Et tu, Hank?

“Golf can be taught,” that great American comedian and archetypal duffer Leslie Nielsen (Airplane, The Naked Gun) once quipped, “It just can’t be learned.”

That hasn’t kept golf instruction from becoming a multibillion dollar business.   The likes of Bubba Watson and Rickie Fowler – self-taught pros with funky homespun swings – have become rare exceptions.  Every other pro seems to have been coached from the cradle.  Their grooved swings are as bland as a vanilla milkshake at the clubhouse grill.  The most famous golf teachers have become celebrities in their own right.  David Ledbetter and others command profitable empires of videos, books, academies, and Golf Channel appearances.   Even we amateurs no longer “play” golf.   We’re supposed to “work” on our games with the right drills, instructional apps, and guidance from of our teaching pro with his taped video camera feedback.   

It remains golf’s greatest illusion to think we can revolutionize our game with just a few small adjustments.   We’re convinced, as the wry golf writer Herbert Warren Wind already observed a half century ago, that by modifying the way “we bend our left knee” or “position our right thumb” that “even-par scores will be no trouble at all.”  That eternal hope of getting it right, if only for a day, is part of the game’s allure.   Golfers are like Coyote.  We’re always ready to chase after the Roadrunner again no matter that we know that our game will likely blow up somewhere along the way before we can grab that juicy low score.

No less a golfing god than Tiger Woods turns out to share the hacker’s illusion about the possibility of perfection.   He’s now reinventing his game for the third time, with a third instructor.  His swing has become golf’s most famous science experiment.  One wonders, of course, whether Tiger might play better if he stopped worrying so much about his downswing plane angle, right shoulder tilt, and other arcana, and instead just hit the ball.  But Tiger, so unique in other ways, has the mentality of Joe Duffer in hoping that his latest swing makeover will change everything. 

We get an insider’s look at Tiger’s struggles in Hank Haney’s The Big Miss.   Thanks in no small part to Jaime Diaz’s fine ghostwriting, the book is a great read, and high on the bestseller lists.   Haney himself comes across as a man of many contradictions.   He affects an aw-shucks, Mr. Nice Guy persona, and yet clearly loved the limelight of being Tiger’s teacher (and has busily milked it with his dreadful “The Haney Project” on the Golf Channel and now this book).  He claims not to be defensive about comparisons with his predecessor, Butch Harmon, but includes a long appendix supposedly showing that Tiger did just as well under his tutelage.  And Haney professes admiration for Tiger, while depicting his former employer as cold, selfish, and arrogant -- and a cheapskate to boot.  With friends like Haney, as they say, Tiger doesn’t need enemies; he has his share of those already between his jilted caddies and mistresses.

My favorite moment is the tale of the popsicles   According to Haney, when he’d stay with Tiger, they’d watch tv in the evenings.  Tiger would sometimes fetch a popsicle from the freezer during commercial breaks.   Not once, Haney reports, did the golfing god ever offer to bring one for his houseguest.   Haney admits it may sound petty to make much of this, and, in fact, it does a bit.   But it’s just another example of what Haney judges to be Tiger’s rudely imperious self-centeredness, not to mention his banal alpha male obsession with hardcore military training and always having the upper hand.  The Big Miss is the doorman’s revenge, Haney’s payback for the poor way he felt Tiger treated him while Haney collects some hefty book royalties in the bargain.  It’s not a flattering portrait of Woods.

Golfwise, Haney recounts Tiger constantly mulling over swing mechanics.  When his teacher made suggestions, he’d accept some, dismiss others.   Clearly, Tiger, like the rest of us, enjoys fiddling with his swing, and the pleasure that comes with the prospect of fixing something broken and imagining that our best still lies ahead.   And yet, of course, the former Zeus of the golf world must also hate it that his powers have diminished at least for now; he seems to hold himself to a standard of perfection that may now be more hindrance than asset in his quest to regain his divine form.  It was Tiger’s pursuit of something yet better that led to his split with Haney.   Now he has still another coach, Sean Foley, and one wonders how long this one will last.  Coaching Tiger is like being one of Henry VIII’s wives, an uncertain proposition that can end on the chopping block.    

