Me and the Gentleman’s Game

Confession: I love golf.

Me, about to hit my best drive ever, and on a beautiful hole, to boot.

Me and my spouse at the Quicken Loans National last year. That’s Ricky Fowler in orange behind us.

I took up the sport when I started business school, complying with the “white guys make deals on the golf course” trope, but also because it seemed like a really complex sport, physically, mentally, and emotionally challenging.

I started watching men’s golf on TV really consistently when I was working at my old job in NYC. Every Sunday afternoon, anxiety would paralyze me to the point where all I could do was sleep. So I turned on golf to keep me company (my spouse was usually working). Since it was relatively quiet, I found it relaxing and it helped soothe me a little bit.

Watching the sport every weekend became a habit, one I’ve kept up since then because golf is, by far, the most fascinating sport on the planet. Let me explain:

Golf is widely known as the “gentleman’s sport.” It’s a game of politeness, rules, order, and snazzy dressing. When you play on a course, there’s a dress code and clear way of comporting yourself—most places require a collared shirt (at least for men) and for you to play in a certain amount of time, to be respectful of those behind you. [Further example, if you’re going slowly on a hole and a group comes up behind you, it’s custom to allow them to go ahead of you, to “play through.”]

Of course, golf is also known as the whitest sport imaginable. I can’t think of another activity that encapsulates every race and class problem in the world than this very sport. Golf clubs are insanely expensive, even the cheap ones. On top of that, it costs at minimum $25 per person just to play the game on a terrible course, and greens fees on nice courses can be well over $100. (And that’s on a public course, not a private club, where greens fees are even higher, but seem lower because of the thousands of dollars one is paying for club membership. But anyway…) On top of that, courses are usually in places not all that accessible by public transportation, making playing an even more expensive venture for those who live in the city.

The combination of these two things—its gentlemanly veneer and its unabashed white privilege—is what fascinate me about golf. They allow for instant conflict and tension!

The male players have historically touted themselves as family men who live squeaky-clean, boring lives (a la Phil Mickelson), but that’s literally never been true. Phil, allegedly, had a gambling problem for years.

Tiger Woods blew through as the Black guy who would be the best ever to play the sport. I loved that he was knocking down barriers and didn’t even care to knock them down because he just wanted to win. He was a clean, nerdy, athletic Carlton Banks, and when I was in middle school, he gave me hope that my male counterpart existed, that there were more clean, nerdy, athletic Carlton Bankses out there and that I would find one and that he would love me. When Tiger became the poster child for the “good on the outside, icky on the inside” thing that every white male golfer had always been, it was extra hurtful to me. I didn’t care that he wasn’t who he’d made himself out to be to the world; it felt that he’d lied to me personally and tried to shatter my dream of love.

Everything about the sport of golf ultimately sets itself up for failure—the gentleman’s game that supports racism, sexism, and classism, none of which are at all honorable, as the definition of “gentleman” denotes.

For example, while my spouse and I were playing on a course in the Dominican Republic while we were on vacation a few years ago, I hit my best drive ever, WATCH:

I saw where my Callaway Solaire ball landed, a little to the right, but on the fairway. An older white couple came up behind us, and we let them play through, first the woman (who hit a sweet-ass drive) and then her husband. Her husband hit his ball off to the right, into the palm trees. He went in that direction to hit his second stroke, but then he stopped—he stopped at my ball. He hit my ball. HE HIT MY BEST DRIVE EVER BALL because he was an entitled old white man who figured he could never hit a ball off to the right, into the palm trees. I was livid. But all I could do was drop my ball around the same area and move on.

Clearly, the sport mimics a lot of the themes of real life.

To me, golf is a literary writer’s gold mine for narrative tension and character dynamism. I’m working on two short stories involving it in some way. For my Black women protagonists, this world should be inaccessible to them and to me, and that’s why it’s so intriguing. Stay tuned to find out how they turn out!

