Don't ask, don't tell.

 Don’t ask, don’t tell. 

You can’t wrestle someone else’s demons. Why do you try?

            - Uncle Albert

I play golf the way study German, on and off again. I get as good as I am going to, and I give it up. Add that now I am older as good as I’m going to get isn’t as good as it used to be.

     It’s a game for the young, forget what golf’s cheerleaders want to tell you. And forget what the new equipment, the new woods that are metal and the irons with hollows in the back, the balls that whistle through the air and whisper to a stop - forget what the equipment wants to say.

     Thirty years ago, I drove the ball 230 yards with a driver with a persimmon for a head. Thirty years later, I drive the ball 230 yards with a driver with springs in it. Thirty years ago, the pros outdrove me by 40 and 50 yards. Today they outdrive me by twice that much, easy! Bryson DeChambeau has come back from the coronavirus break averaging 350 yards per drive.

     So, how does he do that? My friend Hamlin Moody wants to know if he’s been tested for steroids. “I mean,” Hamlin was saying on the phone earlier this week, “I know this isn’t a question you ask, but he looks more like Roger Clemens, circa 1999 than Roger Clemens three seasons earlier.”

     “What do you mean it isn’t a question you ask? You thought Tiger was on steroids if I remember.”

     “So, right. What do you make of this, then? DeChambeau averaged 350.6 yards per drive last weekend. Three-hundred-fifty-point-six! Averaged! Breaking a record set in 2005: 341.5 yards a drive. Set by?”

     I hazarded a guess, “Tiger Woods.”

     “Looking more like A-Rod after than A-Rod before,” Hamlin said.

“You don’t look very happy,” Roz says. “What are you writing about?” She hardly ever asks.

     I read her what I had so far.

     “Can you write about that?” she asks.

     “Nobody reads what I write anyway,” I say. “It’s just a hypothesis anyway.”

     “I guess so,” she says. “Is that the end? ‘Looking more like A-Rod after than A-Rod before’?”

     “It sounds like it to me,” I say.

“You know the President’s on steroids," Hamlin said.

07.09.20

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 * Hamlin Moody is a guy I sometimes play golf with. See here. Roz is, you know, Roz. Here.