A Long December,
Now Nearly Two Years Old
My father never cared for champagne.
Nearly two years into this pandemic, he would have fit in well. More than 800,000 Americans are dead; a million seems inevitable. Causes for celebration have been few and far between.
Golf has been an uncommon, unexpected respite. For two years, the pandemic has taken and taken again: the little things, like restaurants and movies; and the not-so-little things, like fathers and sisters. How strange, then, that golf — emphatically not a little thing, for anyone who cares about it — should remain available. How unexpected that, in an era to be remembered for not affording niceties, one of life’s nicest things should still be around. Between January 6 and the enduring cult of vaccine resistance, 2021 has reminded more than most years that the efforts of a devoted many are never beyond the reach of a few idiots. But not even the blowhards have been able to touch golf.
Coincidentally, my local go-to golf course reopened in 2021: the Refuge, a municipally owned and recently renovated venue just 15 minutes from my front door. It’s not perfect. The land is dull; the holes are a little cramped; the renovation work is good, but some of the ways it’s set up from day to day are maddening. Still, if you play public golf in Jackson, Mississippi, it’s what you’ve got. Take your choice between that and nothing.
So it is with life in a pandemic. Sure, you’d rather feel comfortable sitting in a crowded Outback Steakhouse without worrying whether you’ll be bringing more than a half-eaten porterhouse home with you. You’d rather have more than just golf to help you pass away the early sunsets of another winter, but that’s the choice. You don’t have to pop champagne over it. But you do have to live with it.
. . .
I don’t keep track of much that happens on the golf course. I gave up my handicap a couple of years ago. I count my total putts on my scorecard, but I don’t do anything with the numbers. And some days, I don’t even finish keeping score. For a while, I convinced myself that my laissez-faire attitude was free spirited. Eventually, though, I realized that it’s not free spirited — it’s chickenshit. I don’t keep a handicap because I’d like to ignore the fact that I’m not getting better. I don’t track my putting stats from round to round because I’d like to believe that I can hope myself into a respectable putting day. The stakes are infinitely lower than the pandemic, but sticking my head in the sand and hoping for the best was no more likely to save me from shooting in the 90s than it was to save Aaron Rodgers from a positive test. So in early December, I threw $35 at my state golf association and registered for a new handicap. All I needed was five scores.
The first three were easy: my Tot Hill Farm, Southern Pines, and Tobacco Road scorecards were still stuck in my golf bag from my November trip to North Carolina. The memories they called back were sweet, but the numbers they produced weren’t. As it turns out, it’s hard to keep a 15 handicap without breaking 90. Mathematics is a grim negotiator; she gives up nothing to spare your feelings. I bristled. Then I started looking for a tee time. By the time I found a day to play, I realized I might be looking at my final round of the year.
For all the things I haven’t kept up with on the golf course for the past couple of years, I’ve kept a keen awareness for my last round of the year. Sure, there’s always hope of getting out on New Year’s Eve and ushering December’s final sunset into the clubhouse. More often, though, a rare window of playable weather around Christmas Day closes, and settles any questions about squeezing in one more round before the calendar turns. And generally, you know it when you feel it. It’s a sinking feeling.
I had intended for my last round of 2021 to be something more glamorous than the Refuge. For all the headaches of life in a pandemic, 2021 had been good to me: Shoal Creek and Southern Hills had been rare, humbling afternoons; a summertime sojourn in Pinehurst had provided a welcome calm before the Delta variant’s storm; and walking Southern Pines and Tobacco Road on back-to-back days in late November had more than justified the nearly 24 hours of driving that I’d needed to get there and back. Ending such a year so close to a Golden Corral seemed hard to chew. But the weekends kept filling up, and the weather kept canceling other options. It would be the Refuge or nothing: one last chance to shoot in the 80s and set a tone for the new year, or sulk on my way home in the Popeyes drive-thru (perhaps also setting a tone for the new year).
