Golf is in the Ruff:

Maybe you heard but the popularity of golf has flattened out. Reasons are numerous:

“The answer is usually economic,” Mr. Kass said. “No time. Two jobs. Real wages not going up. Pensions going away. Corporate cutbacks in country club memberships — all that doom and gloom stuff.”

In many parts of the country, high expectations for a golf bonanza paralleling baby boomer retirements led to what is now considered a vast overbuilding of golf courses.

Between 1990 and 2003, developers built more than 3,000 new golf courses in the United States, bringing the total to about 16,000. Several hundred have closed in the last few years, most of them in Arizona, Florida, Michigan and South Carolina, according to the foundation.

At the meeting here, there was a consensus that changing family dynamics have had a profound effect on the sport.

“Years ago, men thought nothing of spending the whole day playing golf — maybe Saturday and Sunday both,” said Mr. Rocchio, the public relations consultant, who is also the New York regional director of the National Golf Course Owners Association. “Today, he is driving his kids to their soccer games. Maybe he’s playing a round early in the morning. But he has to get back home in time for lunch.”

Being a dedicated mini-golf player myself, I can't say I'm shedding a lot of tears over this. I'd be interested to hear how the people's game of moats and outsized animals is doing.

Honoring Jackie Robinson...

Tomorrow marks the 60th anniversary of Jackie Robinson's debut in Major League Baseball and the beginning of the sport's long journey toward equality for all its players. On that day, Robinson told his wife Rachel "I'll be number 42 in case you have trouble picking me out."

In 1997, Major League Baseball agreed to retire Robinson's number in his honor. This year, to commerate the anniversary, every major league team will have at least one player wearing the number 42. Robinson's team, the Los Angeles Dodgers will have every player, coach and batboy wearing the number.

According to the NY Times article I read, The movement began spontaneously when Cinncinati Reds outfielder Ken Griffey Jr asked MLB's commisioner's if he could wear the number on opening day. Word spread from there, with Barry Bonds and Gary Sheffield making a similar request. Now the entirety of major league baseball is participating in some way.

It's tempting to look at Jackie Robinson's place in American history and charatcerize him as a holy noble, the Ghandi of Baseball who put his own safety and comfort on the line in the name of a higher cause. The reality is that Jackie Robinson was a ruthless competitor on the field, an outspoken political activist and a proud yet private man. Many of his biographers submit that he died younger than he should have (from diabetes complications) since he often pushed his body at the expense of its well being.

Jackie Robinson life was about work, both on and of the field, about setting goals, achieving them, them pushing further. His courage and understanding of his place in history are indisputable. But it would be wrong to give his memory a hug this Monday. He wouldn't have wanted it that way.

"The Ted Williams of Tennis"

I'm reading this great book called The Tennis Partner by Abraham Verghese. Dr. Verghese's first book My Own Country, his autobiograpical story of running an AIDS clinic in the 1980s in rural Tennessee was one of my all-time favorites.

Early on, along with a brilliant turn of phrase every 3 paragraphs, he had this...

Ivan Lendl was to me the Ted Williams of tennis, the way he used a brand new frame and new shoes with every ball change during a match, the way each racket was strung with geniune gut at exactly seventy-two and a half pounds, the way he would toss a ball to an umpire when his fingers detected a drop in pressure that no one else had noticed. David Halberstam in Summer of '49 describes once how Ted Williams struck out at Fenway, he came to the dugout raving that the home plate was out of line. The next day, to humor him, they measured the plate. It was out of line. Lendl gave just that kind of attention to detail that oulwd have made him a great clinician, and yet, like Williams, he didn't suffer fools well and was not a popular champion. (p. 47)

I've never thought about it that way but it's exactly right. I'm loving this book.

88 Years in the Making:

Congratulations to Justin, Andrew, Wendy, Claire, Mara, Tara, Alan, Amber and all my friends in Chicago on the White Sox World Series victory. I'm not a baseball fan and didn't catch one game this year. My interest in sports only extends to underdogs. Winners bore the heck out of me. So the Red Sox last year and the White Sox, 88 years overdue this fall? Now that's my kind of fall classic.

Cubs 2006, anyone?

I Can't Happen:

No, it just did.

Sox 'em!

I don't pay much attention to baseball but there's nothing I like better than an underdog. So I was juiced like a junkie when The Red Sox, who haven't won a World Series since the invention of fire, beat the Yankees 4-2 forcing a game 7. The Yankees were ahead 3 games to 0 and have lost each of the last three.

What will happen next, I don't know. The last game is in Yankee Stadium and those people are wing nuts.

Am I a Red Sox fan? I was in like 1984 when I started collecting baseball cards and Bill Buckner was my favorite player (shows what I knew). But now I just like a good martyr story. And I hate Yankee fans. No scratch that. I hate fans of any team that wins all the time. How easy is that? It's like calling yourself a fan of gravity.