some souvenirs, I’ll leave and go to dinner.

I cannot wait.

Down and Down

~ Lee Swanson ~ 7 Comments

We’re on vacation this week and we’re supposed to be in Chicago. Abbvie, the company that sponsors the clinical trial I’m in, is holding a conference and invited us to come and discuss what it’s like to have CLL. It is flattering, though there are other people in the ABT-199 trial, my name just floated to the top because someone there read this blog a few months ago. And then they asked us to come anyway. Makes you wonder a little doesn’t it.

The appointment for my last Rituxan infusion of the trial was moved up two days so we could make the trip. Abbvie got the plane tickets, the hotel reservations and the car service. I haven’t been on an airplane (or in an airplane either) in four years and I hear there have been a lot of improvements. It’s actually pleasant now I guess. Lots of legroom, food, drinks, and you don’t need correct change. Right?

So I went in to the clinic for the infusion, did my blood tests and waited an hour or so for results. That’s when the nurse came in and said my counts aren’t good enough to have the infusion.

Seems my ANC is way low. I wasn’t aware the African National Congress had any connection with leukemia, but it turns out ANC is also absolute neutrophil count. Those are the good white cells; the ones that fight infection and disease. The low end of the normal range for that ANC is 1.4. Mine was 0.2. That’s almost bubble boy. My doctor said it will only go up from here. Since the alternative would be a negative number, you don’t really need a medical degree for that conclusion, but I’m glad he said it out loud. Anyway, I couldn’t get the infusion and even had to surrender my pills. We’ll try again in a week. I got a hypodermic in the stomach, a handful of masks, a long list of things I shouldn’t do and told to go home. If I happen to come up with a fever over 100, I’m supposed to go directly to the hospital. Do not pass go.

And we had to cancel the trip. It’s everything that’s on the list – crowds, restaurant food, airplanes, mold spores. The biggest worry was the flight. We had chosen Petri Dish Airlines. It’s the very definition of an air carrier, in every sense of the word.

The good news is, we won’t be in Chicago this week where the high temperature is supposed to be 35 degrees, and the warmest thing I own is a sweater. The bad news is, we were looking forward to getting away, even in a polar vortex and the whole idea of the conference was interesting, bordering on exciting.

The good news is, last weekend (before I knew I was a 220 pound delicate little flower) I was hauling sand and cement and making a flagstone path in the back yard and today that job is far too dangerous for me. The bad news is, the path is only a third finished and is not going to finish itself.

The good news is, if I can’t build the path and do the rest of the yard work, I can still play golf. Golf’s not on the list of immune threatening activities, provided I soak my balls in Purell, and who’s ever heard of anyone dying on a golf course? The bad news is, my Dad died on a golf course, actually.

The good news is, the trial has been working spectacularly and I’m very optimistic about what we will find (or not find) next month when I have a CT scan and bone marrow biopsy. The bad news is, all this bad news is not helping my mood, particularly since my optimism quotient is naturally lower than my ANC.

You might say it is the best of times, it is the worst of times. (That just might catch on).

Easy Is Not Golf

~ Lee Swanson ~ 5 Comments

I have spent much of my adult life and all of my expendable income drinking scotch, and playing, practicing and thinking about golf. Lessons, books, tapes and DVDs, practice and more practice, more lessons and more books. The game dominates most of my waking hours, which accounts for the sorry state of my career and bank account.

Golf is the only thing I’ve tried that I stayed with though I have absolutely no aptitude for it.

I gave up on basketball after one season in junior high school, despite the varsity coach offering to spend the summer working with me so I could go out for the team. It was an offer that had a great deal more to do with my being the tallest kid in my small school than it did with my burgeoning athletic potential, which has yet to burgeon.

At college, I decided I would learn to play chess and turned to a kid in the dorm who seemed to play a lot. Big mistake. He was a total math nerd. Before him, geek was a term reserved for carnival performers who bit the heads off live chickens. I understood the direction the pieces moved and what the object was, more or less. So we sat down to play. And the first words out of his mouth were “think of it as a math problem but start with the solution and work backwards.” I stared at him silently for a full minute and then pushed my chair back and said, “Thanks, but I got to go.” Have not tried to play chess since.

My mother was a very good bridge player. She was in a couple of bridge clubs in our town and was on the list to substitute for several other clubs. Not that it’s a big deal to be in demand to play bridge in a small town, but nonetheless she was by all accounts really good at the game. So I asked her to teach me. I knew how to count the value of the cards so when we started I thought I was ready. She looked over my shoulder at my cards and said “bid two clubs.” “Why?” I asked. “Because that’s what you bid with this hand.” “But, I’ll never have this hand again, what makes it two clubs?” “It just is.”

My brother once suggested we go to the park near his house and play tennis. Or at least hit tennis balls around, since neither one of us actually played tennis. It seemed like a good idea and might have been fun had it not been for the two eight year olds in the court next to us who had been playing since birth.

