The Men of The Masters Mentality and Golf Writing Today
by Tom Collins
I have had it. I can’t deal with golf articles anymore. It has reached a point of no return, where everything sounds the same yet everyone thinks they’re fresh and unique. Worst of all, thanks to the new school of marketing, golf media types in general are utilizing social networking tools like never before. Golf news and opinion pieces are in my face all the time. I suppose it would be one thing if the stories were ever-changing and approached creatively. But no—the same tools and techniques are used constantly—all of the redundancies from golf reporting are force-fed to you, and I have snapped because of it.
I feel blasphemous for saying this, because I love golf. Ask anyone who knows me at all, and they’ll all tell you that I’ve always been obsessed, even from a young age. What’s even harder to swallow is that I also love reading and writing, and have always appreciated literary talent. Historically, golf writing has been rich in this regard. But these days, despite my deep affection for the game, I find it next to impossible to finish any of the golf articles I start.
How did it get to this point? What is it about golf articles today that makes me want to revolt?
I’ll tell you why: because they do nothing to help replicate a golf experience. Oh, they may talk about Tiger’s win, a current controversy, or a summary from a day of play, but you can never actually feel like you’re there experiencing it with them. Think about the last weekend Nassau you played in with your friends, or back to when you caddied as an adolescent, or an incredible birdie putt you made on the first hole before you triple-bogeyed the next six. These are all experiences you will try to convey to friends and loved ones, right? All of these situations, and others like them, usually fall under the category of “you had to be there.” But regardless of that fact, the effort is still made to tell a story and engage an audience.
But professional golf articles rarely captivate an audience. Why? To get right to it, I believe it is because of a limiting factor called the “men of the Masters mentality.” But before I explain that, here are the three most annoying tricks golf writers use to complete an article. See if they’re like nails on a chalkboard to you, too.
First, player accolades and statistics are rattled off like bullets from a machine gun. The article may be progressing nicely, and then there’s an entire paragraph of:
“Chappell’s finish was a bit more dramatic at San Juan Oaks in Hollister, Calif. Having made just eight birdies through 54 holes, Chappell was outside the number starting the fourth round, tied for 32nd. He went out in 34, but came roaring home in 31 for a sizzling 65 that pushed him into a comfortable tie for 13th.”
Here’s another example, slightly less potent:
“Oh, and then there's his resume from the Nationwide Tour, where he won three times in a span of eight starts and shattered the circuit's money record with $644,142 in earnings over just 14 starts.”
This kind of writing is prevalent in “tournament summary” golf articles, which will highlight play from a particular day. These articles often read like bullet-points; facts and statistics are layered with weak prose used only to connect the dots. One of the best quotes I found relating to statistics came from David Feherty, who was talking about his approach to commentating during a broadcast:
“I simply describe what I see. I don't care if a player was 128th in sand saves, and he's up to 17th now. F---ing snore! I'm interested in what's happening. Besides, I killed so many brain cells with booze, I can't remember a stat to save my life.”
Second, your typical golf article tends to rely heavily on player quotes. Similar to statistics, quotes hold most articles together, and it seems like many golf writers are better suited to use words that do not belong to them than complete assignments using their own. I have a big issue with using player quotes in general because 99% of the questions “journalists” pose to players are half-assed, and the resulting responses are canned. Read my account of Turning Stone to see this theory in action. I would list examples of articles below, but that would require listing one or two complete articles, and I would encourage you to check this point out for yourself.
Third, and perhaps the most annoying, is that the language used in your average golf article idolizes every movement or action of a tour player. It seems like everything they do is poetic. Phrases to the effect of: "His soft hands, which have been so effective in his short game throughout his career, shook my own and seemed to transfer all of his knowledge and glorious power into my willing body as we began to speak." While this may be a slight exaggeration, it isn't far from the truth:
“Weathered hands spread just inches apart, Watson went on to describe the buzz of getting up on a horse and letting go of the reigns with great enthusiasm, as he did in the media center a day earlier. He turned 60 in September, but still has the youthful spirit and bright eyes of a young man.”
Or this:
“After winning the U.S. Bank Championship in Milwaukee for his first PGA Tour title in 229 starts, Bo Van Pelt couldn't help but get emotional. His elation was as pure as his golf swing.”
Or how about this:
“So, ‘Fred Couples: Leader of Men’ became the latest chapter of the Couples Mystique. Its components include plenty of emotional intelligence and humility, but also a heavy dose of self-belief in his own intuitive powers.”
