Tales from the first tee
Stories about my life experiences and others as I work at one of the premier golf clubs in Charleston, SC. Interviews with golfers around the world that have one thing in common...the pursuit of excellence on a golf course and everything else that happens along the way.
Tales from the first tee
Navigating Holiday Debates, Golf Misadventures, and the Culture of Offense
What if holiday gatherings were just an elaborate golf game, where every swing could spark a political debate? Join me on a cross-country journey with my loyal dog Sammy, as we navigate the delicate art of dodging contentious family discussions and explore the quirks of golf with my rule-bending buddy, Wi-Fi. Inspired by the likes of Trevor Noah, Joe Rogan, and Malcolm Gladwell, we dive into the wisdom of Yuval Noah Harari's "Sapiens" to ponder why we argue vehemently with friends about politics, yet remain unseen by the politicians we defend. Through this mix of humor and insight, find out if avoiding family disputes is a warning or simply a prophecy of what's bound to happen.
Shift gears with us as we tackle the rise of movements like Me Too and Black Lives Matter, and their impact on today's climate of heightened sensitivities. With a comedic lens on cultural grievances—from our golf course misadventures to everyday annoyances like driving habits—we ponder the absurdity of being perpetually offended. Reflecting on the mental challenges faced by golfers like Justin Thomas, discover how personal struggles on the green can metaphorically mirror societal complexities. Whether it's on the fairway or around the family dinner table, this episode encourages finding common ground and maybe even laughing at life's little absurdities.
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you're tuned into another episode of tales from the first tee. I'm rich easton telling tales from beautiful charleston, south carolina. In this episode I'll talk about Wi-Fi and Kris Kringle the schizophrenia of golf. Are we over-offended? And first, a segment I'll call admonishment or foreshadowing. If you're like me, you've heard all these pre-Thanksgiving alerts from the media to better enjoy family gatherings in these incendiary, politically biased times. I mean, are these alerts admonishment or foreshadowing?
Speaker 1:So during the holidays I traveled over 2,000 miles with my canine companion, sammy, thanks to the magic of streaming. While driving I listen to my favorite podcasts with Trevor Noah, joe Rogan, mike Rowe, bill Maher, adam Carolla, jon Stewart, malcolm Gladwell and, for a fix of dumb yet genius comedy, theo Vaughn. Four to five hours of streaming podcasts. I have to switch to terrestrial radio to listen to sports talk or NPR to remind me why I never pursued a life as a professor. That's 32 hours behind the windshield over eight days filling my brain with insights, facts, hyperbole, and I might cast a white net. One theme that seemed to be prevalent during the trip was this psycho babble about how to avoid contentious arguments that could lead up to words and actions that can't be taken back. What have we become where we need to be advised on how to act around our friends and family. So I've been reading this book Sapiens by Yuval Noah it was highly recommended by my free-spirited son about human evolution from pre-stone age to the present. One of his theories is that the act of storytelling helped advance our race from Neanderthal to Homo sapien. Storytelling contributed to human cooperation, cooperation and teamwork helped our race evolve. To underscore this point, we've created children's books to emphasize cooperation, books like the Enormous Potato Sloth and a Squirrel in a Pickle, when Pencil Met a Racer and the Biggest Snowman Ever when pencil met eraser and the biggest snowman ever. So I ask myself what series of events provokes an author to plunge themselves into spending weeks, months and years searching for the right proverbs, aphorisms and lessons to guide our youth into kind, cooperative team players.
