Spotted on a gate around the corner from our house:
Two funny things about this: 1) I don’t think they even have a dog, 2) That German Shepard moves pretty fast for such visible hip dysplasia.
Played Harding today with JV on a wonderful San Francisco day. The day started off completely fogged in, and burned off to a nice, windless afternoon. I was looking forward to seeing how well I could let go of focusing on performance, and simply enjoy playing golf on a beautiful course.
One of the reasons I love playing with JV is that he is an avid fan of finding ways to enjoy good golf, without completely focusing on score. Today he offered to play a game of points earned on shots that felt good, regardless of their outcome. How perfectly suited to my own inner game goals! You could award your playing partner a point for a shot you thought was really good, and you could call your own points. I opted to think of them as “fun-points” - a barometer of how much enjoyment I got out of any particular shot.
The fun-points system tied perfectly well into my inner game goals, and kept me away from falling into the pitfalls of beating myself up after bad shots or holes. I quintuple-bogeyed the 2nd hole, missing the fairway and three-putting when I finally found the green. But I scored 1 fun-point for an approach shot that was spot-on.
In fact, I had four 3-putts and a 4-putt, but it was my putting that kept me in it down the stretch! Each shot was its own beautiful challenge. I even had a double-bogey 7 on the par-5 10th, with 3 fun-points: a 3-iron out of a fairway bunker that I picked clean and sent over 170 yards down the middle of the fairway, a 9-iron approach shot that stuck the green, and a 30-foot, uphill putt that wound up inches from the cup.
After a chip-in par on the 14th hole, I had a 3 fun-point bogey on 15 that left me fifteen strokes on the final three holes to break 100. All I had to do, I told myself, was average 5 strokes per hole, and I could break 100 for the first time at Harding. I proceeded to hit a wonderful approach shot on 16 that rolled off of the front of the green, leaving me a testy pitch and three puts for a double-bogey 6: +1 on pulling off the sub-100 milestone.
On 17 I put my 7-iron tee-shot squarely on the green, about 30 feet past the hole. My lag putt was well-paced, but I misread the break, and left myself a 6-foot tester for par. I acknowledged the magnitude of the putt, then dismissed the importance, pictured myself picking the ball out of the cup, and viola! Off to the final hole, with 2 strokes to give to break 100.
If you’ve never played Harding you have to understand that the final tee shot is the most daunting. It is the only hole where Lake Merced actually comes into play. Pull your drive, and suddenly you’re hitting 3 off of the tee. I thought about the lake. I thought about the fact that I hadn’t lost a ball yet on this round. And then I thought about how fun it was going to be to crush one in the fairway. I settled for a drive pushed a little right, and near the sand-traps. Excited, I topped a 5-wood, and suddenly was sitting on my third shot 150 yards to the pin.
My 6-iron approach looked like it had actually gone in the hole, and for a second I dared to dream that I’d actually birdied the last hole for my personal best anywhere, ever. It was just a trick of the shadows, and my 20-foot putt for par came up short, but my bogey putt didn’t: 98 at Harding. One stroke off of my personal best, anywhere, and my best score ever when slope and rating are factored in. It also marks three straight rounds under 100, all since I started practicing inner game techniques.
I’m stealing JV’s fun-point system for the indefinite future. It maps too well to the inner game strategies I’m trying to implement. And it is…fun.
The Day’s Stats:
Fairways hit: 5
Greens in Regulation: 4
Ups & Downs: 0
Pars: 3
Putts: 40
Handicap before round: 32.6
Handicap after round: 31.4
A few weeks ago, Dan Patrick had Chi McBride on his AM radio sports show. Chi (sounds like “Shy”) does one of the best Christopher Walken impressions on the planet, and goes on to tell three classic Walken stories. I ganked the audio and cut it down to just the good stuff: click here to listen to “kittens”
I laughed so hard while listening to that in the car, that I told Michele the story as soon as I got home. The two punchlines of, “I brought kittens. Kittens.” and “Today, I am an alligator” are big hits in our house. Or at least, in my head.
Ryder, however, is always listening. Last weekend was his friend Lulu’s party, held at a Tutu School. It’s a ballet studio for kids that also does elaborate birthday parties. Elaborate girls’ birthday parties. It was a stark comparison of the sexes, even at such a young age. All the little girls donned tutus and ran around dancing. The boys sort of watched from the sidelines. Geneveve, who runs the studio, invited Ryder to participate, and in some of the ballet-play and he declared that, “Here, I am a horse. Neigh!” Score one.
McBride inspired me to get working on my own Walken impression again, something I’ve been meaning to do for years. The other night while we were getting Ryder ready for bed, I gave my best shot at “Today, I am an alligator.” Without hesitation Ryder whipped the toothbrush out of mouth, and in near-perfect pitch declared, “I brought kittens. Kittens!” Score two.
