A Really Good Reason To Get Together

    A couple of weeks ago, I made a last-minute decision to head up to the Main Line just outside Philadelphia, and make my way to storied Merion Golf Club, home of this year’s United States Amateur Golf Championship. For the low, low price of $39, I spent the day walking one of America’s great, great golf courses and watched some of the best amateur golfers compete for one of the oldest and most prestigious trophies in the game.

    As some of you may know, it is a huge understatement to say that I enjoy watching and especially, playing golf. That said, it is rare I actually go to a golf event. For that matter, it’s rare I go to any live sporting event. I mean, that’s why Yahweh created the monster-screen TV, right?! That said, I have been to practice rounds for the United States Open and I have attended a few PGA Tour events. I have even worked at two events held at Aronimink Golf Club (located just a few miles from Merion), which basically means I held up a sign all day telling people to please be quiet as a player gets ready to swing the club! But the first thing that really struck me as a fan at Merion that day was just how close I could get to the players and to the game itself. 

    Of course, there were other spectators, ropes, volunteers, scoreboards, and all the things necessary to stage a national championship, but there weren’t enormous crowds, tents, or grandstands everywhere, like you would see at a PGA Tour event. In fact, there wasn’t the constant feeling that I had entered a giant entertainment production. Instead, I could simply watch golf.

    Throughout the day, I found myself only a few feet from players as they studied a lie, talked with their caddies, checked a yardage, reconsidered a club, and worked through what they were about to do. The unique thing was watching the players solve problems in real time. Seeing a player figure out how to read a putt or choose the right club for a second shot may seem insignificant, but trust me, it isn’t. The neat thing as I watched all of this, was that I already knew the answers to some of their questions. You see, I have been frighteningly fortunate to have played Merion a few times in my life, and it was all I could do to keep from leaning a little closer to some young college kid and saying something like, “Trust me, that putt breaks HUGE to the left!”

    We have become accustomed to experiencing elite sports as spectacle. Go to an NFL or NBA game, and there is an enormous entertainment apparatus surrounding the competition itself—music blares during breaks, video boards tell us where to look and offer unending distractions, advertising is everywhere, and there are luxury suites, premium clubs, elaborate food offerings, and an almost endless stream of stimulation. Even golf, a sport whose scale and pace should offer some resistance to all this, has embraced a little of this spectacle. Major professional tournaments regularly draw enormous crowds and extensive corporate hospitality that puts up tents which look like cities, while the best players have become celebrities surrounded by security, sponsors, television crews, and thousands of spectators trying to get close to them.

    Some of that is fun. Like most Americans, I love a show. But at this amateur championship on these hallowed fairways and greens, with far less spectacle, I found myself noticing things I normally wouldn’t. I could see the lie and the slope a player was confronting and hear the conversation with his caddie. (And don't fret. I did not say a word all day!) I watched players react to poor shots and try to put them aside before taking the next one. Television and projections on large screens during tournaments can make extraordinary golf look strangely routine; while standing 10 feet away from a player does the exact opposite.

    There was another part of the experience I had not anticipated. Many, but not all, of these players are college students. They are extraordinary golfers, certainly, and many play for some of the finest college golf programs in the country—watch them strike a golf ball, and it is easy to forget just how young many of them are.

    I am retired now and spend much of my time playing or practicing on the driving range with young people. I also happen to know some of the aforementioned programs represented at this championship through reading and talking to friends in different parts of the country, and since no one will ever accuse me of being shy, I had no trouble striking up conversations with a few of the players. We talked about their schools and their rounds, about how things were going and what they were seeing on the course. After a difficult stretch—and there were plenty for some—I offered a supportive word or two, much as I might with one or two of the kids that I play golf with on occasion.

    Those conversations were necessarily brief, but they changed the way I experienced the tournament. A leaderboard looks different up close. A name and a score belong to a young person trying to manage the pressure of a national championship at one of the most difficult courses in America, if not the world. You watch someone work through frustration after a mistake, solve the next problem, and try to keep his emotions from interfering with what he knows how to do.

    As I have aged, I spend a fair amount of time watching and writing how young people attempt difficult things and push themselves. Some thrive immediately out of the gate, while others take longer. I hadn’t expected that part of my retirement life to follow me onto a golf course, but I was glad it did. It reminded me that, for all the extraordinary talent on display at Merion, I wasn’t simply watching future professionals. I was watching students (and yes, even some older amateurs) trying to do something extraordinarily difficult under enormous pressure.

    The setting made all of this even more remarkable. Merion Golf Club is one of the storied places in American golf; consistently ranked as the 6th Best Golf Course in the United States. Bobby Jones completed his Grand Slam there in 1930, and Ben Hogan hit his famous 1-iron on the 18th hole during the final round of the 1950 U.S. Open. Generations of great players have walked these fairways, as well as lucky dopes like me who get invited! 

    Under ordinary circumstances, Merion is a famously private place. Yet that particular day, I did not need to know a member or have a formal invitation. I took the local SEPTA out to the Main Line, had a short walk to the club, bought a ticket, and walked onto the grounds of one of America’s great sporting venues to watch a national championship from just a few feet away.

    The day reminded me that community is often built by simply having a reason to engage with one another. Sporting events give us a reason to leave the house, spend time with people we don’t know, strike up conversations with strangers, cheer for someone else’s kid, and, almost without realizing it, become part of something larger than ourselves.

    I had a lengthy conversation with a tournament volunteer next to one green who left New York for Philadelphia two years ago and we connected over our shared pandemic experiences. I ended up spending some time with a family from Atlanta who flew up to watch their nephew play in the tournament; we talked about mid-life, higher education, and the next generation. Neither conversation would have happened had I stayed home. As I walked the course remembering the times I was lucky enough to play this iconic venue, I saw those same kinds of connections forming all along Merion’s fairways and greens among fans.  

    Sports have long provided Americans with places to connect. At their best, they are not simply products we consume; they give us a reason to gather on a golf course, in a stadium, or even at a festival setting like a professional tennis tournament. Walking around Merion I saw volunteers giving their time, and families following players from hole to hole. The course wasn’t so crowded that you couldn’t move around and because there were pauses as groups came through, spectators were talking with one another and strangers began applauding and encouraging young men most of us had never heard of when the day began. 

    Look, I understand that a golf tournament isn’t going to solve America’s civic problems. But civic life has always depended on more than politics—a healthy society really depends on having places to go, having things to care about together other than politics, and reasons to spend time around people we don’t already know.

    I came to Merion hoping to remember some past, fleeting glory; but more importantly, expecting to see some of the best amateur golfers in the country. What I had not expected was the pleasure of seeing them so closely: watching them think and work, talking with a few of them, and seeing not simply elite athletes but young people doing something extraordinarily difficult. American sports have become very good at making athletes larger than life. At the U.S. Amateur, I got to see them at life size. And I was reminded that, at its best, sports does not simply produce champions; it still gives Americans a reason to gather and to celebrate the human condition…at its very best.

Write to Peter: magtour@icloud.com