If 2021 has been a give and take, then so were my first two holes: a three-putt double bogey at the skinny but otherwise straightforward first, followed by one of the great pars in golf history on the second (a blistering drive around the leftward-turning dogleg, and an approach to inside 10 feet). Along with sleeves of Callaways and fistfuls of tees, my golf bag carries loads of insecurity; pars (and, God forbid, birdies) feel like a luxury to which I’m unentitled, rather than the score that an architect expects of players — and, therefore, the score that I should expect of myself. Bogey is more comfortable. But then again, so is a handicap that hovers just north of 15. Two spots for improvement in the new year, I suppose. But you can make only so many bogeys and double bogeys before you lock yourself into shooting 93; and you can shoot 93 only so many times before your handicap assumes you’re more like an 18. Doing better starts with expecting better.
At the par-5 sixth hole (594 yards from the back No. I tees, 512 yards from the middle No. III tees), I popped a respectable drive to the right side of the fairway, leaving myself a choice from an unexpectedly opportune yardage: a perfect fairway wood could probably trickle onto the green, but anything less than perfect would shift demand onto my short game — an unfortunate position in which to work myself after a great opening shot. I decided instead to cut the approach in half, and to take my short game out of the picture by laying up with an 8-iron, and leaving perhaps a 9-iron into the green. The first half of the plan played out well enough; the second half faded rightward, into a greenside bunker. My leaky short game became necessary just the same. Somehow, I got out of the bunker in one shot, tossing the ball to within 15 feet, and rolling the par attempt to the edge of the cup. The plan had been sound, at least; the execution, admittedly, had lacked — an apt metaphor for Covid response if ever one was.
Around the par-3 eighth, I accepted that this is probably a better golf course than I’ve given it credit for. The renovation work that preceded its reopening in early 2021 gave the course its best chance; the presentation doesn’t take advantage of that work, and the recurring water hazards on the back nine aren’t great. But it’s better than it was five years ago. We should all be so lucky. And I shot 43 on the front; I should be that lucky for the next five years, too.
On the back nine, though, I stumbled. I could feel my swing speed dropping; I could feel my club face failing to close. I limped to the tee at the par-4 18th hole (421 yards from the No. I tees, 326 yards from the No. III tees) needing bogey to shoot 89, and began promisingly enough with a drive in the fairway’s left side, clear of the pond guarding the right side. But with about 80 yards left into the green, I’d put myself in between weaknesses: a three-quarters wedge, or something even less conventional (I’m not above putting inside 90 yards). I went with the former, but the failing swing speed caught up with me, and I left myself well short of the green — at the mercy of the weakest link in my game’s chain. My five-foot putt for bogey finished on the hole’s right edge, and I tapped in for yet another score with a nine in front. Hope, falling just short. As if I haven’t lived through enough of that in the past two years.
. . .
“I wanted a mission,” Captain Willard prayed in Apocalypse Now — “and for my sins, they gave me one.” For a world that has ached for an end to the COVID pandemic, an endgame might be in sight — albeit at a dark price. With the wildly contagious Omicron variant rolling like a tide across the globe, there is a school of thought that 2022’s first few months will end with nearly everyone infected, or vaccinated, or both. In the tide’s wake, though, could come something approximating herd immunity — at a terrible price. It would be an awful outcome that no one could ever rightly call victory. Maybe, though, it could crack the door open to something approximating a return to normal.
Between a fair but better-than-nothing local golf course and a pandemic closing in on a million American deaths, life and 2021 have proven themselves unfair. By now, it’s clear that we can’t have what we deserve. But maybe we can have something. Maybe there is something better on the horizon. That’s the hope of every new year, and of turning the page on every spent December.
We don’t open the champagne to honor the past 12 months of disappointments. We open it with the hope of something to come. So I’ll open champagne on New Year’s Eve. And I’ll stand on the first tee box in 2022 intent on shooting 89.
. . .
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