In the final chapters of Gallwey’s book, he lays out the true core of his approach, and asks the question at the heart of the matter: why do you play golf?
I would love to answer that question to the effect of, “I enjoy it,” or “I love the challenge of golf.” And while they are both true, they are not the truth. The truth is I play golf to keep score. A damning realization and confession. Especially since I don’t score very well. But as of late, keeping score has become the focus. I’ve been playing for three years now, I should be breaking 100 all of the time, I should have broken 90 by now!
And the funny thing is, I’m so concerned with outcome that I’m getting in the way of a solid outcome. I have often stood over tee shots with nothing but trepidation, worried about how bad I might mess this shot up. My pre-shot routine would sometimes last a good minute or two. Over the ball. I would not say that golf has been fun. Oh, there have been moments. That “1 shot a round that keeps you coming back for more.”
I have been trying to remember what playing disc golf was like for me, and whether that was any fun or not. It was plenty of fun, but I was also very good at it (I’m allowed to stake that claim: I won the California Amateur title in 2000, and finished 3rd in the San Francisco league in 2003). For the most part, disc golf was fun, especially when I was winning. But when I was playing at my best, I was able to detach from outcome for long enough to make my shot. I’d make peace with what the shot meant, then disconnect and make the shot. During one stretch where I was struggling with my putts in disc golf, I found a little mantra that would clear my mind and set me in a positive mind state: “I love my wife, and I love this putt.”
I have not found that peace in golf yet, and the number of rounds I get to play is low enough that every round takes on a larger importance. Beating the last score becomes the end all, and suddenly there is not much fun to be had after a double bogey on the first leads to a triple on the second and a quad on the fourth.
Gallwey points out that focusing solely on performance hinders enjoyment and learning: all three of which are interconnected. Focus on enjoyment, stay open to learning, and odds are that performance will go up. This resonates deeply with my own personal beliefs, and reaches far beyond golf in the process.
I love what I do for a living. I couldn’t imagine a better job for me. I have so much fun on stage, that I’ve gotten to a point where I can learn in real-time during events and make adjustments to my performance. The more fun I have, the better I do, the more fun the crowd has with me, and the more money we raise.
I’m trying to focus on what I’m feeling in every day to day situation now, especially if I’m finding myself uneasy. It has brought a new level of focus and understanding to my day to day activities, work, personal and play. But I haven’t had a chance to focus on enjoying golf yet.
I’ve got a tee time at Harding this Saturday with JV. I’d love to break 100 out there, shoot my personal best, score in the mid-90’s. What I want to focus on is the pleasure of each shot: enjoying the challenge at hand, choosing the shot, and trusting myself to execute. Hopefully, it’ll be a ball.
PG&E crews have been tearing up the streets in our ‘hood for a good five or six months now. Seems there was this federal grant that PG&E was sitting on, and even though they declared bankruptcy, the fed insisted that the work get done or the money get returned. It has been great for Ryder, as we’ve gotten to watch a lot of great construction, and play on a lot of really cool work vehicles after hours.
Walking home from a trip into town yesterday, Ryder wanted to stop and watch the crew in a hole at 18th Street & Douglass. The scene had everything our toddler could ask for: guys wearing safety vests and hard hats toting shovels and sledge hammers, a mini-excavator, and a dump truck ~ all within forty feet of each other.
We were watching the guy operate the mini-excavator - the same mini-excavator we’ve crawled all over when the guys have gone home for the day, the same mini-excavator that Ryder figured out how to honk the horn on - when he noticed Ryder intently watching him work. The guy honked and waved, and Ryder just gaped back. I leaned down, “Can you say ‘Hi’ Ryder?” He waved. The guy stopped working for a second, and asked Ryder if he wanted to sit in his lap and help him operate the excavator.
“You are kidding, right?” was my first thought, but I asked Ryder if he wanted to give it a shot. He said yeah, and up he went.
The amazing thing was the look on his face the whole time: very serious. The guy was telling Ryder what they were doing, guiding him along as they took a scoop out of the big hole and emptied it into the dump truck twice. Ryder was extremely focused (except for when one of the other guys shouted, and he turned to see what was going on) and tuned in to the moment. It was neat to see. Neat? Hell, I was giddy! More excited than he.
There are benefits to having a kid in the city with the lowest per-capita percentage of children in the United State. I think I owe that guy a six-pack.
A few months back, the History Channel focused one of their fx-driven episodes of Mega Disasters on Volcanic Winter. The concept is terrifying, but seemingly far fetched: I mean, what are the odds of a massive volcano erupting in our lifetime? And if it does, we could always find a way to pull through. Right?
