Back to School

Back to school today. Teaching one media course is a generally fun and challenging way to spend my mornings. As old media adapt their presentation methods there are more and more opportunities for content made by members of the public like my students. Time at the golf tournament surprisingly brought an offer to speak about advertising techniques in media and a proposal to provide content for the Enterprise and Journal. Expect to see more of Oliver Ames on ECAT as well.

People have shot home video for a long time, but the distinction between home video and professional TV was a wide one. Technical advances closed the gap between professional and consumer cameras, but professional editing remained out of reach until Apple created Final Cut Pro and its little brother iMovie. These software packages enabled folks at home to digitally edit film in exactly the same way as the people in Hollywood or the big networks. The final frontier for home video remained live or live to tape productions like the local news. Your typical news show assembles previously edited video along with logos, green screens, and picture-in-pictures. This has long remained the domain of expensive stand alone hardware. Even the little studio at the high school had a box called a tricaster connected to a monitor and sound board. This year all that will be used by ECAT to create programming in the gym and auditorium while our students will audition a new software package that does most of what the old equipment did in an ordinary computer.

Final words on the golf tournament. There's a famous book on golf called A Good Walk Spoiled. That sums up playing the game, but for visitors to the tournament you got an opportunity to see a very special kind of landscaping. The entrance road to the TPC has spectacular flower beds that are at the height of their beauty for the tournament. Summer plants are still going strong and are supplemented by pots of autumn favorites like mums. The wild areas of the course are home to turkeys, squirrels, and all the other animals that are familiar to New Englanders. The course design tries to blend the fairways and greens into the natural environment. The course gets very high marks from the players for its near perfect condition, but the vistas for the spectator call to mind Olmsted's "more natural looking than nature" credo. Standing on the course early in the morning lets you see just how sublime a local landscape can be.

Skinning the Cat at Hole 7

God bless the greenskeepers at all our home courses, but PGA pros would hyperventilate if they had to play our courses on a regular basis. At the TPC Norton the collar at the edge of the green is cut like the regular green at our courses and the real green is shorter and faster still. Hole 7 is a 600 yard par 5 and yesterday the hole was about 8 feet from the back of the green. The green itself rises from the front, dips down in the middle and then rises again to yesterday's pin placement.

Current golf course design tries to give the golfer a variety of ways to get to the same result. You're OK and I'm OK thinking. Yesterday's pin placement created a more Calvinist perspective-there was only one way to be saved and it was a narrow and difficult way. Pro after pro ended their previous shot right at the front of the green and were faced with a 90 to 100 foot shot to the hole. The typical pro shot would be to throw the shot in a high arc past the hole and use the golf professional's almost magical control of spin to make the ball roll backwards towards the hole. Several tried this, but the ball either flew too far and got stuck in the rough past the hole or spun back too far and rolled down the slope away from the hole. Other pros putted the ball, a mighty whack even on a superfast green, but here everyone misjudged the dip in the middle and had their ball stop far from the hole. The only way to get the ball close to the hole was with a duffer's bump and run shot. Drop a low running shot into the low spot and the ball almost inevitably rolled to a stop just a few feet or inches away from the hole. Stray from the path and be damned! I've always believed that the Scots developed the game as a metaphor for life as they saw it-stay on the straight and narrow and you might get to heaven, but even then your ball may roll into a divot in the center of the fairway and you make double bogey. Dealing with sheep is bound to sour your view of life!

Changes

     The weather at this week's Deutsche Bank Tournament has been exceptional so far, the experience for volunteers excellent, but a feeling of melancholy has hit me hard. I've been watching golf on TV for more than half a century. I've seen Gene Sarazen and Sam Snead play. Arnold Palmer was my first golfing idol. This year's tournament seems to be a passing of the torch from an older generation who I have watched play for many years to new players who I don't have any real feeling for.
    Time to think about passing the torch myself.
    On the leaderboard only Ernie Els represents the older generation in the top ten. Lots of the young guns missed the cut, sure; but so did Steve Stricker and V. J. Singh. Phil Michelson, Davis Love III, and Padraig Harrington are hanging on with little chance to win. Tiger Woods isn't even here.
    Change is inevitable. When do you hang on and try to make a difference, and when do you hang it up and let time's river flow on without you? Few athletes make a graceful exit. There's no stage manager whispering the final lines to the tiring player. Few people make a graceful exit either, but having never risen so high there isn't so far to fall and the downward slope is a more gentle one. Inevitably, everything we hold dear, everything we've accomplished or tried to accomplish, washes away like "tears in rain."
   Written after a week of very little sleep  while watching Sam Peckinpah's "Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid."