| Golfing with the Guys |
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 LIKE A BEER COMMERCIAL or a buddy movie, a guys’ getaway depends on proper casting. It requires the fellowship of ordinary louts—everyman companions disinclined toward deep reflection and apt to call you “dude” or describe something as “awesome” when it is. There’s a place for earnest travel in the company of sages, like the time I climbed Kilimanjaro with an adrenaline junkie or paddled the Amazon with a Brazilian shaman. But in the primal, manly quest for instant gratification, I’ll take the Ryder Cup.Not the one you’ve watched on TV. My Ryder Cup—the knockoff version some friends and I created for ourselves—is an annual event, pitting Yanks against Euros, held at some of the world’s least glamorous locales. Golf is involved, at least a sloppy attempt at it. So is pride of country, though mostly in debates over which nationality best metabolizes booze. In the decade-plus since the Cup’s inception, its format has never wavered: seven rounds of match play in four days, beginning with great vigor on a Thursday morning and ending with a Sunday death march made all the more pathetic by the fact that we ride carts. Every hour of daylight is spent on the golf course. Every evening is devoted to inebriation and Homeric recitations of our most triumphant shots. Never is there talk of enlightenment or growth. Wives and children, while beloved, are limited to cameos in cell-phone snapshots, acknowledged, if at all, by Neanderthal grunts. The trip, in other words, is a hackneyed showcase of arrested male development, and thank goodness. Some men travel to find their better selves. The Ryder Cup reminds us of who we are. Not that I invested it with any kind of meaning when we organized the first Cup 13 years ago. We were a loose network of friends, some Irish, some American, all seeking an escape from the grind of grad school or the numbing regularity of our jobs. The inaugural event was held in Hilton Head, South Carolina, and, as I recall, nothing profound happened, except that it was profoundly fun. In subsequent years, we reconvened at disparate destinations: the Sierra foothills, suburban Atlanta, western Massachusetts, Ireland’s west coast. More recently we’ve settled on Myrtle Beach, which some observers dismiss as the Redneck Riviera, ignoring, in their snobbery, this cultural footnote: It has more golf courses than Paris has cafés. Someday we’ll hold the Cup in a place of refinement or historical richness, but only if they lay sod over the Louvre or replace the Egyptian pyramids with a putting green. The Ryder Cup began with five founding members, but over time we’ve picked up stragglers. Among our hardcore 12 are stock characters: the lush, the lecher, the nerd, the know-it-all. Some of us can hardly say we know each other beyond the backslapping we exchange. That’s probably a good thing. I’d rather think of Booker as someone I really like than as a man whose politics stray right of Mussolini’s. And he’d rather think of me as his American teammate, not a tofu-eating liberal whose amoral convictions are bound to attract lightning. If differences divide us, they disappear come Cup time. We are bound together by our love of a long weekend whose pleasures are so real and uncomplicated that it’s better not to analyze them. My wife has given up. Her sole involvement with the trip is to bar me from returning with the Cup itself (yes, we have a cup, a silver chalice engraved and given to a member of the winning team), which she deems too tacky to allow into our home. Otherwise, she asks no questions, and I’ve learned not to bore her with details. I once made the mistake of relating slapstick moments from our competition: the time an Irishman named Padraig, in stubborn defiance of the laws of physics, struck a drive that rocketed straight behind him; or the day in rural Ireland when Tom, a benign lunkhead, made a frantic pit stop at a lonely restroom, only to discover there was no toilet paper. He was forced to perform the hygienic act by tearing off and using his own underwear. That my wife didn’t laugh was perhaps to be expected. That she shook her head sadly was a reminder that some things are better left unsaid. The Ryder Cup, in fact, is almost never worth discussing. Those who understand it require no explanation. Those who don’t simply never will. But this I will say: One sure path to existential crisis is to scour the world for meaning when the meaning resides right beneath our noses. Drop by my house. I’ll break out photos of the Sahara at sunrise, of daylight cresting over the Great Wall. I’ll also show you a picture of 12 guys gathered at a scruffy golf course, surrounding a tacky silver chalice. What the snapshot represents is up for interpretation. An all-too-common image of meatheaded masculinity? A dozen couch potatoes clinging to their youth in the face of middle age? Fair enough. But to call it cliché is also to admit that you identify. |
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