Yes, what a professional golfer can do with a club and ball is quite amazing, and I’m sure their lives outside of golf transcend happiness, but you can't tell me that they are all noble enough for knighthood. They are human beings full of errors and humor. Failure to acknowledge these beings as imperfect leaves you nowhere else to go, and this is an easy way to make all of your writing sound the same. In this respect I feel many golf writers are stuck, and have cornered themselves into only one setting: absolute awe and praise.
Shakespeare wrote his plays using an iambic pentameter. Now, without looking that up I have no clue what that metrical beat is supposed to sound like, but I believe in a similar fashion, there is a tone and rhythm typical for most of the golf articles you read. I am not a hardcore English or Theatre major, so I would not be able to break down an article for you to analyze metrical beats and see if I’m right. But I can give you a solid example—and for that I’ll need Jim Nantz.
Tournament highlight reels, especially for past majors, are often narrated by Jim Nantz. His slow, sweeping vocal delivery is unmistakable, and his tone crescendo’s and climaxes just when you think it should. Keeping his voice and technique for narration in mind, read the following passage:
“Johnson didn't have his best stuff Sunday, and it appeared as if he was heading for another final-round derailment. Just two weeks earlier, the 2007 Masters champion held a two-stroke lead after 54 holes at the Quail Hollow Championship, but his advantage evaporated with an early triple bogey, and a 76 dropped him to T-11. At La Cantera he didn't let the round get away from him. The saving shot was an 18-foot par from off the green at the eighth following a flubbed chip.
‘That one really could have deflated me," said Johnson, who had missed putts of reasonable lengths on the three previous holes. "That was a big putt; it just kind of kept me in the game.’
Johnson put himself in the game with Saturday's 60, an impeccable bogey-free effort that tied the tournament record and was capped off in darkness after the second round was delayed for nearly five hours while a two-inch deluge drenched the course and unofficially ended a drought that had engulfed the region for two years. Johnson could barely see the hole when he lined up his 19-foot birdie try for 59, and he left it three feet short. But at least he was in, while 14 players, including Goydos and Leonard, had to return Sunday morning to complete the third round.”
You can almost picture the different video cuts and footage, can’t you? The preceding paragraphs sound too much like your average telecast, and so reading it feels redundant. I believe this writing tone and rhythm is anticipated by readers, even on a subconscious level, and it is this predictability that contributes to a boring read.
I’m sure some would argue that the approach of golf writers I’ve described thus far is merely professional journalism. In that case, I guess I should refine my previous statements and say that professional journalism is to blame for CASTRATING golf. Every day on the golf course is different and noteworthy in its own way, yet “professional journalism” presents each day and each tournament summary with the same voice and techniques it always has. Week in and week out, it all reads the same. But golf writing doesn’t have to read like a news bulletin or the old ticker-tape from the stock market. There’s more humor and humanity available for writers in each round, and players are not just statistics or pull-string talking dolls.
But in the big picture, whether it’s “professional journalism” or a “Jim Nantz approach to golf commentating,” I’ve concluded that the tone and rhythm of a golf article ultimately stems from what I would deem the “men of the Masters mentality.” As all golfers know, Augusta National is sacred and the location is heaven on earth. Aside from the Open Championship, the Masters is one of the most respected tournaments in all of golf. Every golfer on earth would do anything to be a member at “The National.” It’s safe to say that the men of the Masters have quite a bit of pull in the golf industry.
But the men of the Masters’ influence extends into the media as well. A perfect example of this influence came in 1994 when Gary McCord noted during a broadcast that the greens were fast, almost as if they had been “bikini-waxed.” It was a brilliant play on words. But what did McCord get for his brilliance? The men of the Masters banned him from ever coming back to Augusta.
In conjunction with the power of the men of the Masters is the fact that golf is a luxury. Getting paid to write about such a sport in such posh surroundings seems too good to be true—and most of the time, it is. Golf writers are laid off or fired all the time, but let’s face it: in hard economic times, commentating on a luxury isn’t exactly a societal necessity.
Subsequently, if you were lucky enough to land a job writing about golf, you are grateful and will do anything you possibly can to hang onto that job as long as possible. So you blend in. Like a chameleon, you avoid predators who want to see you go. You say what everyone else is saying as close to how they’re saying it. You may inject some subtle humor from time to time, but your whole goal is to avoid criticism as much as possible. This statistics-and-quotes approach to each day of coverage is really just a great way to hide a unique style of writing in self-defense.