Speaker 1:Well, age and life experience has a prejudicial effect on how we see others, particularly others not like us, particularly people who vote for the other side of the aisle. What gets me when we argue about politics is we're fighting with people we know on behalf of those who have no idea we exist. We are fighting with people we know on behalf of politicians that have no idea we exist. They're driven by votes to keep them in control of things that keep their lobbyists content. Yet we walk our swords into the ocean to defend political stances that are as sturdy as a Jenga stack, and we do this by raising our voices, peacocking. And we do this by raising our voices, peacocking and berating our friends and family, believing in the other guy's party. So if we were all to have read the same children's books or were lucky enough to read them to our children or grandchildren, you might imagine that we had shared values about cooperation, kindness and honesty. Maybe we're just writing and reading children's books as adults because we're actually aware of how the human race is prone to go all lord of the flies on each other when we're unchecked, or because perhaps we can influence the next generation to improve or at least convince a few to treat others the way we want to be treated, and hope that it spreads.
Speaker 1:So, getting back to the foreshadowing of a contentious Thanksgiving party, do adults in 2024 really need to be coddled and coached on how to talk to their friends and family over the holidays? I guess maybe some do, but I'm guessing that media executives hammered that point down to their talking heads to come off as the smartest, wokest and most evolved network in the room. My advice is to know your audience. If the hosts bake the bread and roasted or smoked the turkey and you don't agree with their politics, shut the fuck up, pass the dinner rolls and talk about something everybody can agree with. This year, like Deshaun Watson, is overpaid and overrated sorry Browns fans, but you know it too and 66 massage therapists can't all be wrong.
Speaker 1:Wi-fi and Kris Kringle this is as true as a story ever gets. No, this is not a story about how I fixed the router enabling a strong Wi-Fi signal and saved Christmas for the family. Instead, it's a story with plenty of low purply. To make it interesting, wi-fi is a nickname I gave one of my golf goombas who caught on fire one morning and put together a slew of birdies to win the bet. His story was featured in an episode in May 2022 called Wi-Fi the Birdie Machine.
Speaker 1:Let me give you a little backstory. Wi-fi is a character who beats to his own drum. Nonconformist would be an understatement To him. Stupid rules are for suckers. Hypocrites who try to enforce the same rules they break are his nemesis, but oddly enough, he's governed by the rules of golf, with the exceptional gimme here and there, and there and there he hunkers for a good bet as long as the handicaps are fair and when I say fair I mean they're even or perhaps tip in his favor.
Speaker 1:But what golfer doesn't want the same self-tipping scales? Nothing worse than agreeing to a golf bet with a stranger or another golfer that says I don't have a handicap but I usually shoot Fill in the blank. Those are the guys you have to be cautious of. Now. It's possible they don't play enough or don't want to spend the $40 annually to participate in the GIN handicap system, or they're just so inconsistent they could only cite the score from their last round if they could remember it. I'd venture to guess that most of the I don't have a handicappers are those kind of people. Now, sometimes they purposely don't keep a handicap, so they miraculously play their supposed best year of the round ever when they play against you. Everybody has a good day on the course every once in a while. Hey, it bothers me as well when those I'm betting against have their best day ever.
Speaker 1:I must bring out the best in golfers, because the story I told about Wi-Fi, when he had a hat trick of birdies to complete the round and won the cash. It was one of Wi-Fi's best rounds. And look, I'm always glad to see a friend play well, full disclosure. Usually I'm happiest when their good round is one stroke above mine. So a few years back, wi-fi gets matched up with another local golfer, also in search of a better game, and not adverse to a little lunch money on the line.
Speaker 1:I happen to have started this guy and played with him in the Saturday morning game on our local course and put him in the category of one of the good guys. One of the good guys easy disposition, eager to play his best, aware of his golf shortcomings, but doesn't bark or complain about any unintended consequences from an imperfect setup or swing. He just laughs and goes on to the next shot. I'm going to call this guy Chris Kringle because it seems like all the times I see him on the course he only works one day a year and has a jolly attitude. The two couldn't be more polar opposites. That's why I shook my head when I saw that they had become golf buddies. Let's play a game, all right, on the count of three, name your favorite dinosaur. Don't even think about it, just name it Ready. One, two, three.