And congrats to Tiger on PGA win #80. Only needs 3 more to officially be the greatest golfer of all time. Let’s see about that…

Do you remember the 20th night of September?

I caught myself feeling down a lot the past week. I’ve been tired and a little teary and just plain glum. I couldn’t quite put my finger on the cause. I thought maybe a bunch of things were finally settling into my bones:

• It’s “unofficially” autumn (though not for real until Saturday), so summer and all of my travelling and writing and meeting new people adventures are over. I still can’t believe everything I did this summer! I told myself I won’t do three (one, two, three) workshops again because it actually was too much. Throwing in a trip abroad that wasn’t to a beach compounded the exhaustion. But I had an amazing time doing it all, so no regrets!
• It’s time to get back to work on my memoir manuscript. Given the feedback I got at Bread Loaf and from a couple of other readers, this round of edits will be pretty extensive. I’ll be making significant structural changes, especially to the beginning, which I’m still not happy with. I start to feel good about my book at Chapter 7, which is entirely too late to start to feel good about something.
• I’m still submitting a short story around that I wrote last summer and have workshopped a couple of times. I got some positive feedback from a journal (a goal publication!), but I need more clarity on how to make it better. Otherwise, I’m still going at another short story that’s been pretty difficult. (I swear, I saw the protagonist on my plane to Ft. Lauderdale—yes, my fictional protagonist, in real life, on my plane. It was fine until she spoke to me. She asked if I had any lotion. It was weird giving my protagonist my little pink bottle of Vaseline hand lotion. Then she would smell like me, too. It was all very odd, and I still wouldn’t be sure I wasn’t hallucinating if my spouse hadn’t seen her, too [she was dreadfully pretty, so I had to make sure he didn’t look too hard].) Both are causing me their own versions of angst and making me a little tired.
• I’ve got new material to get on the page. Inspired by Bread Loaf, I’ve got two essays and a short story that I spent some of past week drafting. The essays were short and easy to get out; the story, like the two above, is causing me some trouble. I think it’s because, though it’s a fictional story, it is based on real life, and that’s always weird, lying about things that actually happened in some way or another.

Ultimately, I reminded myself that this time of year is always weird. Even without consciously thinking about it, my body knows that it is the three-year anniversary of my father’s death. The weather in DC hasn’t been helping, staying nice and gloomy in the remnants of Florence. I still don’t miss my father, per se—not in the way people who had great relationships with their fathers do—but I think, every year, my subconscious acknowledges the implications of his physical absence from this planet: I’ll never get the acceptance or the love that I wanted and needed from him. I’ll be feeling great and then, suddenly, boom, this sadness comes out of nowhere, and I’m always confused as to why, until I think about it.

One day, I hope September returns to being just the introductory month to my birthday at the beginning of October. Three years later, it’s still “that weird time of year when my brain remembers that my father died.”

The Storms of Life

There’s a lot I could talk about that occurred in the past week, namely the misogyny (and probably racism) the whole world saw at the women’s U.S. Open final. But what really intrigued me this weekend was weather.

My spouse and I went to Ft. Lauderdale, Florida for a mini-vacation, landing Thursday night and leaving Sunday evening. We knew there was some weather brewing in the Atlantic, but figured we’d go anyway. We had almost every meal outside, mostly because the AC was blasting everywhere we went, but the temperature outside was actually pretty pleasant, even with the threat of weather.

On Thursday night, while we ate dinner, I noticed that some cumulonimbus clouds several miles out to sea (I suppose I should explain that I was a really huge weather nerd in middle school, thanks to a great science teacher and an acute fear of storms. I figured if I learned more about them, I wouldn’t be so afraid of them. I was right.). Knowing that storms generally west to east on land and east to west over water, I started to get nervous. The clouds grew bigger and bigger, puffier and puffier, until lightning glowed throughout, illuminating them in the dark sky.

“Maybe we should go inside,” I told Rustin.