I recall a story about Giotto, a genius of the paintbrush and not the fairways.  To pick a painter for a large Vatican commission, the Pope sent messengers to Italy’s most famous Renaissance artists for a sample of their best work.   Giotto, when the emissary arrived to his Florence studio, pulled out a sheet of paper, drew a perfect circle on it, and then handed it to the man.  Is this all, the puzzled courier asked?  Take it to your master, replied Giotto, and he’ll understand.   And the Pope, indeed amazed that Giotto had drawn such a circle by his eye alone, awarded him the commission. 

But even Giotto, also an architect, surely knew that it’s actually impossible to draw a circle that’s truly faultless down to the very last millimeter.  He sent his off to the Pope anyway.

What you can do with your own astonishing talent, if you’re a Giotto or a Tiger Woods, may be close enough to perfect to proceed without worrying too much about it.

I’m not sure Tiger has quite learned the same lesson.

A bit of promotion: my new book The Passion of Tiger Woods: An Anthropologist Reports on Golf, Race, and Celebrity Scandal is now available in print and for Kindle and other e-readers.

Is Tiger Back?

I always loved the climax of The Odyssey.

Odysseus, the legendary King of Ithaca, returns at last after surviving the perils and temptations of his long journey back from Troy. It had taken him ten years to get back from the war; he finds that a host of boastful young pretenders have taken over his house, giving him up for dead as they drink, preen, and press their affections upon his wife, the steadfast Penelope.

Sports superstars are our modern-day mythological heroes, the Odyseusses of this postmodern age. When injuries or other troubles put them out of action, we wonder whether they too will ever rule their sport again. What about Peyton Manning after his neck surgeries? Can Manny Ramirez still bash it out of the park? Evander Holyfield take to the ring for one last title bout? The likes of ESPN, sports talk radio and the rest of the media machine that cultural critic Kevin Quirk labels “SportsGlutUSA” have made such speculation into a 24/7 business.

There's been plenty of such chatter, of course, about Tiger over the last couple of years. The double whammy of the great golfer’s personal woes and bad left knee led some pundits to insist that he would never again be a top player. Perhaps the most incautious of these observers, the Golf Channel's Brandel Chamblee, seemed to take a strangely vehement pleasure in declaring that Tiger’s knee was irreparably damaged; his swing hopelessly flawed; and his game that of a has-been more suited to the Nationwide than the PGA tour. The one-time king of golf, Chamblee insisted, was dead, the new Tiger a shadow of his former glorious self.

But recall, then, the ending of The Odyssey. The weary yet wily, resilient Odysseus returns to Ithaca at last, disguised as a beggar. Finally, at the palace, he reveals himself to the stunned assembly by stringing his great old bow and sending an arrow through ten axe-heads. He and his son Telemachus confront the arrogant, bullying suitors, slaughtering them all. Odysseus takes command again of his island realm.

Will Tiger follow this archetypal model by taking back his throne, or at the very least reclaiming some of his magic? He’s played well since last fall, including his victory at the Chevron World Classic. Yes, his putting is sometimes shaky; but the flat stick, of course, is a matter of confidence, and surely that may return, especially now that Tiger is able to play tournament golf regularly for the first time in so long. We’ve certainly seen flashes of the old Tiger of late, most notably at the 18th hole at the Honda Classic - the brute power of the 325 yard drive; the verve of the 203 yard five iron over water; the staring down of his eagle putt with the ball diving into the cup as if he had willed it there. That hole recalled the thrilling drama of Tiger in his glory years.