Speaker 2:Velociraptor. What Did we just become best friends? Yep. Do you want to go do karate in the garage? Yep.
Speaker 1:What Wi-Fi and Kringle have in common is their love of the game, penchant for playing hooky and full knowledge. When either of them text the other one about playing golf with as little as 30-minute lead time, the answer is always a conditional yes, conditioned on the fact that their exit strategy from their homes or local offices has to be executed flawlessly, without blowback from their bosses or wives. That makes for creative storytelling or just stealth avoidance. This tells you a little bit something about the Butch and Sundance partnership they have. Well, it's impossible at this point to make a long story short, but here's where it gets interesting. In the beginning of the NFL football season. Wi-fi, an avid Carolina Panthers fan.
Speaker 2:Betts.
Speaker 1:Kringle, a diehard New England Patriots fan, that his team would win more games than the Pats. His team would win more games than the Pats. The bet was a moderate amount of coin and understand. This was really not a bet about which team was the best. They both had horrible starts. For example, after the first seven games of the season both teams were 1-6.
Speaker 1:Somewhere really early in the season maybe it's when the Panthers were 0-2 and the Pats had won at least one game Wi-Fi couldn't stand the bet that he had made. He couldn't stand watching his team flounder after betting Kringle that the Panthers had a chance to be good this year. So somewhere in the beginning of the season, let's say after game two, wi-fi, while pulling up to the first tee for another golf match with Kringle, exclaims the bet's off, I want out. I can't stand it anymore. Mind you, they're in the beginning of the season. This is not mid-season or late season. It's the second game of the season. Kringle is laughing. He won't accept the white flag. Come on, man, the season just started. We have to let it play out.
Speaker 1:I'm not much of a Panthers fan so I didn't catch any of their games. I'm guessing from Wi-Fi's disappointment there weren't many highlights on Red Zone, where I tend to park myself on Sundays. So their tee time was being called and they had to move to the tee box and start thinking about the golf bet. With the feeling of the world on his shoulders, wi-fi pulled out his betting money satchel that he keeps in his golf bag and said take it, take the satchel and everything in it. No more, no, not tonight. Pay him, pay that man his money. Kringle laughed and said no way, a bet's a bet. Wi-fi threw the satchel at him. When Kringle looked inside and saw there was more cash than was wagered on their football bet, he finally agreed to end Wi-Fi's suffering. And the funny thing about the satchel is that every time Wi-Fi wins a golf bet, he pulls the satchel out of the bag and says a line that you'll never forget.
Speaker 1:Feed me, seymour, feed me all night, me, I mean he must have been so distraught with the Panthers to let the satchel go. But the story doesn't end here. Kringle, executing one of the best in-your-face moves, declares that he's going to carry the satchel on every business and personal trip, like the Stanley Cup, and text pics of the satchel to Wi-Fi in different places around the globe, like Flat Stanley. So he does that in a few cities. I think he took his girls to Paris to see Taylor Swift because the tickets in Paris were cheaper and more accessible than in the United States.
Speaker 1:The satchel made it to Paris, but security was so tight it never got to see the heiress tour. It did, however, make its way around Europe and, truth be told, I think Kringle's girls snuck bottles of wine back to their room in the satchel. It was having a far more exciting life than sitting at the bottom of Wi-Fi's golf bag. When Kringle returned to the States, he put the satchel in his golf bag and has lost just about every match against Wi-Fi since he accepted the forfeiture of the football bet. Actually, not just some matches, every match. He's now convinced he's cursed like the Curse of the Bambino, the Sultan of Swat, the King of Crash, the Colossus of Clout, the Colossus of Clout, the Great Bambino.
