The Tradition of Meltdowns

It finally happened. It was bound to. A couple weekends ago. 

My player wigged out. The Meltdown in Monterey. Fukushima style. A regional tournament. Hat, clubs, golf balls abused after shots. Three episodes in the round with some beautiful golf in between for absurd contrast. We adults express ourselves like 9 year-olds at times, whether in joy or anger or despair or bliss, especially on the course or behind the wheel. So when my 9 year-old player does, I grant latitude. 

Until this time.

These outbursts weren’t new, occasionally airborne equipment and all. But until I thought about it, I hadn’t realized how new they weren’t. 

My dad was a kind, present, forgiving, dryly silly, smart, cool, and steady person who loved us fiercely. Outside of a golf course. On and after the first tee, he became self-demanding, intolerant of minor miscues, a grumbly perfectionist, even as a scratch golfer expecting red numbers. But he was a working class family man with little time for himself. So in lieu of practice, his expectations would go stratospheric when he played, reasoning be damned. Even though he didn’t start playing until his teens, he’d win local tournaments and do well in the Chicago city championship in his day. He had that ability to flip the switch. I’d caddied for him and played with him plenty, so I knew his standards and fire, as well as the wisdom of not immediately reaching for his club right after an imperfect shot, allowing time for a second swing and robust whackthump against the earth with force and cursing. And tournaments were one thing. But there was something else to up the ante.

There was this dream for our family to golf together. Maybe it was a stipulation for him to get on the course on the weekends in a deal with the devil, or, in this case, my mother. A well intentioned dream, I’m sure. Something conjured up between Currier and Ives and Norman Rockwell sucking a crack pipe behind a dumpster.  

Unaware, we were a party to the training for a yet-to-be Olympic track and field event: The Club Throw. Little things might water the seed, like a group behind us waiting, or a lost ball in the rough, or any variety of things. This would have my dad running between us as our group’s caretaker, looking like a sportier version of the guy on Bozo’s Circus spinning 20 plates on sticks at a time, but covering more distance, then interrupting his rescue of us to scratch together some focus on his own shot. All this, while not surrendering his perfectionist standards.

So he’d mishit a shot or two, the club would go back into the bag with the gusto of an Hawaiian native manually spearing a hefty fish, accompanied by his clenched audio request that God damn something, anything immediately. My mom would admonish him for getting so angry, apparently to further prove the theory that, throughout history, telling someone to calm down has never actually resulted in anybody calming down. By then, I knew the pump was primed, the volcano leaking vapor, the drumroll. Then, the shot. One last mishit. But his first reaction to it was his tell: his calmness.

The skulled, chunked, or shanked but ignored ball would go on its mindless way. He would make a couple steps back to his bag, still placid. But there would be a click, a switch, where he’d think better of it. He’d pivot to step towards open space. His technique was a 2.5-step hybrid of the discus and hammer throw. He was incapable of athletic awkwardness, which made it more grand and comic. Two steps, re-grip, cock the club, and wang-schwehwehweheheh. The club’s launch coincided with a joyful release of dramatic tension, the image of the confused club in flight against the bucolic background, a blade in search of its helicopter. A sad descent for denouement, a few spastic bounces as an ending to contrast its liberation, then a suspended so-that-happened second and a half of silence. 

After that came the walk of shame to retrieve his club. With no caddy or money to burn to replace clubs, there was no escape. It was the opposite of a mic-drop and exit stage right, like dramatically quitting a job with no bridge unburned but remembering you need to return to clean out your desk. Yet, it did the opposite of phase him. With nonchalance and no shame, he’d grab his bag then go for the club, walking to its resting place as if it was all a natural adjunct to the game. He was visibly lighter. Relieved and revived. Grateful. I’d see a shadow of a grin on him, visibly moved by the layered absurdity of freaking out over the endeavor of whacking a ball into a hole. I once considered getting him a dummy club, something disposable he could wing into a lake for absolution on a budget for the mic-drop effect. But the two seconds to place the offending club in the bag and find the prop club would’ve killed the satisfaction, like being given a musket to quench a vengeful rage, with the anger evaporating in the reloading time. 

At this point, my mother, who always seemed to be a witness to the rare flight of the 5-iron, would be silent, either out of righteousness or wisdom to keep distance. Ironic, both because she was the only one to scold the outburst and an unwitting architect. But also because she was a regular practitioner of emotional release, and knew of its benefits, at least for the practitioner. My dad, my sister, and I absorbed her regular outbursts in our shared family psyche, to be jarred and processed decades later. A therapist had once told her to let her emotions out as The Answer– good advice to an introverted 24 year-old desperately needing to release anxiety. But the doctor also practiced brevity and hadn’t embellished – at least in my mom’s recollection – with the idea of inner processing or the possible ramifications, damage, repercussions, or other ripples for recipients in the blast zone of the emotional cleansing. To this day, from me, fuck him, said with love.

I grew up with that angry flavor of golf on my tongue. So that’s what I did. I can’t remember ever throwing a club – except with shock and joy when my only hole-in-one dropped – but I played acerbic golf, saturated with expectation, fluctuating between bliss and a smelly hell, reacting to mistakes like transgressions personally against me, unable to see that golf is mistakes followed by either recoveries or disintegration. Like all things then, I was battered by the mysterious, volatile currents and waves of the game for me to surf or get pulled under. Then, I guess age, experience, and my meditation must’ve effected it. After that, it turned into whole different game. 

So, fast forward. Back to Monterey.

After 4-putting the 13th green, G melts down the third time. In truth, I’d reached my limit years ago – but in Parentville, one’s own limits are irrelevant. Yet, this has crossed a line into a territory that’s unfair to the other players in the group, who are now waiting on the next tee. Nursing a headache, I crouch and then go to all fours, hoping the grounding will help inform me on what to do. Textbook dilemma – two bad choices, either continuing or calling it. I feel cornered. 

Back in my childhood, quitting wasn’t an option. It just wasn’t in the lexicon or on the menu for us or our elders. Now, when the option of withdrawing feels like quitting, it hits my gut like a tainted 3am street taco. Yet what was also absent from the menu back in the day was focus on the mental and emotional aspect of sports. It was all viewed at as mainly a physical endeavor, with willpower, control, talent, and acuity considered inborn or absent. We know all this now to be perfectly flip-flopped.   

But just off the 13th green in a coffee table’s prayer position, I begin to see it differently: Not as quitting, but a lesson, drawing a hard line, and damage control. Simple. Sucking huge, yes. But the right thing to do. Honestly, the only thing to do. That tainted taco has to be dealt with. Wrenching. Heavy lifting. Emergency triage. But I guess that’s what breaking a chain of a legacy feels like.

I got to my feet and went to the next tee. I apologized and handed in the scorecard. Jane took over with G. I walked back to the clubhouse. Done. Turbulent sadness.

My deal with G – or rather, my demand – was that we come back the next day and he apologize to the players in our group. He did, willingly. But a funny thing happened: As we’re waiting in the practice area that next morning, G observes quietly for a while. He sees this thing, this event that he’s not a part of. Players go about their quiet, reverential, pre-round business on the practice green. A slow moving ritual, something between a Catholic mass and a rehearsed square dance. But for him, this is a new perspective. This once, it doesn’t include him. I wonder what effect it may have.