Napping in 4K HD
My habit of watching PGA golf on TV in the hope that the low droning of the announcers would put me to sleep goes back to when I was in the throes of my third divorce. Told by my then wife that she no longer wished to be married and that I should take my teenaged son and find other quarters, I had retreated to an apartment that I would soon learn I could no longer afford.
Unemployed and soon to learn that a sixty-year-old white male with an MBA was unemployable even as a barista at Starbucks, I pulled in my horns and tried for a time to keep my son and I alive on the proceeds of unemployment. This was, of course, in the aftermath of the 2008-09 financial crisis and a lot of people were struggling. Being at the maximum level of unemployment support might have worked had not the solons of the US Senate decided to stop the government’s ninety-nine-week supplementary payments.
I was spending a good deal of time alone as one does with teenagers who find any excuse to get away from their parent. Rather than turn to drink or try to play the lotto to gain a fortune, I simply turned on the TV. Weekends were especially hard so, with no adults in sight, I started tuning into golf.
Fast forward a few years to me living in New Jersey and caring for my father now in the last stages of COPD. Having spent sixteen years in sunny California, the rigors of that first Jersey winter were enough to freeze the you know whats off a brass monkey. Once again, the PGA on TV came to save the day.
As glaciers formed outside and near white outs obscured the view of our pond and the woods beyond it was the tropical vistas that were the background to tournaments in Hawaii and California that brought me hope. I was still working then, so it was only on weekends when I could watch. And watch I did. While the old man was still alive, he would sit in his chair by the bow window overlooking the pond and doze off. I, on the other hand, would go into the TV room and tune into Nick Faldo and company to gaze upon emerald fairways bounded by the blue Pacific or the arid desert mountains of the southwest.
Those scenes were a lifeline to someone who felt more like Robert Falcon Scott, lost amidst the icy fissures of a northeast winter, and abandoning any hope of seeing green trees again. Still, the mellow intonations of the TV crew led my brain, weary from week after week of snow and ice combined with a no-win job working for a scientist whose middle name had to be Frankenstein, lulled me into the merciful arms of Orpheus.
As I have confessed in these pages, I am a duffer and moreover a geezer which makes me a charter member of the GGA – Geezer Golfers of America. That said, viewing the pros on TV is much like watching a foreign movie with subtitles running along the bottom of the screen. I can see what they are doing, but I cannot fathom how I might get my body to move in the same way to hit the ball.
When some twenty-year-old kid, fresh out of college who looks to weigh about one-fifty gets up and slams a bomb three hundred yards down the fairway, I simply close my eyes in disbelief. Maybe, just maybe I can get one-eighty or two hundred yards from my drive as long as there Is a long downhill roll. Since I play from the forward tees, I might get a drive close to where they land theirs, but that is the closest I can come to emulating the way they play.
Still, I continue to watch. My partner sometimes joins me, but she too, tires of the repetition and Jim Nance’s mellow tones as he calls us all “friends”. But last week a change in our viewing habits came about.
I had decided to update my iPhone to a 13 Pro. Why is it that even a septuagenarian needs the latest phone? God only knows. Inasmuch as I don’t make calls and none of my children ever, ever call me, what’s it for? The answer has to do with the camera and the amount of data, in my case news, that it can handle. In any event, we made the pilgrimage to Best Buy. Where after buying the damn thing and dealing with a mostly disinterested salesperson we were drawn in by the display of new Samsung 4K TVs. In the semidarkness of the showroom the images displayed on these devices were shocking in clarity and depth. Immediately a check mark was made deep in my brain.
Back at home, I began to research these QLED devices and decided that we really needed to upgrade from our current 55-inch HDTV (which was perfectly serviceable) to a 65-inch QLED 4K HDTV (btw anything bigger would require demolishing a wall).
So, after getting in a queue to find the damn thing, Best Buy let me know that I had a four-day window within which to purchase and pick up the TV. And so, we did.
We got the TV on a Saturday morning and voila, what was the featured fare that afternoon. Well, wait for it, drum roll please; The ATT Pro Am from Pebble Beach.
By three pm Nance, Faldo and company were droning away to the backdrop of Monterrey Bay, the rocky isles dotted with seals, and long luxurious belts of green fairways overlooked by the mansions of dot-com millionaires and Trump grafters.
The colors were astounding. Individual blades of grass could be discerned, and fluffy grains of sand flew upwards from each bunker shot. There I sat mesmerized. As I watched, the white balls arced upward, tiny orbs set against the azure sky and inexorably I fell fast asleep.