I shouldn’t overdo the Homeric parallels. Tiger did not resist the charms of his Calypsos – Joslyn James, Rachel Uchitel, and the rest of his hook-up roster; and Elin Nordegren, understandably enough, refused to play the faithful Penelope waiting by her loom no matter what. She demanded the divorce; one financial blog suggested that the Swedish krona ticked up against the U.S. dollar on the day the estranged couple signed their separation agreement, supposedly because of the many millions transferred from Tiger’s American account to Elin’s Stockholm bank. The gossip magazines have had Elin dating a handsome young Wall Street tycoon.

As for Tiger, he doesn’t seem any less imperious in personality for his ordeals. His publicity people have doubtless suggested, as many critics have, that he try to be more fan-friendly, and thus he occasionally tweets and signs autographs for fans. But he turned his famous icy death stare recently on a reporter who dared to ask an innocuous question about a passage from his former instructor Hank Haney's new book done with the veteran golf journalist Jaime Diaz (and, personally, I would read anything the wise and humane Diaz writes). At the Honda, Tiger signed some autographs, and yet did it with such unsmiling gracelessness that it looked as if he’d rather be having a wisdom tooth yanked with no anesthetic.

But we don’t expect much human touch from Tiger. He has given us the brilliance of his game. That’s more than enough. “Dogs,” Odysseus tells the terrified pretenders as he throws off his rags to reveals his fearsome majesty “did you think that I should not come back from Troy? You have feared neither God nor man and now you shall die.” Golf, like life itself, seldom provides simple endings; Tiger will surely have his share of false starts, disappointments and defeats in the coming year. His apparent Achilles injury at Doral this past weekend was not an auspicious sign. Even so, I suspect that sooner or later Tiger will have that Ithacan moment where, if only for a tournament, he once again returns to golf’s heights in a flash of power and brilliance.

It’s only a few weeks now until Augusta.

A bit of promotion: my new book The Passion of Tiger Woods: An Anthropologist Reports on Golf, Race, and Celebrity Scandal is now available in print and for Kindle and other e-readers.

GOLF LOVE/GOLF HATE

There are plenty of golf nuts, and, in fact, the Golf Nut Society of America awards a prize each year to the top golf nut of the year. Michael Jordan once won it for skipping the ceremony where he was to receive the MVP award in order instead to play a round with his friends. But, as we golfers know, there are plenty of people who find golf boring or worse. Here's my personal list of top five reasons why people hate golf from a recent interview with the Duke News Service.

NOW AVAILABLE FROM DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS:



Video by Ivan Weiss (c)


Listen to interview about The Passion of Tiger Woods, golf, and anthropology with WUNC's Frank Stasio on The State of Things

Watch webcast about the book from the Duke "Office Hours" program

Read interview about Tiger Woods and the challenges of cyberethnography

In Praise of Hillandale

It was announced last month that the Hillandale Golf Course might soon be closing.

Losing the course would be a sad thing for my adopted hometown of Durham, North Carolina. In a world of gated trophy courses and pricey green fees, Hillandale belongs instead to golf's more democratic tradition. It's an unpretentious public track with very modest fees and a welcoming atmosphere. You'll find all kinds of people out at the course with its busy driving range and practice putting green. Hillandalers include plumbers and police officers, school teachers, traveling salesmen, high-schoolers and hipsters, and Duke students and residents from the nearby Duke Medical Center.

Hillandale was whites-only back in the Jim Crow era. Now, in the best New South spirit, it draws a mixed crowd. The course has become an unofficial center for area black golfers; it's the home track for the North Carolina Central University golf team and a corps of retired African-American regulars. Hillandale is also among the only area courses with a female head teaching pro, Fran James. James and the other pros run free clinics for kids and frequently host charity events, including a recent outing for Duke bone marrow transplant patients and their families. Hillandale is itself an important source of employment in a bad economy. Fifteen full and part-time workers make their living there between the pros, greenskeepers, and others involved in running the course.