Speaker 1:So how do you break out of this curse? Well, kringle's tried lessons. He's gone to the range in the short game hitting area the day before his matches with Wi-Fi I happened to be practicing putting and saw Kringle hard at work trying to find what was lost over the past several months. I played with the two of them last week just to witness from my own eyes what Kringle was talking about. And you know what? I really couldn't tell that Kringle was losing the match. He never complained, never cursed, never threw a club or whined about any of his shots or putts. But as we putted out on the last hole, kringle just said under his breath putts. But as we putted out on the last hole, kringle just said under his breath lost again.
Speaker 1:If Wi-Fi's game was also tanking, I would say the satchel exchange was like the gift to the Magi. But Wi-Fi's handicap is dropping like a mic on 8 Mile and he's playing his best golf. The funny thing is the Panthers and the Patriots are still both tied at three wins and ten losses, and Wi-Fi's out of one satchel and Kringle is out of one good golf game. Go figure. Do you think we as a society are way over offended? I'm offended because you're gay.
Speaker 2:I'm offended by Chick-fil-A. I'm offended by your Starbucks cups. I'm offended by the Donald Trump.
Speaker 1:You have an opinion that's different than mine, so now I gotta scream at why.
Speaker 2:Cause I'm offended by everything. Cause I'm offended by everything, come on out.
Speaker 1:Is it me or are more people prone to taking offense and telling everybody about it? The term shaming has become the new arsenal for the underappreciated Social media shaming, gay shaming, lgbtq shaming, shaming for forgetting there are more letters after LGBTQ, fat shaming, slut shaming Is there such thing as fat slut shaming? Okay, now I've offended a person with an overactive appetite and libido. Whenever something that's been around for a while becomes popularized or condemned, I always try to look back and ask what could have happened to make this battle cry so top of mind. The Me Too movement became front and center when Harvey Weinstein's accusers came forward, starting an avalanche of similar sexual power plays in all industries.
Speaker 1:The Black Lives Matter movement surfaced in response to the acquittal of George Zimmerman who fatally shot Trayvon Martin. So what started the? I'm offended by that movement. I don't think there's one trigger event for the over-offended. I think it's been a slow train driven by taming microaggressions in the schools and workplace. Political correctness in the workplace. Once I left college, universities began implementing speech codes to foster tolerance by limiting offensive speech, and I swear I had nothing to do with it. The timing is just coincidence. Over time, this movement expanded beyond campuses, influencing public discourse and gave the media a needed breath of fresh air and a battle flag to shame offenders.
Speaker 1:Fat shaming came from left field and was born out of our own collective weight changes over the past 50 years. You might want to be sitting down for these factoids, particularly if you're overweight. Over the past 50 years, the average American men's weight rose from 166 pounds to 200 pounds, or a 20% increase, and women's average weight went from 140 pounds to 177 pounds. That's a 37 pound increase, or 26% gain in weight. And you wonder why the porn industry is booming. You see Fat shaming, anxiety, shaming and patriarchy flexing all in one observation. Shame on me.
Speaker 2:Shame, shame, shame, shame, shame on you. Shame, shame, shame, shame on Q. This was serious, but it turned into something fun.
Speaker 1:Hey, let's face it, the facts are the facts. We are all getting bigger as a society. I just saw a side-by-side snap of World Series crowds from 1970 compared to one from recent times. The conclusion we are noticeably bigger. And when I say bigger, I mean overnourished. And when I say overnourished I mean the big O, not the one you hope for on your birthday. I mean the big O for obese. Hope for on your birthday, I mean the big O for obese. Hey, let's see what levers RFK Jr can pull to improve the long-term quality of our food and water. I think this is where hope is a strategy.
Speaker 1:Is our obesity the unintended consequences of a well-fed country? Is this what China and India are going to look like in the future? Is our obesity the effect of multinational food companies delivering low to no nutrition foods at far lower prices than higher nutrition foods? Junk food is inexpensive compared to healthier alternatives. Their availability is ubiquitous. The changes in what we eat and how much we eat have had the biggest changes in our weight as a nation. So we're fatter because of what we eat. And couple that with a more sedentary lifestyle, starting in our Wonder Bread years, and we become a bigger than life poster of ourselves. Fat shaming is an insensitive observation, particularly when it's delivered as a weapon to hurt someone. That being said, if we as a nation continue to move less and eat more, we shouldn't be offended when it's brought to our attention. I'm not going to tell someone. I'm offended when a loved one or a friend suggests I eat less white things and eat more green things. Guilty as charged.