Next.

But golf. I have no ability at golf either. Never have. But I still play. I try, I learn, I re-learn, I practice, I play.  I buy the weighted clubs, the straps, the special gloves, the gadgets that promise to revolutionize my game. And I suck.

I owe most of my stick-to-itiveness in the game to my best friend in high school who started playing golf with me. We knew essentially nothing, but we went to a course and started. No lessons, no practice. How hard could it be? The ball doesn’t move; it just sits there waiting to be sent soaring through the air and land in the short grass hundreds of yards straight ahead.

We were just smart enough to go to another town because someone said it was a good place to start. As golf courses go, this was a goat path. We were embarrassingly bad, but we didn’t know it, and thankfully we didn’t see any eight year old prodigies or anyone we knew at all for that matter. It was just us. We laughed and we tried and we laughed more. People who were on the course behind us didn’t see the humor in it, I’m sure, but we had a great time.

And we kept playing all that summer. We absolutely sucked, but I was sucked in. For the next forty-five years I’ve tried to improve. Occasional flashes of half-decent followed by years of frustration. I’ve thrown my share of clubs and turned the air blue more than once, maybe more often than not. Like everything else at which I’ve tried and failed, I quit the game regularly, sometimes for years at a time. But with golf, I come back. Another lesson, a magazine article, a television tip, a new driver with the technology to make it impossible to fail, and I think it will be different this time.

But of course it isn’t.

It happened again today. I saw an infomercial. Professionals and analysts have found the components to the perfect golf swing.

One of the very average looking people giving a testimonial promises “if I can do it, anyone can.” It’s simple, it’s possible, and it’s within reach. Any run-of-the-mill weekend golfer can learn the method and revolutionize their game. It’s easy. The keys that all champion golfers have in common and I can do it. They promise. It’s easy. And it can be mine. This is it. This is not just it, this is IT.

I was about to write the check when the announcer said it’s a five DVD set.

Five DVDs.

Five.

To get the simple keys to the game.

Easy.

Easy is changing a light bulb. Easy is putting on slippers. Easy is not five DVDs of careful instruction. Easy is not golf.

But maybe if I bought that new driver…

Masters

~ Lee Swanson ~ 1 Comment

Don’t judge me, but I spent a fair amount of the weekend watching the Masters.  I can be entertained watching golf on television partly because I can still do the Sunday Times crossword and not miss a shot.

But I’m left with a few questions.  First, the visor.  Can anyone explain the visor?  It’s not for sun protection; a visor has an SPF of 0.1.  It looks ridiculous. Spend the extra four dollars and buy the whole cap.

Then there’s Jim Nantz, the CBS announcer.  He treats it like the eighth wonder of the world, starting with his continuous network tagline:  “The Masters, a tradition unlike any other.”  What the hell does that mean?  Aren’t all traditions unlike other traditions?  “The Fourth of July, a tradition unlike Columbus Day.” 

Granted, the Masters thinks it’s got the corner on pomposity, but why feed that beast?  Sure, Gary McCord was kicked off the broadcast team a few years ago for saying a green was so fast it seemed to be bikini waxed.  Announcers aren’t allowed to refer to the fans as fans, or a crowd.  They are “patrons.”  The holes are marked by flagsticks, not pins and you better not make that mistake.  And no one can ever say anything about the prize money.  The prize is the cheap green sports coat.  They’re playing for the green jacket that looks like it’s off the rack at Walmart, not the $1.44 million check.  Yeah, I believe that.

But back to ever-so reverential Jim Nantz.  He does a painful little interview after the tournament in Butler Cabin where the jacket is handed out.  And he says to the winner (Bubba Watson for those who weren’t watching) that he knows how much it means to him to win the Masters on Easter Sunday.  Really?  Because there’s such a close tie between golf and Christianity?  I do know a lot of guys who play golf religiously every Sunday and invoke Jesus’ name while they’re doing it, but I don’t think that’s what Nantz was talking about. 

The U.S. Open always ends on Father’s Day and those announcers spend half the broadcast talking about how important it would have been to the winner’s father if he had been alive to see his multi-millionaire golf pro son win.  That makes some sense, though it’s also pretty cheesy, but why does winning a million and a half dollars on Easter have a psychic significance?

Later in the evening I checked on the Golf Channel long enough to hear one of their brilliant broadcasters say “who would have thought that a guy named Bubba would ever win the Masters.”  Augusta National didn’t admit a black member until 1990 and still doesn’t have a woman member.  Its current president is a 64 year old man named “Billy” and for the ten years before him, the place was run by a guy named “Hootie.”  My question is, why did it take so long for a guy named Bubba to win the Masters?

All I Know

~ Lee Swanson ~ 2 Comments

As a kid, I was filled with misinformation.  Not just the normal kid misinformation like mud is good to jump in and dogs like to have their tails pulled.  I thought the signs pointing to “frontage road” were directing cars to a street named Frontage; like First Street, Washington Avenue and Frontage Road.  It wasn’t until I understood there had never been an explorer, developer or president named Frontage that I realized it was just the nondescript street leading to the strip mall.