The Feherty Exception
David Feherty is a comedy dynamo. It isn’t hard to see why people love to read his articles. When writers such as Feherty come along, people devour the content immediately because it’s the deviation from the norm they’ve been begging for. But I feel like David has been trying too hard to make the rest of us happy. At this point, our tolerance levels for his humor are astronomical, and he has to go above and beyond in each article to the point of caricature just so we’ll crack a smile.
“There is nothing sadder than watching a finely-tuned athlete walking slowly into the woods to whack his forehead on a Scotch pine just to relieve the pain of watching a 23-handicap account executive from Sheboygan agonize over whether to miss the green by 70 yards with a heavily disguised 11-wood or a very fat 4-iron.”
Or:
“It takes years of experience, training, hangovers and chili-dog induced Port-O-Let water board experiences to know what a player who has just triple-bogeyed is thinking.”
Both are funny, but both are mouthfuls and each require proper breathing if you were to read them out-loud. Now, this is not supposed to be taken as harsh criticism towards his articles or approach. I look up to Feherty, and have followed his writing for years and years. I am just trying to illustrate how hard I believe he is fighting to keep us all entertained. He should not be the only one fighting.
My Point
In reviewing all of my criticism, you might think that there is nothing left a writer can use to convey a golf experience. My stance is: these tools, when used sparingly, are effective. The problem is: most golf writers use each of these techniques constantly, and whether it’s professional journalism or not, it’s annoying enough to drive me to write all of this. My fear is that if golf writers do not start writing a little more creatively, people will stop reading. Golf fans should feel excited, not obligated, to peruse golf articles.
I suppose the greatest irony with this composition is that I currently WRITE golf articles, and my Editor at Universal Golf, Bobby Nicolson, is perhaps the best boss imaginable. He has always been supportive and allows me write about pretty much whatever gets me going. I think he believes, as I do, that if you write about something you really want to write about, that will become a part of your tone and will be apparent to your readers, who in turn should enjoy themselves while reading your article.
But when I started writing for Universal Golf, I felt obligated to write in a certain tone and style to be taken seriously. I was never TOLD to write this way, I just felt like it was expected of me. I wanted my writing to be classified by others as “golf writing,” and after the first few articles, I felt like I had stumbled upon an acceptable formula for articles that I was now required to follow.
When I was writing my blog as a caddie, I felt engaging and fearless. That was not the feeling I had while writing my first few articles for Bobby. Fortunately, I realized what kind of a creative rut I was in, and I’m glad Bobby has still decided to support me as I climb out and try different things in my articles. The last thing I want is to sound like everybody else.
In “Born Standing Up,” Steve Martin talks about how he studied the way different comedians’ delivered jokes during their performances so he could figure out how to present his material. Martin found that there was a basic formula every comedian seemed to use: there was a setup, followed by a punch line. Martin believed that subconsciously, audiences were anticipating the punch line and were able to predict when they were supposed to laugh.
In the academic world, Martin had been a philosophy major. Being the clever thinker he was, he considered a radical possibility: What if there were no punch lines? When would people laugh? This new concept and approach did not go over well with audiences at first, because people couldn’t seem to figure out what they were watching. Martin's first dozen performances were train-wrecks, but he stuck with the concept. Over time, Martin found that if he didn't let the audience know when to laugh via a punch line, he was depriving them of a much-needed release. As a result, audience members had to find their own time to laugh, and laughs fell in different places at every performance.
We all know the end result of Martin’s hard work and unique approach to comedy—soon people couldn’t get enough and tickets sold by the thousands. Steve Martin is now a comic legend.
I’m not trying to suggest I’ll ever reach the fame of a Steve Martin. What I am saying, however, is that I believe I’ve stumbled upon the tools that many golf writers use. What would happen if these elements or the general formula of a golf article changed? What would happen if a writer completely disregarded the generally accepted, tried-and-true form and wrote about golf creatively instead?
If there is any one thing I can set as a goal, it is this: I only want to write what gets me excited and holds my interest. If I end up sounding like everyone else, I know I will have failed, because that would mean that I can’t even stand my own writing. But as long as I try to bring the reader into my experiences and develop an engaging writing style, I feel I will be successful.