“I’m sure it’ll be fine,” he said in a very Rustin-like manner. Nothing ruffles his feathers ever, whereas my feathers are in a constant state of flux.

But, of course, he was right. The storm never moved. The lightning never touched the water or the ground, but stayed suspended in the clouds, which eventually dissipated.

It’s really the strangest thing I’ve ever seen. But once I realized that the storm wasn’t coming near me, it was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.

During a flight once, my plane flew around a thunderstorm. There was no turbulence, no hint that something was awry in the atmosphere; we just floated alongside these massive clouds that kept lighting up. And it gorgeous.

I couldn’t help think, somewhat cheesily, that this must mean something, and it does. I’ve never been in a beautiful storm while I was in it. During storms as a kid, I was frightened to death of thunder and lightning, and no one and no thing could soothe me. During storms as an adult—not actual weather—I feel much the same way. It seems that no one can say anything that actually encourages me; the only thing that will make me feel better is for the storm to end, though something always comes up again.

These resplendent clouds were a reminder to me that I go through storms (like years-long career uncertainty and trauma) that will ultimately make things beautiful. Maybe my mess looks like a masterpiece to someone else, and vice versa, I don’t know. I just have to remember that there is beauty before, during, and after, even when I don’t see it.

Bread Loaf Aftermath: The Hard Landing

It was a bit harder adjusting to regular life after Bread Loaf than I was expecting.

First, God, there are always sirens—ALWAYS SIRENS—going on CONSTANTLY in DC (see, just heard some in the distance as I typed that). Getting used to the noise took…some getting used to. Which is all the more ironic when I consider that we moved back to DC from NYC partly for the relative quiet in our nation’s capital.

Second, I find that writing conferences in which I focus on nonfiction dredge up some sort of emotions, likely because I shared intimate details of my life in whatever I wrote. Bread Loaf was no different in that regard; I shared the chapter of my memoir in which I slow time down and show what it was like seeing my father for the last time before he died. I wrote that chapter on the plane, the day after I saw him, so I’ve always found that piece both in-the-moment, but also emotionally distant. One of the participants noticed that, in it, I said I would have liked to spend some time alone with my father. “What would you have said if you could have gotten that time alone?” She asked. I hadn’t actually thought about that. Thinking about it in that moment, sitting on the porch of my instructor’s house, tears started to prickle my eyes, but I demanded that I not cry while sitting there. I just wrote the question down and thought about it later: I would have asked, “Who am I?” Which sounds selfish until you realize I’m actually saying, “Who are you? What does it mean to be a Young? Who are we?” I would have asked for some light to be shed on that part of my identity that I’ll likely never know, especially since I found out some time after he died that we’re not really Youngs.

Third, when I said in my previous post that I felt a sense of belonging, that emotion—the elation of feeling understood without having to explain oneself—didn’t really sink into my bones until last week. Therefore, last week, I cried a lot. A lot. I’m not a crier by any stretch of the imagination, but I cried so much. And at the dumbest things! I watched the delightful Netflix movie, “To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before,” an adorable Gen Z rom-com, and bawled my face off afterwards. I realized that my subconscious was looking for any excuse to express how much it missed being in an environment in which everything made sense.

On the brightside, the National Book Festival was this weekend, so I was able to surround myself with book people. Even better, Tayari Jones signed my books! And I even got in a little Bread Loaf reunion–Francisco Cantu was a speaker at the book festival!

The National Book Festival crowd; in line to buy books.

Tayari Jones signing my books and me looking at her a way I never even look at my spouse.

BREAD LOAF REUNION! Paco and me

Paco speaking during the immigration talk at the National Book Festival

I told my therapist that I was trying to think of ways to hold onto that feeling of belonging, but I immediately felt it fall away when I got home (hence all the tears). I can’t live at Bread Loaf, so I have to think of something, not just a group of people to be around (I’m in great writers groups as it is), but a vocation that makes me feel some level of fulfilled, a job in which I fit. But over two years after I quit my job, I still wonder if there is such a thing.