I haven't played a round of golf since my honeymoon, and like a lot of other things I used to follow in my younger days, I don't really watch a lot of professional golf anymore. But every few years the wife and I like to journey up to the big city as the Korn Ferry PGA tour comes to town. Wow, that's really a terrible name, I know...but watching golfers on the AAA tour is still an impressive thing. They're on the way up or on the way down or chasing a dream that will never happen, but they do it all so well. Today we walked 18 holes behind a random guy who shot a 62, with a chip in off the green, a near-albatross, and most impressively an 18th hole 60-foot downhill putt from the fringe to save par. I'm always in awe of people who do what they do far better than anything I do.
But somewhere around the 8th hole as we were heading back towards the clubhouse I could faintly hear off in the distance Gettin' Jiggy With It. At first I thought it was a loud car going by, then perhaps a stereo from one of the houses that line the golf course. But it soon became evident that the music was pumping from one of the hospitality portals on the 17th hole. Lots of loud music continued to follow, alongside occasional trivia questions, promotional reads for the tourney sponsors, and a DJ getting an increasingly drunk crowd (who likely never saw any of other 17 holes) hyped.
Throughout the rest of the round from various spots on the course I could continue to hear the music and the DJ to varying degrees of loudness...all the while the golfers in our group were rock solid, one bogey between them through the first sixteen holes. The seventeenth hole came about, with the giant grandstand holding thousands of drunk people behind the green paying no attention to the quality that was before them, the thing they were ostensibly there to see, and my golfers finally cracked: two of them bogeying putts that they had not missed all day as they tried and failed to concentrate amongst the dull roar of the drunks around them. I really, really felt bad for them. Yes, I know, all the golfers had to endure the same thing. But why on earth does it have to be like this?
Go to almost any sport now and there is rarely silence anywhere. Between pitches or as the basketball teams walks the ball up the floor or as the centers face off, there always has to be those 15 seconds of LOUD LOUD LOUD. It's like our world has told us that we aren't capable of enjoying anything on our own anymroe, that there has to be a pounding soundtrack to the moments of our lives. I don't like it, but hearing this on a golf course knocked a bit of the magic out of the day. These are top-level professional athletes (yes, even minor leaguers are unbelievable in their skill levels). Why can't we be trusted to enjoy what they do without all the fake artificial noise? As much as I loved watching our golfers today, I really hated that 17th hole.