Developing a new approach to golf writing will no-doubt face harsh criticism at first, perhaps even on an on-going basis throughout the journey as I struggle to define my own style. Golf is a game of tradition, and, by extension, golf writing is and has been approached a certain way for years and years. But I believe what I want to do is justified and necessary to refresh and reinvigorate the world of golf journalism. Golf is not boring, and golf journalism should not be either.
I feel blasphemous for saying this, because I love golf. Ask anyone who knows me at all, and they’ll all tell you that I’ve always been obsessed, even from a young age. What’s even harder to swallow is that I also love reading and writing, and have always appreciated literary talent. Historically, golf writing has been rich in this regard. But these days, despite my deep affection for the game, I find it next to impossible to finish any of the golf articles I start.
How did it get to this point? What is it about golf articles today that makes me want to revolt?
I’ll tell you why: because they do nothing to help replicate a golf experience. Oh, they may talk about Tiger’s win, a current controversy, or a summary from a day of play, but you can never actually feel like you’re there experiencing it with them. Think about the last weekend Nassau you played in with your friends, or back to when you caddied as an adolescent, or an incredible birdie putt you made on the first hole before you triple-bogeyed the next six. These are all experiences you will try to convey to friends and loved ones, right? All of these situations, and others like them, usually fall under the category of “you had to be there.” But regardless of that fact, the effort is still made to tell a story and engage an audience.
But professional golf articles rarely captivate an audience. Why? To get right to it, I believe it is because of a limiting factor called the “men of the Masters mentality.” But before I explain that, here are the three most annoying tricks golf writers use to complete an article. See if they’re like nails on a chalkboard to you, too.
First, player accolades and statistics are rattled off like bullets from a machine gun. The article may be progressing nicely, and then there’s an entire paragraph of:
“Chappell’s finish was a bit more dramatic at San Juan Oaks in Hollister, Calif. Having made just eight birdies through 54 holes, Chappell was outside the number starting the fourth round, tied for 32nd. He went out in 34, but came roaring home in 31 for a sizzling 65 that pushed him into a comfortable tie for 13th.”
Here’s another example, slightly less potent:
“Oh, and then there's his resume from the Nationwide Tour, where he won three times in a span of eight starts and shattered the circuit's money record with $644,142 in earnings over just 14 starts.”
This kind of writing is prevalent in “tournament summary” golf articles, which will highlight play from a particular day. These articles often read like bullet-points; facts and statistics are layered with weak prose used only to connect the dots. One of the best quotes I found relating to statistics came from David Feherty, who was talking about his approach to commentating during a broadcast:
“I simply describe what I see. I don't care if a player was 128th in sand saves, and he's up to 17th now. F---ing snore! I'm interested in what's happening. Besides, I killed so many brain cells with booze, I can't remember a stat to save my life.”
Second, your typical golf article tends to rely heavily on player quotes. Similar to statistics, quotes hold most articles together, and it seems like many golf writers are better suited to use words that do not belong to them than complete assignments using their own. I have a big issue with using player quotes in general because 99% of the questions “journalists” pose to players are half-assed, and the resulting responses are canned. Read my account of Turning Stone to see this theory in action. I would list examples of articles below, but that would require listing one or two complete articles, and I would encourage you to check this point out for yourself.
Third, and perhaps the most annoying, is that the language used in your average golf article idolizes every movement or action of a tour player. It seems like everything they do is poetic. Phrases to the effect of: "His soft hands, which have been so effective in his short game throughout his career, shook my own and seemed to transfer all of his knowledge and glorious power into my willing body as we began to speak." While this may be a slight exaggeration, it isn't far from the truth:
“Weathered hands spread just inches apart, Watson went on to describe the buzz of getting up on a horse and letting go of the reigns with great enthusiasm, as he did in the media center a day earlier. He turned 60 in September, but still has the youthful spirit and bright eyes of a young man.”
Or this:
“After winning the U.S. Bank Championship in Milwaukee for his first PGA Tour title in 229 starts, Bo Van Pelt couldn't help but get emotional. His elation was as pure as his golf swing.”
Or how about this:
“So, ‘Fred Couples: Leader of Men’ became the latest chapter of the Couples Mystique. Its components include plenty of emotional intelligence and humility, but also a heavy dose of self-belief in his own intuitive powers.”