Speaker 2:All right, listen up everybody. I have something to tell you. I'm not quite sure how to say this. I'm fat. Let me give you a minute to absorb that. That's the way it is. It's nobody's fault, Meg, but I've decided to do something about it.
Speaker 1:I'll finish with the last segment, back in the realm of golfing. If you're not a golf fan or don't like listening to golf, this is where I bid you adieu and I'll speak to you again soon. So I call this segment the Schizophrenia of Golf. When you think about it, golf is a very mental game.
Speaker 2:In fact, I once heard it said that golf is 80% mental and 20% mental.
Speaker 1:In other words, it's a mental game offers 80% mental and 20% mental. In other words, it's a mental game. I've talked about this subject in the past as I've struggled at times executing shots that I've made before, both on the course and at the practice area, probably because it's a mental game. Every pro I've ever worked with and most every golf video, youtube, tiktok and the golf channel suggest a repeatable pre-shot routine to help get your mind and body in sync. For me, walking to my ball, gripping the club and just taking a hard whack at the ball within a few seconds has little chance of success without a pre-shot routine. I have to first check the lie of the ball to see if it's encumbered by heavy, rough divots, sand impediments or heavy roots. A simple foot wedge helps to cure most of those detractors, but it's heavily frowned upon if money or official scoring is at stake. Then I look at the target to see if there are any branches or hazards between me and where I want to land the ball. Then I feel the wind to see if it's going to have its way with my ball when it's in flight. I pick the club that has the best chance of getting my ball to the promised land. Grip the club take a stance that allows me to swing freely and look at the target and then think of three things when I begin my swing and those three things are personal to me and reflect certain checkpoints that my body needs to execute to have the best chance of execution. But it's a mental game.
Speaker 1:Anytime I cut short any of those pre-shot thoughts, I'm usually faced with the consequences of a bad swing. I play with some golfers, good and bad, that walk up to their ball with the club that they think will get them there and just hit it without what seems to be any pre-shot routine. I'd love to be able to do that if not for the impending hooks, slices, top shots or horribly misguided putts. Now, don't get me wrong, I do some of those things, or all of those shitty swings in spite of my pre-shot routine. However, I can trace back pretty much every crappy swing to forgetting at least one of the checkpoints for that swing. That's usually when you'll see me talk to myself about how disappointed I am with my short-term forgetfulness, because it's a mental game when I'm practicing at the range or playing solo. I've tried the accelerated, no pre-shot routine exercise with less than stellar results. I know it speeds things up and would make me a faster player. But then I always think of the words that Dr Banner says right before he turns into the Incredible Hulk.
Speaker 2:We now return to Jeremy Piven as the Incredible Hulk. You wouldn't like me when I'm angry. I don't like you now.
Speaker 1:As I do a community diagnosis of everybody's pre-shot routine and swing, I realize that everybody's brain works differently and most everybody's tendencies vary depending on their age, body type, physical limitations and, most evidently, not everybody needs the same amount of information in their lives. People have capacity for different information, both in quality and quantity. Not everybody wants to know everything about everything.
Speaker 2:Jerry, do you know? The human head weighs eight pounds.
Speaker 1:I always protest that I have the greatest memory. It's my recall that sucks and newsflash. As we age, our recall doesn't improve. We might remember a time 50 years ago when our older brother allowed a girl to blindfold him and walk him directly into the side of a building, chipping his tooth, but can't remember the name of that Netflix series that we've been watching for the last week or was it Hulu? It's a shame, because the more we experience life, the more we etch into our memory banks. It's the limited withdrawals that cause the frustration. So how does that relate to golf, you might ask? The longer we've played golf, the more we've learned about our game and managing risk to avoid big numbers.
