Monday, July 20, 2009

To Be Young at Heart . . .

In some ways, it was a heartbreaking weekend for the old timers – with Tom Watson blowing it on the 18th hole of the British Open (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/20/sports/golf/20cink.html?th=&emc=th&pagewanted=print) and Lance Armstrong all but ceding the Tour de France after his teammate Alberto Contador burst ahead in the final 3 ½ miles of the 15th Stage (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/20/sports/cycling/20tour.html?th=&emc=th&pagewanted=print). On the other hand, Watson’s near victory was an extraordinary achievement at 59. The oldest major winner in golf history was Julius Boros at 48 years old (1968 PGA Championship), with the second oldest being the more famous 1986 Master’s winner Jack Nicholas at 46. But Watson has not had the game to compete with the youngsters in 20 years. It was only in returning to Turnberry, where he won the shootout with Nicholas in 1977 that the old magic that won him 5 British Opens returned. The stage was set, everyone was ready to cheer and then cruel fate sent his second shot over the green and the third putt ran just long enough for his Achilles heal to send spasms of fear into Watson and the millions of cheering fans around the green and television sets. He missed with a weak effort and suddenly a playoff was on. It is the odd tendency of golf to too often end with the leader choking on the last day, or sometimes the last few holes. Crowd favorite Phil Mickelson has made a career of it (with a few stirring exceptions), Greg Norman will always be remembered for it (particularly his masters collapse) and a long list of others are forever memorialized as snapshots of near majesty; at least in their own subconscious bitterness.

Watson’s miss is a bit more bittersweet than most, as it reflected the collective resolve that keeps many of us pushing forward against the tides of age and deterioration. It was more than a golf story, it was the story of humanity itself and our struggles against the intractable march toward obsolescence and our desire to transcend a world that is increasingly defined by the wants, needs and largely manufactured desires of the young. We have deified youth like no previous generation, and particularly in the United States where marketers long ago realized the buying power and manipulative potential of the young. From Miley Cyrus and the Jonas Brothers to the aging Hillary Duff, Amanda Bynes, Christina Aguilera, Lyndsey Lohan and, of course, Brittany Spears, the public sphere of entertainment has become increasingly dominated by those who have the business savy of the middle aged but none of the wisdom that provides anything but cookie-cutter entertainment to their peers. Enough adults play along with these rather crass marketing campaigns to keep a new generation of pre-adolescents dreaming of the fame that a few lucky ones are guaranteed to achieve.

Lance Armstrong’s loss had a similar story line, though at 37 he is only old within the confines of his sport. Armstrong against symbolizes the push against the tide of youth though, together with the broader significance of his achievement – coming back from cancer to win the European-dominated ultimate test of endurance seven times. He is a symbol of American resolve and arguably, because of this, despised by the power brokers of the sport, who are constantly harassing him as a doper. Armstrong did not have the legs to keep up with his younger competitor yesterday, but he does sit in second place and has shown that even at his age, he is among the elites of a sport that is defined by the acumen to accept pain most of us would run away from, not towards.

In both cases I was reminded of an argument made by Hans Gumbrecht (http://www.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/gumbrecht.html) a few years ago at a summer program I attended at Cornell – that sports offer entryway to the sublime. In sports, we have the opportunity to sit as spectators and watch the fading opportunity for glory – that once defined much of ancient life. We can see the spectacle of physical feats that seem to transcend our limits as humans, to see last second heroics that bring sweet victory, to witness historic wins and losses and to align ourselves with our favorite players and teams and share in their thrills and agony. We experience the heightening of emotions that accompanies our strange identification with the players and teams, our sense that something is at stake in our own lives with each success and failure. In fact, we often speak of “we” when describing the home team, as if we were out there on the field toiling away for victory, as if we were making decisions about the team, as if we had the power to root our brethren toward victory. The truth is we sometimes do – as almost all teams do better at home than away. Sports thus offer not only access to the sublime through its transcendence of the mundane and quotidian, but that sense of community that I believe we all long for. In Armstrong and Watson, we have seen two ad hoc communities form – built around a collective desire for age to win out over youth just one time, to cheat the omnipresent but cloaked hints of death for a moment longer and to prolong that too short march toward the sweet hereafter with dignity and aplomb. Even in loss they have won that battle not only for themselves but all of us.

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