Yes, what a professional golfer can do with a club and ball is quite amazing, and I’m sure their lives outside of golf transcend happiness, but you can't tell me that they are all noble enough for knighthood. They are human beings full of errors and humor. Failure to acknowledge these beings as imperfect leaves you nowhere else to go, and this is an easy way to make all of your writing sound the same. In this respect I feel many golf writers are stuck, and have cornered themselves into only one setting: absolute awe and praise.
Shakespeare wrote his plays using an iambic pentameter. Now, without looking that up I have no clue what that metrical beat is supposed to sound like, but I believe in a similar fashion, there is a tone and rhythm typical for most of the golf articles you read. I am not a hardcore English or Theatre major, so I would not be able to break down an article for you to analyze metrical beats and see if I’m right. But I can give you a solid example—and for that I’ll need Jim Nantz.
Tournament highlight reels, especially for past majors, are often narrated by Jim Nantz. His slow, sweeping vocal delivery is unmistakable, and his tone crescendo’s and climaxes just when you think it should. Keeping his voice and technique for narration in mind, read the following passage:
“Johnson didn't have his best stuff Sunday, and it appeared as if he was heading for another final-round derailment. Just two weeks earlier, the 2007 Masters champion held a two-stroke lead after 54 holes at the Quail Hollow Championship, but his advantage evaporated with an early triple bogey, and a 76 dropped him to T-11. At La Cantera he didn't let the round get away from him. The saving shot was an 18-foot par from off the green at the eighth following a flubbed chip.
‘That one really could have deflated me," said Johnson, who had missed putts of reasonable lengths on the three previous holes. "That was a big putt; it just kind of kept me in the game.’
Johnson put himself in the game with Saturday's 60, an impeccable bogey-free effort that tied the tournament record and was capped off in darkness after the second round was delayed for nearly five hours while a two-inch deluge drenched the course and unofficially ended a drought that had engulfed the region for two years. Johnson could barely see the hole when he lined up his 19-foot birdie try for 59, and he left it three feet short. But at least he was in, while 14 players, including Goydos and Leonard, had to return Sunday morning to complete the third round.”
You can almost picture the different video cuts and footage, can’t you? The preceding paragraphs sound too much like your average telecast, and so reading it feels redundant. I believe this writing tone and rhythm is anticipated by readers, even on a subconscious level, and it is this predictability that contributes to a boring read.
I’m sure some would argue that the approach of golf writers I’ve described thus far is merely professional journalism. In that case, I guess I should refine my previous statements and say that professional journalism is to blame for CASTRATING golf. Every day on the golf course is different and noteworthy in its own way, yet “professional journalism” presents each day and each tournament summary with the same voice and techniques it always has. Week in and week out, it all reads the same. But golf writing doesn’t have to read like a news bulletin or the old ticker-tape from the stock market. There’s more humor and humanity available for writers in each round, and players are not just statistics or pull-string talking dolls.
But in the big picture, whether it’s “professional journalism” or a “Jim Nantz approach to golf commentating,” I’ve concluded that the tone and rhythm of a golf article ultimately stems from what I would deem the “men of the Masters mentality.” As all golfers know, Augusta National is sacred and the location is heaven on earth. Aside from the Open Championship, the Masters is one of the most respected tournaments in all of golf. Every golfer on earth would do anything to be a member at “The National.” It’s safe to say that the men of the Masters have quite a bit of pull in the golf industry.
But the men of the Masters’ influence extends into the media as well. A perfect example of this influence came in 1994 when Gary McCord noted during a broadcast that the greens were fast, almost as if they had been “bikini-waxed.” It was a brilliant play on words. But what did McCord get for his brilliance? The men of the Masters banned him from ever coming back to Augusta.
In conjunction with the power of the men of the Masters is the fact that golf is a luxury. Getting paid to write about such a sport in such posh surroundings seems too good to be true—and most of the time, it is. Golf writers are laid off or fired all the time, but let’s face it: in hard economic times, commentating on a luxury isn’t exactly a societal necessity.
Subsequently, if you were lucky enough to land a job writing about golf, you are grateful and will do anything you possibly can to hang onto that job as long as possible. So you blend in. Like a chameleon, you avoid predators who want to see you go. You say what everyone else is saying as close to how they’re saying it. You may inject some subtle humor from time to time, but your whole goal is to avoid criticism as much as possible. This statistics-and-quotes approach to each day of coverage is really just a great way to hide a unique style of writing in self-defense.
