Twelve months from now, when we walk off the golf course for the year’s final round, where will we go?
Will we gather back around crowded tables in clubhouse bars? Will we be able to celebrate? Will we have reason to?
I have never been an on-the-course imbiber, but there are few of golf’s rituals that I enjoy more than a cold, post-round refreshment. The lovable, self-ridiculing accounts of the day’s calamities; the aggrandized accounts of the round’s rare highlights; the sober analysis of how the 18th hole should be played and by God will be played — next time; all laced together by camaraderie and a cold, frothy beverage.
The day before Christmas, I headed for Dancing Rabbit Golf Club knowing that this, almost certainly my final round of 2020, would go without any post-round adulation. I would drive my cart from the 18th green to the clubhouse, throw my bag across my shoulders, walk back through the parking lot to my car, and leave. There would be no celebration. There would be no toasts. But then, 2020 has not been a year worth celebrating or toasting.
In a cool, late-December fog, I striped my tee ball down the right side of the first hole at Dancing Rabbit’s Oaks course, and headed out pondering the year gone by and the one ahead. My father was not prone to dad jokes, but each New Year’s Eve, at some point in the afternoon, he could be counted on to remark: “Well, if there’s anything else you wanted to do this year, then you’d better do it now.” All I wanted to do this year was to be rid of it. I pulled my approach into the left greenside bunker, made a mess of the sand shot, escaped with bogey, and was glad for it.
The Oaks course’s only challenge off the tee at the long par-4 second hole (468 yards from the tips, 404 yards from the white tees) is a fairway bunker in which I’ve spent more time than most undergrads spend in their college libraries. True to form, I found it again. How in this, the most isolated year of my life, am I still making the same mistakes I made before? After all this time, how am I still making bogey and thanking God for it?
But what are new year’s resolutions if not higher expectations for yourself? For years, my typical ball flight has been a clumsy right-to-left — sometimes a high draw, but more often a dull pull. At the par-3 third (209 yards from the back tees, 161 yards from the whites), though, I resolved to set higher expectations, and I took dead aim. In between clubs, I swallowed my pride and chose the longer 6-iron — and stuffed the shot to within three feet (“I’m not sure that was your best effort,” I’d muttered to myself with the ball in the air). A couple of minutes later, I rolled in my first birdie since…God, who knows? Two holes later, at the downhill par-3 fifth (190 yards from the back tees, 152 yards from the whites), I again aimed at the hole and again finished inside 10 feet; I missed the birdie putt, but I didn’t expect to. I walked away with par, and a bit of hope.
A friend asked me recently when I expected to eat indoors at a restaurant again. I didn’t have an answer, because I don’t know. This year’s toll has been obvious in the most important measures: more than 341,000 Americans who celebrated New Year’s Day a dozen months ago did so for the last time. In less important measures, though, the scar tissue is no less undeniable. When will I pass a stranger in a grocery store aisle without holding my breath? When will I share a golf cart again with another single? The ultimate privilege of golf is its escapism — that it allows you to ignore the world outside for a few hours. But there’s no ignoring a virus with a third of a million American lives to its name. Not even privilege can outrun a pandemic.
I made the turn in 42, on pace for a career round. But I stumbled out of the gate on the back nine, scoring double bogey-bogey on the easy 10th and 11th holes. I steadied myself at two-over through the next four holes, and walked to the tee at the 18th hole (455 yards from the back tees, 378 yards from the whites) needing bogey to break 90 in the year’s last chance to break 90. I pulled my drive a bit, but with most of the trouble off the tee lying in the fairway bunkers on the righthand side, I could’ve done worse. Then I drew a hybrid that floated toward the middle of the green like a mint onto a pillow. My first putt to the back-left pin barely made it halfway, and I finished with an ugly three-putt — but I finished with a bogey and an 89 just the same.
Isn’t that the way it goes? What we sow, we reap; what we expect of ourselves, we pull from ourselves — and usually, no more than that.
What 2021 holds is largely out of our hands. Those of us who want the vaccine will get it; those of us who want our lives to go back to normal might get that too, or at least a measure of it. From here, on the precipice between the darkest December of our lives and the most needed January, I control nothing more than my own expectations. And I resolve to hope: to aim at more flags, and to hold for the day when we tell those stories around crowded clubhouse tables again.
I don’t know what 2021 will bring. But I expect more — from the year, from my game, and from myself. That’s all I can do.
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