Apologies to Herman Melville
I’d like to preface this week’s talk by saying that I’ve never had a hole in 0ne, it is my white whale, On a golf course, I am Ahab.
If you’ve never read Moby Dick, all 13,000 pages of practically indecipherable prose, and which one of us hasn’t, you’ll recognize the cursed lament you are about to hear. If you haven’t then please bare with me
I’ll start.
There’s a white whale out there, it exists in my mind, the nod of other, the ones who stand on a level swatch of grass, weapon in hand, goal in front, and a keen eye for a prize. That prize is some distance off, measured in yards and years. It’s elusive, much on the side of impossible. But others, many more of a fact, many more skilled, many less so, many have skulled that white behemoth. Don’t let them fool you, the skilled and the unskilled alike.
They are, to a person, lucky so and sos.
With tee in my hand and ball in the other I set the course, seeking, as so many do, the very soul of perfection, the score of one.
“They think me mad – First for playing this impossible game, next for hunting the incredible within the impossible; hopelessness squared, then trebled, and finally, the last chance, the ultimate par 3 on this maddening sea.
The target -my whale- is almost beyond my aging sight. It’s great white snout barely visible across the expanse of green sea. Marked with a flag, a sign of where to look, where to strike. It might as well be a single wave on the vast sea, so elusive, so finite.
- “But today is the day, I can feel it, deep in my bones, in my hands and my Footjoys. Let faith oust fact; let fancy oust memory; I look deep down the fairway and do believe.”
The others stand my side, they wait, knowing it is I alone the whale has escaped, they to a person, have conquered their own beast, some more than once,
They let me know, keep me informed of their loud victories against the great white,
They are, to a person, arrogant so and so’s.
“‘Stop your grinning,’ shout I, ‘and hand me my trusty harpoon.
“I’VE piled upon the whale’s white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by my whole race from old Tom Morris, to Bobby Jones, Sneed, Palmer and Niclaus on down; and finally me, the Ahab of these times.
I try all things, I achieve what I can.”
My hopeless resignation is not understood,. It is not appreciated “To be enraged with a dumb brute an unlikely task, that acts out of blind instinct is blasphemous.” The ball nor the hole gives an acre of heed to my strike. It just sits there…
But MOCKING..mocking.
“To the last I grapple with thee; from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee.”
I strike and wail: Go in the hole you cursed thing”
“That wild madness that’s only calm to comprehend itself!” That clubbed harpoon that sails past the whale, and mocks me, looking back to say, what did you think was going to happen? That I’d wind up in that blow-hole? That I’d give you rest? That I’d put your name n the papers, and let you join that unholy cabal that has surely given some part of their soul to enjoy this achievement?
“That ain’t no whale; that a great white god.” I scream
Tis simply a hole in the ground, say my partners.
“Then all collapse, and the great shroud of the sea rolls on as it rolled five thousand years ago.”
I did not feel the wind, or smell the fresh cut of grass. I only stood, staring at the horizon, with the marks of some inner crucifixion and woe deep in my face.” As the small white ball slipped past the hole to settle with grim satisfaction in the shadow of the flag, and my fellow golfers said to me, “better luck next time”, which, incidentally, is exactly what I would have said to the Melvin’s Ahab.
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