The Feherty Exception
David Feherty is a comedy dynamo. It isn’t hard to see why people love to read his articles. When writers such as Feherty come along, people devour the content immediately because it’s the deviation from the norm they’ve been begging for. But I feel like David has been trying too hard to make the rest of us happy. At this point, our tolerance levels for his humor are astronomical, and he has to go above and beyond in each article to the point of caricature just so we’ll crack a smile.
“There is nothing sadder than watching a finely-tuned athlete walking slowly into the woods to whack his forehead on a Scotch pine just to relieve the pain of watching a 23-handicap account executive from Sheboygan agonize over whether to miss the green by 70 yards with a heavily disguised 11-wood or a very fat 4-iron.”
Or:
“It takes years of experience, training, hangovers and chili-dog induced Port-O-Let water board experiences to know what a player who has just triple-bogeyed is thinking.”
Both are funny, but both are mouthfuls and each require proper breathing if you were to read them out-loud. Now, this is not supposed to be taken as harsh criticism towards his articles or approach. I look up to Feherty, and have followed his writing for years and years. I am just trying to illustrate how hard I believe he is fighting to keep us all entertained. He should not be the only one fighting.
My Point
In reviewing all of my criticism, you might think that there is nothing left a writer can use to convey a golf experience. My stance is: these tools, when used sparingly, are effective. The problem is: most golf writers use each of these techniques constantly, and whether it’s professional journalism or not, it’s annoying enough to drive me to write all of this. My fear is that if golf writers do not start writing a little more creatively, people will stop reading. Golf fans should feel excited, not obligated, to peruse golf articles.
I suppose the greatest irony with this composition is that I currently WRITE golf articles, and my Editor at Universal Golf, Bobby Nicolson, is perhaps the best boss imaginable. He has always been supportive and allows me write about pretty much whatever gets me going. I think he believes, as I do, that if you write about something you really want to write about, that will become a part of your tone and will be apparent to your readers, who in turn should enjoy themselves while reading your article.
But when I started writing for Universal Golf, I felt obligated to write in a certain tone and style to be taken seriously. I was never TOLD to write this way, I just felt like it was expected of me. I wanted my writing to be classified by others as “golf writing,” and after the first few articles, I felt like I had stumbled upon an acceptable formula for articles that I was now required to follow.
When I was writing my blog as a caddie, I felt engaging and fearless. That was not the feeling I had while writing my first few articles for Bobby. Fortunately, I realized what kind of a creative rut I was in, and I’m glad Bobby has still decided to support me as I climb out and try different things in my articles. The last thing I want is to sound like everybody else.
In “Born Standing Up,” Steve Martin talks about how he studied the way different comedians’ delivered jokes during their performances so he could figure out how to present his material. Martin found that there was a basic formula every comedian seemed to use: there was a setup, followed by a punch line. Martin believed that subconsciously, audiences were anticipating the punch line and were able to predict when they were supposed to laugh.
In the academic world, Martin had been a philosophy major. Being the clever thinker he was, he considered a radical possibility: What if there were no punch lines? When would people laugh? This new concept and approach did not go over well with audiences at first, because people couldn’t seem to figure out what they were watching. Martin's first dozen performances were train-wrecks, but he stuck with the concept. Over time, Martin found that if he didn't let the audience know when to laugh via a punch line, he was depriving them of a much-needed release. As a result, audience members had to find their own time to laugh, and laughs fell in different places at every performance.
We all know the end result of Martin’s hard work and unique approach to comedy—soon people couldn’t get enough and tickets sold by the thousands. Steve Martin is now a comic legend.
I’m not trying to suggest I’ll ever reach the fame of a Steve Martin. What I am saying, however, is that I believe I’ve stumbled upon the tools that many golf writers use. What would happen if these elements or the general formula of a golf article changed? What would happen if a writer completely disregarded the generally accepted, tried-and-true form and wrote about golf creatively instead?
If there is any one thing I can set as a goal, it is this: I only want to write what gets me excited and holds my interest. If I end up sounding like everyone else, I know I will have failed, because that would mean that I can’t even stand my own writing. But as long as I try to bring the reader into my experiences and develop an engaging writing style, I feel I will be successful.
Developing a new approach to golf writing will no-doubt face harsh criticism at first, perhaps even on an on-going basis throughout the journey as I struggle to define my own style. Golf is a game of tradition, and, by extension, golf writing is and has been approached a certain way for years and years. But I believe what I want to do is justified and necessary to refresh and reinvigorate the world of golf journalism. Golf is not boring, and golf journalism should not be either.