“It appears to me that the dark has a lot more territory.”
“You’re looking at it wrong, the sky thing. Once, there was only dark. You ask me, the light’s winning.”
– Marty Hart and Rustin Cohle, True Detective
Sept. 11, 5:17pm
T-minus 6 days, 16 hours, 23 minutes
Right now, I’m camped out indoors, sheltering from an impending downpour. I spent the morning finalizing my trip to Chardon, Ohio and taking three times as long to do anything. I thought moving was complete once the furniture was built, but I didn’t realize how much infrastructure was in place in my day-to-day life until I had to start building it myself. For instance, that a real kitchen trash can with a lid is the only thing keeping swarms of fruit flies at bay, and that just using a spare cardboard box would invite a multi-front war. Flushing out my sink’s garbage disposal with boiling water was not how I planned to spend half an hour today.
So, when I checked my phone on the way to practice and realized we’d get pounded by a thunderstorm in 20 minutes, I realized I’d blown the good-weather practice hours to poor planning. I sped through a chipping drill way too fast for it to be effective practice, then got inside just before the storm was supposed to hit. I’ve been doing video work in an indoor-outdoor hitting bay for a while, but the practice plan I’d put together for today will go mostly undone.
It’s been the subtle ways in which shedding the amateur tag and turning pro feels like I imagine those big lizards feel after molting. There’s this new-skin full-body-sunburn feeling by which everything I do gets my attention a bit more and I’m that much more aware of bumping into stuff. Not checking the weather is a total own goal, and I get the sense I’m commanding only small pockets of what I need to control, and I have a feeling this sort of thing comes with the territory until I’m able to scale things up.
Case in point: there’s a bunch of guys out on the back range hitting balls right now. The models are absolutely adamant that we’re about to get hammered by this storm, but they’ve been saying it for an hour and it hasn’t rained a drop. The veteran pros apparently know something I don’t, and that knowledge has granted them an hour’s worth more work.
I moved down here last week to chase pro golf. In four days, I’ll fly up to Detroit and drive over Chardon, Ohio to play the Korn Ferry Tour Q-School Pre-Qualifier at Sand Ridge Golf Club. There are roughly 75 of us playing; of those, roughly 35 will advance to First Stage (First Stage is actually the second stage — this has been very easy to communicate to my friends and family who just want to know what I’m up to…). Something around par will probably get through. If I can play my game this week, I think I’ll get through, and I’ll have three stages and 12 rounds of golf between me and membership on one of the PGA Tour affiliate tours.
But, in a sense, it’s simpler than all that. I’m trying to get good enough at getting the ball in the hole that people will give me money to watch me do it. There are a lot of us trying to do this, and there are only so many checks to be won. And so the margins seem to be such that a better weather forecast and an extra hour’s worth of practice once in a while could make the difference.
If there were ten thousand Tour cards, I think many of us would choose to chase something else. I’m not sure it’s about the golf, in the end. It is, of course, an immense privilege to be able to play golf for a living. But there’s an additional privilege of doing a job that asks for everything you have. If I were doing another job, I think I’d be able to produce work that’s good enough, get in a rhythm, and become something of a system quarterback. For some reason, I feel the call of something that wants me to truly plumb the depths of what I’m made of. I want to do it, but I also want to know if I can. And I’m going to fight like hell to find out.
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Sept. 13, 9:03pm
T-minus 4 days, 12 hours, 37 minutes
My game feels good. I didn’t score well today. It’s one of the scarier combinations in competitive golf, in my opinion. My coach and friends agree that my game looks good, and the shots feel exceedingly doable, but the numbers aren’t adding up at the end of the day.
Today, after getting caught up with move-in stuff once again, I rolled out of the car and onto the first tee. I’d worked out in the morning, so I figured I was already loose and no worse off for not warming up. But midway through the round I realized I had been setting up closed, and I’d started compensating by swinging over the top — this is a familiar pattern for me, the tendency I’m trying to combat right now. By that point in the round, I’d made too many swings to adjust things easily on the fly, and I felt like I was fighting myself pretty much the whole way around.
I think the consistency that great pros are able to display on a day-to-day basis deserves more recognition than it gets. There’s the obvious sense that going out and playing top-level golf is impressive, but, even as a reasonably good player myself (I did break par from the tips in the wind today), I stepped on multiple bad-habit landmines that I was specifically trying to avoid. There’s a lot that goes into making consistently good passes at the golf ball.
It started raining on us pretty good during the round (for real, this time), and the worst of it started as we walked off the 18th green. But I had work to do. And, while puddles on a putting mirror used to be a reason to go inside and get the work done tomorrow, now it’s an annoyance that has to be tolerated and overcome like any other. The work had to get done. There’s a pride to be taken in it. I know people have done a lot harder work under a lot worse conditions, but there are plenty of guys who aren’t out there in the rain. It feels good to lay out my clubs in my apartment to dry and feel like I did something.
Now I’m showered, sitting at my kitchen table, looking at my apartment’s still-largely-blank walls. I’ve been enjoying the clean look of things during the day, the simplicity, and the feeling of control that comes from an uncomplicated environment. There’s a sense that I’m not being influenced, that the blank walls let me write things for myself.
But, once the sun sets, they can become a bit more of a burden, a lonely demand to populate the space with my own thoughts. The mind craves some amount of structure. In the daylight hours, the visual simplicity of the space denotes it as a sovereign space in an often chaotic world. But at night, light stops coming in the windows, the apartment becomes the whole world, and the walls start asking questions.
I’ve been rewatching the first season of True Detective while continuing my set-up chores here, and the main takeaway is that my head’s filling up with a lot of dark, uncomfortable shit, and I should watch something else. But, with all that season’s talk of superstition and stories, I find myself asking: do I have what it takes? Does my own self have what’s needed to pull this off? Cognitively, I believe it’s a bad question. Right now, it’s still up to me. I can pull it off, or I can’t. I don’t think fate or armchair analysis gets to the root of the problem.
The better question — maybe the only question — is, “What can I do to give myself the best chance?” And that begins with filling my head with something other than dark, existential TV. Still, there’s a Wile E. Coyote feeling to it all — that I know I shouldn’t look down, but, if I did, I’d start falling. And both my intrigue and my discomfort with the word “chance” have me craving an answer, making me want to take a peek. I’d better keep my eyes above the horizon.
Sept. 15, 9:01pm
T-minus 2 days, 12 hours, 39 minutes
And, just like that, I’m in Chardon, Ohio.
Going back to yesterday, my last day of practice at home before traveling, everything felt great. Golf felt easy. I had all the shots. As much as this seems wonderful, the truth is probably closer to that of the parable about the Chinese farmer: maybe. Things lined up well today. I’m glad they did. I don’t know why things went so well, and in that sense, I don’t own it. At the same time, I’m not going to try too hard to find o
Source: https://nolayingup.com/blog/connor-belcastro-a-q-school-diary