Also notable is Hillandale's environmental record. Ellerbee Creek cuts through the course; it had been straightened, probably in the 1950s, into an ugly Army Corps of Engineers-style trench. But in an innovative collaboration with a local environmental group, the Ellerbee Creek Watershed Association, Hillandale superintendent Roy Clark oversaw the remeandering of the creek some five years ago. The results have been spectacular. Trees and native shrubs have grown in along the creek; they add interest and beauty to the course and a bird sanctuary. The work included constructing a wetlands area to catch the oily run-off from I-85 that had previously run straight into Ellerbee Creek. The course itself is the single biggest green space in the central areas of Durham.

The Hillandale closing had been scheduled for October 31. But the Sun Trust bank, which administers the course as a public trust, recently postponed the date. The city of Durham is now apparently negotiating to take over Hillandale.

I hope an agreement will soon be reached and this great Durham spot kept open.

Forthcoming in January 2012 from Duke University Press

“Orin Starn’s excellent examination of Tiger Woods offers deep insight, original thinking, and valuable new perspectives. This book tells us a lot about Tiger, but even more about ourselves.”—Jaime Diaz, senior writer, Golf Digest

“The next time someone asks me about anthropology’s value to contemporary cultural debates, I’ll just tell them to read Orin Starn’s The Passion of Tiger Woods, a funny, engaging, readable and unapologetically anthropological take on celebrity scandal, popular culture, and American sports. From playful musings on a potentially recessive ‘golf gene’ to critiques of (wildly popular!) speculative genetic theories about black athleticism, Starn takes us on an entertaining ride through the history of a sport, the rise of its current superstar, and the media maelstrom of racial and sexual imagery that followed from a relatively minor car crash in Florida one fateful Thanksgiving night. I’m one of those people who was tired of hearing about Tigergate almost as soon as the story broke, but Starn does a convincing job of showing me why I should have been listening and watching even more closely.”—John L. Jackson Jr., author of Racial Paranoia: The Unintended Consequences of Political Correctness

Golf in Ghana

It’s an iron law of golf economics that you won’t find many courses in poor countries.

You need a healthy middle-class with the money and some spare time for the game to take root as it has in, say, Sweden, Taiwan, or South Korea. The only relatively prosperous African country is South Africa; and it’s the only one with a thriving golf scene, albeit still dominated by the country’s white minority.

I was not much surprised, then, to discover that Ghana has only eight courses, according to the count of a young Ghanaian golf pro, Daniel Appiah, when I visited last month. This West African country is better-known for its legendary ancient civilizations, kente cloth, and Black Stars national soccer team (though they made an inglorious exit from the last World Cup after blowing a penalty kick chance). The capital, Accra, is a sweltering megalopolis that juxtaposes the everyday hardships and vibrant street market culture of so many big African cities.

Global investment marketeers tout Ghana as a success story with its growing GDP. That would come as news to the more than fifty percent of Ghanaians below the poverty line. It was my first trip to Africa, and Ghana is the poorest place I’ve ever been, including years of fieldwork in the hard-scrabble Andes of Peru.There’s little steady work; child malnutrition everywhere; and miserable living conditions in slums without sewage and running water. Every year, legions of Ghanaians set out for Europe, Middle Eastern oil states, the United States, and elsewhere globally in search of a better life; millions more dream of escaping abroad. It’s been argued, only somewhat hyperbolically, that 21^st century Africa has become a vast continental prison.