When people said “no news is good news,” I thought it meant there was no such thing as good news.

For a long time, I thought Spago, Drano, Pepto and Bromo were the names of the least talented of the Marx Brothers.

Fortunately I lived next door to a kid who knew everything.  And this was before Google. I know he knew everything because I asked him.   In high school, he once (at least once that I heard) made an offhand reference to some totally obscure fact that no one else could possibly have known.  I looked up and asked, “Tom do you know everything?”

Without a moment’s hesitation he said “actually, I don’t know anything at all about hydraulic pumps.”  I figured he was just being modest, because as he explained what it was he didn’t know about hydraulic pumps it was clear that he didn’t know less than I didn’t know.  I didn’t…and still don’t…know enough about hydraulic pumps to know what I didn’t, and still don’t, know.

For that reason and others, I’ve always found it easier to quantify what I do know than what I don’t.  On our first date I told Cheryl there were only four things in the world I knew anything at all about.  I said I knew a little about television news, a fair amount about golf, a great deal about college basketball and absolutely everything about embalming.

That led to a long discussion about growing up as the son of a mortician, but she went out with me again anyway.

I’ve clung to that claim, though the order has changed now and then. For most of my adult life it was exactly reversed.  Now I don’t think I know much at all about any of those four topics.  I am far removed from the ins and outs of embalming, as it were, though I am closer to being embalmed than I ever have been.  (Not that I’ll learn anything from the experience).  I don’t follow college basketball well enough to get into a Final Four pool any more, even though every college team in the country now makes it into the tournament.  I’m playing golf whenever I can and follow the game somewhat, but it’s been a long time since I was able to name the player of the year for every year of the decade.

And television news? Well, despite spending thirty years working at it, I’m fairly out of touch with it now as a profession and don’t really even watch it very much.  I can expound upon how it used to be done, back when we did it well – or at least as well as it’s ever been done.

Perhaps most disturbing is that nothing has crept in to fill the cranial voids.  I just know less and less – stuck with dwindling levels of expertise on four subjects and an urge to read up on hydraulic pumps.

Fashion Advice

~ Lee Swanson ~ Leave a comment

There’s a guy I often see in the morning when the dogs take me for a walk.  He wears a blue t-shirt, work boots, black socks, denim shorts and clip-on suspenders.  The suspenders just sort of top it off.  Big, wide suspenders clipped to his shorts. He’s a short, round little man and in a couple months he could trade them in for red suspenders and get a job at any department store on earth, except that he rarely says anything more than “hello” and even that only grudgingly.

Looking at him as he came down the street this morning I couldn’t help but wonder, “does he think that’s a good look?”

I, on the other hand, wore my usual morning walk uniform — running shoes in which I’ve never run, nylon warm up pants and a white t-shirt with some sort of logo on it.

One of the advantages and disadvantages of a lifetime in television news is a large collection of free t-shirts and caps. Advantage because I haven’t had to buy a t-shirt in a long time, maybe ever. And disadvantage because many of them have dates on them.

Today’s shirt, for instance, was “ABC News – The Vote 2004” – from either the Democratic convention that nominated Kerry and Edwards in Boston or the Republican convention that re-nominated Bush and Cheney in New York.  I was at both and don’t recall where the shirt came from.  I do remember coming away from New York firmly convinced that there was no way in hell those two were going to get re-elected.  It was the same feeling I had four years earlier in Philadelphia as we watched waves of henna-headed women stand beneath the podium and chant “Bush and Dick.”

The t-shirt drawer is pretty full.  And there’s a stack of baseball caps in the closet at least three feet high.  I look at that stuff and I’m sometimes reminded of the farmers where I grew up.  No farmer in America has ever bought a cap.  And not many bought jackets.  The joke was, “why don’t farmers wear tennis shoes?” “Because seed corn companies don’t give them away.”

So, now as I walk down the street, anyone who bothers to notice knows my t-shirt is seven years old. Not the worst fashion statement and not even the oldest piece of clothing I own.  There’s a sweater from the 1982 U.S. Open at Pebble Beach, for instance.  It’s been well cared for and is in pretty good shape.  Invariably when I wear it, someone will look at the logo and say “I wasn’t even born then.”

But I’m ready for them. “This ‘old’ sweater,”   I point out “is from the U.S. Open where Tom Watson made what’s no doubt the most famous golf shot in the history of the Open, the iconic chip shot from the rough behind the 17th green for birdie to win the championship and defeat Jack Nicklaus.  And I was there.  Saw it with my own two aging eyes.  And, because photo credentials were easier to get in those days, have the picture to prove it.”

They invariably look at me, shrug and say “yeah, well it still kinda fits.”

Smart ass kids.