New York Times sportswriter Dave Anderson puts golfer Greg Norman on the couch
By GARY KAMIYA
Photograph by Matthew Craig/The Augusta Chronicle
Contrary to the beliefs of 14-year-old boys, the daily sportswriter's lot is not an enviable one. It consists mainly of endlessly flying to Buffalo, where after watching heavily muscled, obscenely wealthy men run about for several hours, one is forced to crowd into a sweaty cubicle in which, rubbing shoulders with other pimply-faced young men clutching cheap tape recorders, one frantically scribbles down the cliches uttered by those heavily muscled millionaires as if they were Holy Writ.
The job does have one considerable perk, however, especially for those who have ascended to the profession's Everest, columnist: It gives one carte blanche to indulge in the most intimate and outrageous speculations, without having to worry about details like evidence, expertise or objectivity.
Freed, by virtue of their inconsequential subject, from the rules that occasionally obtain in the rest of the paper, the sports pages are a vast domain of irritable rants, gossip, and penny-ante psychologizing. That's why millions of right-thinking American males reach for them first. In a perverse way, they are the dude equivalent of women's magazines: designed to be read purely for pleasure, they allow the vicarious venting of irresponsible opinion and just plain silliness. Just as women apparently bond over the 1,345th article on "Fry Off That Cellulite -- and Put the Sizzle Back in Your Marriage!!!" so a sports-page tirade about why Charles Barkley's obnoxious personality led him to miss a crucial free throw appeals to the Braying Drunk on a Barstool who is the American male's true Inner Child.
In a legendary example of jockscribe hubris, a San Francisco daily sports columnist's distaste for quarterback Joe Montana actually led him to attack Montana for having impregnated his wife at the wrong time, resulting in the child being born during the playoffs and causing a distracted Montana to lose a vital game. "Joe should have planned better," he intoned. It was not a popular position, even the most psychosexually inquisitive 49er fans being unwilling to concede that athletes' matrimonial congress should be regulated by sportswriters. But its author refused to back down.
The latest incident of know-nothing jock analysis took place in the April 15 New York Times, in which columnist Dave Anderson donned Viennese frock coat and ill-fitting goatee to probe deeply into the id of golfer Greg Norman. Doktor Anderson's subject was Norman's collapse at the Masters, in which he lost a six-stroke lead on the final day, and more particularly the athlete's composed demeanor afterwards. "It's not the end of the world," Norman said minutes after the end of the tournament. "I'm happy. I have a pretty good life. Some things have worked out and some haven't. I'm very very philosophical. It's one of my very good strengths."
To Herr Anderson, however, zis apparent "strength" unly concealz vat ve call und Regressive Passivity und Satisfaaction mit Mere Money Syndrome dot makes it hempossible for him to vin das Big One. "Losing the Masters...would never be 'philosophical' to golf's great names," declaimed Anderson, the inner thoughts of Palmer and Nicklaus miraculously appearing on his 13" mental TV screen. He then went on to mock Norman, the all-time money winner on the PGA tour, for not being sure how many Ferraris he owned, setting up a dazzling, if somewhat illogical, transition: "If he doesn't know how many Ferraris he's got, does he know, or care, how often the last round of a major has not been one of his strengths?"
Having gazed Cassandra-like into the secrets of time and mind, Anderson then moved into a vengeful mode, one more suitable to his Aeschylean theme of death, pitiless destiny and a blown lead in a golf game. "More than any of the others, yesterday's runner-up finish should haunt him throughout the rest of his career," he wrote, leaving the distinct and somewhat ghoulish impression that if Norman were not haunted by it, Anderson would take it as a personal affront.
Anderson's unique insights into Norman's psyche, for some reason, were not well received by the readers of the New York Times, who let fly with a torrent of outraged letters in this Sunday's sports pages. "Norman's response to his defeat was a triumph of his spirit over ...adversity," one person wrote. Another writer noted that "Dave Anderson could be reminded that we are responsible only for the quality of our effort; subsequent results are out of our control." Another noted that Anderson's column "was both unjust and cruel."
Unfortunately, the section's editors do not seem to have learned anything from Anderson's ill-fated venture into amateur omniscience. Like New Age psychobabblers constantly searching for the perfect guru, they offered up, along with the letters, yet another Grand Hegelian Explanation, this time by a sports psychologist named Jim Loehr. Loehr, speaking ex cathedra, cleared up exactly why Norman lost. After spouting the usual sports-psyche cliches -- "fear of failure," "if you play not to lose, you're going to lose" -- he informed us that if only Norman had been able to stay aggressive and "go for it," "it would surely have changed the outcome last Sunday."
Fascinating theories, Herr Doktoren. But readers will be be forgiven if they conclude that sometimes a putter is just a putter.