I’m sorry for the somewhat justified navel-gazing attack (and I know that starting with an excusatio non petita is a huge red flag, as the moderns say). Due to circumstances that are not relevant (or maybe they are, or will be in time), I am reviewing what I have written about golf over the last 20 years, from the material on the website I founded long ago, Crónica Golf, the scripts for more than 250 episodes of Locos por el Golf, the format created by Carlos Palomo and myself that is still on air on Golf en Movistar, or my contributions to Golf Digest, Jot Down, and of course, Ten Golf. Besides rereading, I am grouping everything I wrote into thematic blocks, and I have discovered that there are topics or references I frequently revisit, little lights that attract the moth within me. One of them: chance.
I’m not into determinism nor do I believe in fatalism or the immutability of predetermined destinies, but I do believe that the fate of the best plans, of the well-marked and calculated routes, of the most carefully laid purposes and objectives, sometimes depend on circumstances beyond any control. For better or worse, of course.
“I firmly believe in luck, and I’ve found that the harder I work, the luckier I get,” said Stephen Leacock, a Canadian economist and humorist (quite the combination) who inspired Groucho Marx and Jack Benny
You’ll allow me to gaze at my navel again (which is clean, don’t worry). As you probably know, a few months ago I won a good amount of money by hitting the jackpot on the TV quiz show Pasapalabra. My performance on the show largely depended on my prior preparation and the excellent level of my opponent, who was aiming for the same goal as I was. For almost six months we were battling on air, the television culmination of a longer process that included prior study, a preparation filled with the uncertainty of not knowing if one day I would receive the call to compete. Once on the show, there was friendly rivalry, intense competition, more preparation… and as a result of all that, and also as a result of chance, came the outcome, recorded on April 22 and aired on May 15, where I won the show’s jackpot, the famous “rosco”. In that test, I had to answer 25 questions, of which we could say about 15-17 were easy, four were rather tricky, and another four, as the French say to name special climbs in the Tour de France, were hors catégorie, of special category. And if we get more picky with the analysis, one of those four entered directly into the realm of extreme oddities, as (for the letter F) I was asked for the surname of an architect who had designed a house (the Wenhold villa) in Bremen. I didn’t know that work, nor was I certain if the architect they were asking about was German, and for the letter F I had in mind a good number of architects, many of them Central European (Ferre, Fuchs, Fellner…), but at the moment I thought that, if I assumed he could be German (since they were asking about a building located in Bremen) I only knew one German architect whose surname started with F: Emil Fahrenkamp, famous in his country for his work in the interwar period (although here one could almost perfectly fit the saying “famous in his own home at lunchtime”), but absolutely unknown in ours. And that’s what I answered… and I was right. The fact is that the correct answer was the result of my effort, because I was the one who included him in my study databases, in a list of unknown architects, and I was the one who remembered the surname, but chance intervened when it also put Fahrenkamp in the path of the scriptwriters. My database consists of more than 70,000 words and definitions, but the final triumph, the achievement of the jackpot, depended on just one, the identity of an obscure German architect. It still amazes me that all of that, that the movie I got to live and star in, took place.
“I firmly believe in luck, and I’ve found that the harder I work, the luckier I get,” said Stephen Leacock, a Canadian economist and humorist (quite the combination) who inspired Groucho Marx and Jack Benny, and whose aphorism is sometimes attributed to Mark Twain, George Allen, Samuel Goldwyn, or even Thomas Jefferson. Gary Player, the black knight, brought it to the realm of golf and changed “the harder I work” to “the harder I practice,” and it’s easy to see the charm in the phrase and feel identified.
I’m not into determinism nor do I believe in fatalism or the immutability of predetermined destinies, but I do believe that the fate of the best plans, of the well-marked and calculated routes, of the most carefully laid purposes and objectives, sometimes depend on circumstances beyond any control
Golf players (especially amateurs with a medium or high handicap) tend to think that the gods who govern this sport are hard on us and our volatile memory makes us perfectly remember all those setbacks that fate reserves for us every time we step on a course. However, in our bar conversations, the lucky bounces or strokes of luck that end up benefiting us rarely come to light, as if we believe we deserve them.
In the professional field, we have also had the opportunity to witness implausible situations that we can only attribute to good luck or, if we don’t believe in lady fortune, to the whims of physics. Just recently, on the second hole of the playoff at the Mexico Open, we saw how Brian Campbell‘s tee shot was heading inexorably out of bounds until it hit a branch that took his ball to the rough. Then, a good second shot and a masterful third led him to make a birdie on the 18th at Vidanta World and claim his first victory on the PGA Tour. As the commentator said, “it was a bounce that defines a career.” But it wasn’t all chance, of course, as Campbell’s work, his efforts since he was a kid, his ability channeled in the Korn Ferry Tour until he rose to the PGA Tour, the quality he displayed during the 72 holes of the tournament, allowed him to be in a position to benefit from that twist of fate.
There are countless examples of paths that fork in a similar way, as Borges once wrote. Fred Couples‘ ball clinging to blades of grass that shouldn’t have been there on the 12th hole, the par 3 guarded by Rae’s Creek, at the 1992 Masters; Gary Player suffering an excessively effusive handshake from a fan before facing the decisive round of the 1962 Masters and ending up injured; Sean O’Hair saving a spectator’s life by hitting him with a ball during the 2010 AT&T National because, when recognized at a nearby first aid station, the doctor found a lump in his throat and asked him to have it checked. The lump turned out to be a malignant thyroid tumor, which was removed from Chris Logan, the fan in question, after two operations six weeks after the ball hit.
“Why call paths the furrows of chance?” wrote Antonio Machado in the poem used by Paco Roca in the work whose title I borrow in this column and which tells the adventures of the members of La Nueve, the company of republican soldiers who led the liberation of Paris against the Nazi forces. We don’t know where those furrows will take us, of course, but we can strive to at least try to embark on the right path, the one we chart ourselves.