But after driving North on 101 this morning - through the thick haze of wildfire smoke blanketing Northern California - the reality of how tenuous our position is on this planet became painfully clear. One winter of drought, one good thunderstorm, and viola! 1,100 wildfires burning simultaneously in NorCal alone.
I’ve been driving the 101 corridor from San Francisco to Willits for 23 years now, and have a familiarity with the landscape that has evolved with the urban growth that has occurred over the past two decades. One thing that has remained constant has been the backdrop of hills, mountains and ranges. No matter how much urban sprawl changes the immediate view, those ranges in the background are longstanding visual anchors. Old friends on a long drive. Gone. Un-visible.
Mount Tam was barely visible from 101, and that was where the air was clearest. The haze in that photo above is smoke, not fog. Next time I go to Novato I’ll bring a camera so I can offer a comparison for just how visible Mt. Tam should be.
As we neared Santa Rosa, visibility dropped to less than a mile at one point. The smoke affected all of our breathing, made our throats sore, eyes water. Horrific. And all of this “just” from some fires. A super volcano? Whoops.
It raises some questions: is it possible to build a home with a filtration system that could parse out ash? Ok, possible, sure. Economically feasible? Can you build a redundant filtration system for water and waste? Can solar panels pull down enough power through this haze to be effective? Could you build a house specifically designed to get you through this sort of mega-disaster?
More importantly, would you want to?
Today being Monday, it was Toyota Prius day in the parking lot of Whole Foods SoMa. Tuesday is Mini Cooper Day, Wednesday is BMW day, and the rest of the week is a mish-mash.
On the way in we spotted a black Prius with the following license plate:
There is discussion in our house as to whether or not the license plate frame is necessary. One way or another, it shows a sense of humor above and beyond what we give most Prius owners credit for.
My friend Sarah recently posted the top 106 books most often marked as “unread” by LibraryThing’s users. As in, they sit on the shelf to make you looksmart or well-rounded. She issued a challenge to “Bold the ones you’ve read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish.” I added a fourth category: Underline and italicize the ones you started to read for school, but didn’t finish.
Looking through the list, I thought it was an exercise too interesting to pass up:
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel
War and Peace - Pretty lame that I haven’t read this, given I had a dog named Tolstoy
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver - last book I read before Ryder was born. Waiting to finish series
Wicked
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum - Where Dan Brown got the idea for the Da Vinci Code
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno (and Purgatory and Paradise)
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States
Cryptonomicon - In my top 5, all time
Neverwhere - awesome fun
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake
Collapse
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit - the book that motivated me to learn to read
In Cold Blood
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers
Apparently, I don’t read much, but when I do it is dense.
I guess I’ve never really looked too deeply into Kenny Loggins’ eyes before, but when did he become Ethan Hawke’s evil (albeit older) twin?
The sports talk radio shows, columns and blogosphere all took time today to focus on the USGA’s 18-hole playoff system for the US Open. I drove over the Bay Bridge to a meeting in Oakland and back again, listening to Gary Radnich, Jim Rome, and Dan Patrick on all of their respective shows tackle the issue. Two things stand out for me.
Foremost is the case everyone makes that an 18-hole playoff on Monday is somehow bad for fans. Did I watch the end of the tournament in real time? No. Does that bother me? Not in the least. I found it completely fascinating to finally be able to watch a round of professional golf, and listen in on all of the conversations between golfer and caddy. Tiger and Stevie had some extremely illuminating conversations down the stretch, with Stevie even jumping in and stopping Tiger to change clubs on one shot.
What amazed me was the level of analysis they pour into each shot, and Tiger’s ability to refocus after being pulled off of a shot. I also loved seeing the difference in relationships between both players and their caddies. Rocco Mediate and Matt Achatz look, and sound, like they are having a great time out there.
Lost in all of these discussions is what is best for the players. Simply because our culture has made sudden death playoffs the norm doesn’t make them the best way to settle the score. What would Rocco Mediate’s legacy be if he’d simply lost to Tiger in a one-hole playoff on Sunday? How would we think of this US Op
en vs. so many other tournaments that are decided in a playoff? Amex 2005, anyone?
For two competitors to go head to head, and slug it out for another 18 holes on one of the longest, most challenging, and still fairest courses in a US Open ever was a great opportunity for them to test their own mettle. For Tiger to see how he and his bum knee could hold up after five rounds of coming back too early, and for Rocco to see how far he could push Tiger.
Both competitors got to experience something neither of them has before in sport, and came away better for it. That should count for more than satisfying a fan base’s hunger for outcome on Sunday afternoon.