A Father’s Day Message to Rory McIlroy
Edward Curtin
I’m easily old enough to be your father, and as I was watching and rooting for you when you missed those putts earlier today at The U.S. Open, I was thinking about my own father, and fathers and sons, winning and losing, and what those terms mean. I have a son your age, also an excellent athlete in a different sport, as I was in my youth and my father in his turn.
Bitter it no doubt was to miss those putts, and shocking for the fierce competitor that you are. It no doubt hurts a lot. When you grimaced in pain, I did too. But it’s not the end of the world or the end of your great golf career. You will have other chances and you will win more Majors, but only if you forget today and stay focused on tomorrow and the days that follow.
There’s a profound wisdom in letting it go and dismissing comments such as Nick Faldo’s – “That’s going to haunt Rory for the rest of his life, those two misses.” He may mean well, but such a statement fails to grasp an essential truth: that those who allow themselves to be haunted by the past, haunt their futures. To follow such a road is a fool’s game. It is the old Irishman William Butler Yeats at his pessimistic worst.
Yes, the luck of the Irish wasn’t with you on those holes, as it was earlier in your round with your many made difficult putts. Like life itself, golf is a very strange game, as you know. It begins in youth as a lark, pure fun in efforts to hit a small white ball with a long stick down green grass into a small hole. A game of skill and chance before the play of life opens and so many lose their sense of fun and humor to the dark voices of the old disappointed ones.
Be bred to a harder thing than triumph always, be secret and exult, and remember Yeats in his merrier mood – wise words to Faldo’s words of doom and gloom – when Yeats wrote of the Fiddler of Dooney:
For the good are always the merry
Save by an evil chance
And the merry love the fiddle
And the merry love to dance:And when the folk there spy me,
They will all come up to me,
With ‘Here is the fiddler of Dooney!’
And dance like a wave of the sea.
Or if you prefer a different poet, another minstrel boy, who sang a song of sage advice at about the same curly-headed age you were when you won your first major, listen to Dylan shock the older folks with Mr. Tambourine Man.
Edward Curtinis an independent writer whose work has appeared widely over many years. His website is edwardcurtin.com and his new book is Seeking Truth in a Country of Lies.
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I was hoping that this article would be about how he backed out of his divorce – hopefully because he values his role as a father for his daughter.
I guess the scamdemic was blowing in the wind, as Zimmerman was hiding behind a mask and plastic shield during all his concerts.
Ouch!
anyone ever seen pics of R.Z./B.D. playing golf…?
(asking for a fiend)
https://www.espn.com/golf/columns/story?columnist=sirak_ron&id=2755203
https://www.golfdigest.com/story/how-the-times-changed-for-bob-dylan-and-he-became-a-golfer
??? I cant find the hidden meaning of this.
Relation between the scamdemic and .Zimmerman’s lyrics and concerts. Bob Dylan’s imaginary stone face mask and guards/police plastic shields under a concert.
How do you manage to put this together.
Think harder. 😆
Ha ha. I saw the Yeats quote and said to myself, “Good. He isn’t quoting Bob Dylan this time.”
The quickest runner. The best footballer. The best golfer. And preferably ad infinitum…
The moral perhaps is that it doesn’t last. We age. We go the way of all flesh. Presumptuous youngsters somehow outrun us. We no longer live up to the myths of overly reverent siblings.
It is (admittedly) a pleasant feeling to prove utterly superior to others in some field. Most will have experienced it in some form or other. I’m better than you at this. Can we vicariously prolong that in offspring … ?
Reminiscent of the tale (perhaps Roald Dahl) of the man who habitually killed sevcn before breakfast. They turned out to be 7 flies, but who’s telling…?
That said, Dylan’s playing of 2 instruments simultaneously takes some beating (how many modern musicians can claim the same). Three instruments if you include the voice. Unlikely to be topped in any modern era
Re talent, per se
Talent ultimately fleeing those who have none, in favour of those who do?
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13565437/Julian-Assange-walks-free-WikiLeaks-founder-boards-plane-UK-agreeing-plea-deal-spy-charges-12-years-fleeing-Ecuador-embassy-avoid-sex-crime-quiz.html
Rahsaan Roland Kirk would knock over Dylan with a light breath…
Yeah well Edward, I have been playing that song a long time. in fact my mother blamed Bob Dylan for the way my life went, turned out. It was in ’65. She called me downstairs to hear Mr Tambourine Man playing on the radio. It was a Saturday. Later in the year I was in the Albert Hall to hear him play it live, and then get booed for bringing the raucous under rehearsed band, If you look the gig up online, they’ll tell you it didn’t exist, that it was in the Free Trade Hall in Manchester, but I was there, in the second row. So I got my acoustic out, detuned the bottom E to D, stuck a capo on the second fret, and played along with Bob in Newport. I had his arrangement down decades ago. I’ve made people cry with that song, but nowadays I don’t… Read more »
I had a magazine that told you how to retune and play the guitar to get the exact sound of the original recording. It did this for Bob’s “Buckets of Rain” (from Blood on the Tracks). Turns out you had to tune some strings upwards a bit. Always a scary manoeuvre. I don’t know how many strings I snapped.