But, then again, there’s also plenty of joy, beauty and life to be found. At his workshop in Accra’s Osu neighborhood, I met the fashion designer Kofi Ansah. He was concoting a wedding dress for my fiancé, Katya Wesolowski, an anthropologist, capoeira teacher, and director of the Duke in Ghana program. A London-trained friend of the famed genius bad boy designer Alexander McQueen, Ansah has made his career in his native Ghana. His creations blend traditional motifs with avante-garde haute couture. Later, I made the trek with Katya and her students to northern Togo to visit the village where my colleague Charles Piot, perhaps the best-known anthropologist of West Africa today, has worked for more than thirty years. As challenging as life for farmers there, the village is stunningly beautiful -- a 21^st century African Machu Pichu with its stone-walled compounds and terraced fields high up on a green tropical mountain. Here, too, Africa seemed much more than just the proverbial beleaguered continent in need of saving by a would-be benevolent West as the Gates Foundation and so many NGOs and missionary groups would have it. No wonder that observers seem to swerve, almost schizophrenically, between Afroptimism and Afropessimism about Africa's future (and, needless to say, it’s foolish to draw many grand conclusions about the continent anyway given the tremendous heterogeneity of its regions, countries, and cultures).

Most American visitors to Ghana head west to the Cape Coast, and I did too. The area is best known for its infamous slave castles – Elmina and Cape Coast -- where millions of Africans were shipped off in bondage to the Americas. As anthropologist Bayo Holsey describes in her Routes of Remembrance, many African-Americans tourists make the pilgrimage back to the castles nowadays; Barack and Michele Obama visited last year. Paradoxically, however, many Ghanaians don’t much think or care much about the slave trade; it raises for them tricky questions of guilt and complicity insofar as various Ghanaian tribes slave raided themselves to supply the European demand for human chattel. Surviving the present-day realities of poverty and marginalization is the more immediate Ghanaian concern in any event.

I toured the white-washed Cape Coast castle and its horrifying dungeons with a clatch of Senegalese and Nigerian tourists. Some were solemn, but others took calls on their cell phones – one had a Lady Gaga ringer – much to the distress of our Ghanaian guide and an African-American couple on the tour. A friend who’s a historian of Nazi Germany, when I related this, said it's the same way at Auschwitz – cell phones buzzing, teen-agers Facebooking on their I-Phones. No ground is too hallowed or blood-soaked to keep people off their devices in the age of mass tourism. Outside the castle walls, Elminan villagers motored their hand-hewn wood plank boats out to sea for a night of fishing, oblivious to us tourists. They chanted and drummed in the local tribal language, Fante, as they headed out into the deep water.

It was perhaps yet more postmodern tourist grotesque for me to visit the slave castles and then take to the fairways in the same day. But I played a few holes later that afternoon anyway at the Coconut Grove Hotel where I was staying. I was joined by Daniel Appiah, the club pro, and we shared his incomplete set of clubs, which was missing wedge through five iron. Daniel only had one tee as well, and we miraculously managed not break it between us. Daniel had picked up the game at the hotel, and, in fact, taught himself to play almost scratch golf in spite of his slender frame. He was the club pro by default because no one else on the staff knew how to play. His favorite player? Ernie Els, Africa’s most famous golfer.

The Coconut Grove course was little more than a cow pasture, albeit with astonishingly narrow fairways lined by scraggly trees. Daniel’s drive raised a flock of turkey vultures on the first hole; our drives in the second hole had to traverse a pit of crocodiles, there to add a dash of color to the hotel. I was so soaked with sweat that I felt as if I’d taken a shower with my clothes on at the end. Daniel didn’t even seem to have broken a sweat.

He shook my hand, then headed off into the tropical twilight with his bag of six clubs and that single wooden tee.

The Passion of Tiger Woods

I recently finished a short book about Tiger's troubles, The Passion of Tiger Woods: An Anthropologist Reports on Golf, Race, and Celebrity Scandal. It's forthcoming from Duke University Press here in Durham. I gave a first public presentation about the book last week at Duke's John Hope Franklin Center. This was a big step for me: the first real event of any kind I've done since going to Sweden for a major double artificial disc surgery in September. Here, complete with my annoying verbal tic of using "sort of" seemingly every sentence, is an excerpt about Tigergate and our strange modern obsession with celebrity scandal.