Speaker 1:Every day I play and practice, I learn more about my personal tendencies, some which have helped me in other sports, but not in golf. I know that I tend to line up irons in woods with a closed stance, causing me to hit the ball right to left. Trying to correct that mid-round causes more problems than it solves. I was playing team golf with this character I'll just call Swing Leg, who had me visualize the course like a three-lane road. He always had me pick a target that was on the right lane, knowing that my ball would end up far on the left lane, which is where the pin was. I'm like that's pretty good, swing Leg. It worked for a while and I know that I set up with an open stance when I putt and slightly cut the ball. Swing Leg had a solution for that as well. Apparently he's a student of the game as well and observes his playing partners as much as he focuses on his own game. Good team captain. I know that I have a tendency to under club in the beginning and the end of a round when I'm stiff or tired. Now, swing leg didn't have a fix for that because he didn't look at my bag and see what clubs I was hitting. I have a feeling if we played more together, he'd figure out the fix for that as well.
Speaker 1:I know this one thing about myself Overall I know that when I try to rely on muscle memory alone and not go through my thought sequence, I start an internal, sometimes external, dialogue with myself. See, I think we have two entities in our heads when we play golf. Now just hear me out on this before you call the psych ward. One entity feels the shots and just knows how far back to take the club, how fast to swing and how it feels when you make center face contact with the ball. A pro once told me when you hit it pure, it feels like stale marshmallows, others tell me it's like butter stale marshmallows, others tell me it's like butter. So one entity feels that the other entity holds all the information about what needs to happen, mentally and physically, from the time I approach the ball until I release the shot from the club and hold my follow through. When they're out of sync, bad shit happens and we start to talk to ourselves. I know I talk to myself.
Speaker 1:I was practicing the other night and saw a golf acquaintance that I played with once but knew him through others I frequently play with and let's call him Durf. Durf didn't see me at first and was working on his putting game. He kept missing short putts and started blurting out sounds of disappointment. Come on, geez, no Understand. He's practicing alone and is having a dialogue with himself about how disappointed he was from missing such an easy putt. And they didn't count. He even said come on, durf. His name's not Durf, but you get it. So I piped up and said hey, durf, who are you talking to? He said what I said, you're talking to somebody every time you miss a putt. I just wanted to know if it's the same guy I talk to when I screw up a shot.
Speaker 1:Durf is like most of us. You take time to practice and want to show improvement. That's why you're doing it. Otherwise you'd be home with your wife talking about whose turn it was to empty the dishwasher. All right, so let me land this plane. As Mike Rowe always says, when I line up a shot or a putt and hit it exactly where I aimed and find out that I miscalculated the distance or direction after making great contact, I always fire my internal caddy. That's the voice in my head that convinces me that the putt breaks to the right when it actually breaks to the left. I'm like the Justin Thomas of internal caddy firers. It helps me from becoming apoplectic after spending time at the range and practice putting area, only to take my game to the course and continually guess wrong about distance or direction on any given shot. Whatever, your method is to hit more shots consistently without alienating your friends when things don't go your way. I suggest you do more of that.
Speaker 1:Thanks for listening to another episode of Tales from the First Tee. I'm your host, rich Easton, telling tales from beautiful Charleston, South Carolina. Talk to you soon, cause you own a gun. I'm offended Cause you ain't no fun. I'm offended by intelligent design. I'm offended by the way you drive. I'm offended by your race. I'm offended when I look at your face. I'm offended by your immigrants. I'm offended. You're a pacifist. I'm offended by your pro-war stance. I'm offended by your sagging pants. You have an opinion that's different than mine, so now I gotta scream at who I Cause I'm offended by everything.
Speaker 2:Come on out.