The greens party

Part 2

by David Andrew Stoler

During our wait, I introduce myself to the people behind us -- two women, maybe in their 50s, named Delores (Dee) and Patricia (Pat). Dee is dressed in a bright-pink golf ensemble that starts with the mandatory visor, heads to a polo shirt and knee-length shorts, and finally ends in saddle shoes (mercifully, not pink) with golf spikes. Pat prefers her powder-blue plaid number -- a body-length jumpsuit of unspecified material. With Pat and Dee is a 13-year-old boy named Josh, who is related to one or both of the women in a way that is unclear to me. All three are Seekonk natives.

Pat tells me that we will be waiting in line a lot together today, probably at each tee, and that, consequently, we will have a good chance to get to know each other. She says this eyeing our cooler. Finally, after about 40 minutes, it's my turn to tee off.

I am Tiger Woods. I stare with Zen-master focus at the white, dimpled ball sitting aloft the wooden tee, draw the club back, then swing downward with all the strength I can muster, my hips whipping tsunami-like force through my arms and launching the club toward the unsuspecting ball.

The joke here, of course, would be that I miss -- a complete and total whiff that sends snickers through the small crowd awaiting their own tee turns. But such is not the case. I do indeed hit the ball, and hit it solidly: the sound of the club cutting the air punctuated by a ringing "ping" as it strikes the ball which, in turn, speeds -- some would say "careens" -- at an almost 90-degree angle to my right, toward and over the practice green to be leapt by no fewer than three yelping/scowling retirees. Finally it plunges irretrievably into the small strip of trees and brush that demarcate well well out of bounds.

Dee finds it appropriate at this point to help herself to one of the beers from our cooler.

Golf's blessed synergy: be like Mike and gangster status and appropriation

It was back around 1983 when golf's stars started to align. In Chapel Hill, North Carolina, one of the state university's young, talented basketball players met one of its young, talented golf players. Michael Jordan and Davis Love III became fast friends, and golf's fortunes turned. Jordan showed an interest in golf, Davis supported him, and Jordan learned to love it.

Jordan also became the most famous and emulated person on the planet. Whatever Mike wore, everyone wore; whatever Mike drank, everyone drank; and whatever Mike did, everyone did -- and that included playing golf.

Following Jordan's lead, "the more athletic players started to take it up," says Phil Fecteau, head teaching pro at Firefly. "They have a huge influence -- they make it normal."

As basketball and baseball players all started talking about fixing their golf swing during their off-season, people started paying more and more attention to golf. Joe Sprague Jr., tournament director for the Rhode Island Golf Association, says that golf's governing body, the US Golf Association, went after its new audience with inner-city outreaches and grass-roots programs "in an effort to get inner-city and non-traditional groups who might not be inclined to play out onto the course." By "non-traditional" he means the poor and minorities.

Golf was well on its way to popularity, but it took the simultaneous and continued evolution of something entirely different to make it not only popular, but hip, too. At about the same time M.J. was making his name in hoop, rap was shifting into its third stage of prominence. Paralleling rock 'n' roll's development in the beginning of this century, rap had been in its folk stage five or six years prior to this, mutating and growing at the grass-roots level of parties and extreme urban hip. It's like the Sugar Hill Gang is to rap what Robert Johnson is to rock.

Later, in the mid- to late-'80s, rap hit the pop-culture stage, drawing on its roots and combining them with modern pop inclinations. Rappers became a force in music, fashion, everything -- pop icons with hit singles who were economic forces. So maybe L.L. Cool J and the Fresh Prince are like the Beatles; N.W.A like the Rolling Stones.

So rappers got huge, made money, and started to sing about it and the respect that they deserved because they had money and success. Gangster rap, too, got big, and rappers began to appropriate 1920s American gangster style -- pinstriped suits, fedora hats. Gangsters, after all, appropriated all the symbols of money -- boats and planes and mansions and cigars, things that had been exclusively white.

Part 3