I am certainly not a “Hitlerist” (and I will never become one, if only because I deeply detest and reject all militarism, collectivism and uniformity in whatever form). I am also against coercive state measures, unless they are clearly and unmistakably used to protect a healthy ethnocultural state. For example, with regard to all depravity through “liberalization” of drugs, LGBTQ perversion, pornography, pedophilia, etc. But I am also against the censorship of dissident material practiced by today’s philosemitic agenda. https://counter-currents.com/2022/09/a-beginners-guide-to-the-jewish-question/ https://www.wintersonnenwende.com/scriptorium/english/welcome.html “We dont need no education (because education ultimately means fascism, or so)”: Has the “Prussian education system” https://linkmix.co/24057092 corrupted America’s schools? Some Americans claim it has. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Taylor_Gatto The crucial question – as with everything that has advantages and disadvantages – is probably what and how something is taught and conveyed in schools. Let’s take our current, completely rotten and dysfunctional “education system” with its “liberalist” values in schools where… Read more »
When McIlroy did his other famous meltdown at the Masters, he won the next Major on offer (the US Open). I believe that there is a major on offer in Britain in the not too distant future…..
I guess there’s some poetry to golf, but being a simple man, all I really need for father’s day are some beers and burgers in the backyard.
The ultimate in recycling.
Quick! Patent it Niko.
Not bad. Technically its perfect. Oxygen from beneath, porcelain to keep it cold. Melting water to extinguish the fire. Brilliant.
I dont want to pisss on anyone’s fireworks but what planet do theses authors live in…?
They change the name ‘athletics’ to ‘players’ 40/50+ years ago.
The player is a term used in a play A scripted play. Street slang for player is a ‘whore’ ‘cheat’ ‘dodgy’,
The Hole in one with it magnetic balls and billions betted on trillions in merch and memberships to be able to play at exclusive clubs build on old world lands covering up the past.
The whole thing is rigged scripted. Hole in one.
Nick flado’s ‘question of sports’ keeps you locked in to the hypnotic loop do loop.
‘Players only love you when they’re playing.’ (Fleetwood Mac)
Play-station. Where you train to shoot the the heads off and splatter blood all over the screen as player.
After training you become a Pentagon/nato drone operator shooting the head off of families and civilians in Pakistan and Afghanistan because AI said they were terrorists.
Player is a military term. Internet and play-station is made by the military. Athletics are from the old days where we lived a civil life as civilians.
McIlroy lost to a guy who has the middle name of Aldrich. The Aldriches are to the Rockefellers what the Warburgs are to the Rothschilds.
Elite sport is now merely a vehicle for propaganda – that’s not to say it’s all fixed but some it it clearly is (like the USA reaching the so-called Super Eights of the Cricket T20 WC) and any of it could be. See Twohy’s ‘The Fix Is In’ which reveals, among plenty else, that fixing sport is not illegal in the USA.
At the Euros, the world’s current top footballer (probably) is going to play the rest of the tournament in a mask. Funny how that worked out – and it’s not the first time.
whats this to do with anything, bit of celeb news ..
Sorry Ed, but golf, tennis, football, basketball, car racing, horse racing, cricket, baseball etc etc (including the Olympics), I haven’t wasted my time with for more than twenty five years.
Life’s too short, and besides, who wants to watch an elite group of billionaires and multi millionaires, many from private schools, kick, hit and chase a ball around, or drive a fast car for some corporate parasites.
Like war, ‘sport’ is a racket to bleed the bored.
Johnny – For a writer with a philosophical bent, nothing is alien and everything is worthy of contemplation. In this case, golf is a vehicle for thoughts on how to live joyously and youthfully throughout life despite defeats. “I’ve been a puppet, a pauper, a pirate, a poet, a pawn and a king
I’ve been up and down and over and out, and I know one thing
Each time I find myself flat on my face
I pick myself up and get back in the race”
Pax,
Ed
Fair enough Ed.
I admire and respect the skill of athletes but I feel that the corporatisation/monetisation of ‘sport’ has corrupted the beauty of human endurance.
Billionaire and multi millionaire sports, rock or movie stars is a bridge too far.
Frankly, the game is tired- as being played…
3 in a day don’t think about first one