Reflections on My US Open Experience

I'm back on my couch at home after an all-night drive from Long Island, and with the US Open final round playing out on TV I thought this an appropriate moment to share my thoughts on our weekend at Bethpage.

Obviously, I would've loved for the weather to have been perfect and to have seen the final round play out before my eyes rather than on my flat screen. However, life can't always go as you'd like, and I still had a fantastic weekend with the USGA.

First, I have to tip my cap to Holly. She overcame blisters on muddy feet in less-than-perfect weather and was the perfect golf-watching companion. My favorite moment with her was when I realized that I didn't have to point out who people were or try to explain what was going on because she'd figured it all out for herself and had actually started to do it for me. She even let me spend $8 bucks on one of those yardage books that I always dream of checking from the fairway. She's a real stud.

My next nod of appreciation goes to the USGA, the Long Island Rail Road and every other agency/person that was involved in the organization of the event. They did an amazing job. The golf courses at Bethpage were not constructed to host a hundred thousand spectators. Parking and transportation could have been an absolute disaster and instead it was an amazing choreography of busses and zig-zagging lines. We took the train on Saturday and drove on Sunday and NEVER waited in a line for more than two minutes. We always were immediately ushered onto a waiting bus and on our way with little idling time. You know that a system has been organized well when it can be executed to flawless perfection by a team of teenagers checking their text messages. Everything that was within human control (translation: everything but the weather) was very well done.

Speaking of the weather, it would be unfair to be handing out kudos without mentioning the Bethpage ground crew. Golf is a weather-sensitive sport, mainly because the course is so delicate in heavy weather. The rains this week were the continuation of three weeks' worth of bad weather. Keeping the course playable and the spectator areas passable was a Herculean labor.

There are a lot of things I could share about the experience, and maybe I'll post again to cover some more, but I'll finish here with my "moment of the weekend." Golf is one of those sports that, in terms of actually seeing the action, there's nowhere better than in your living room at home. When you're actually there, you spend a lot of time scrambling around to see 10% of the major action and a lot more time trying to figure out what's happening in all of the places you can't see. Still, the experience of being there is electric, and the one magical moment that you see in person is worth hours of ESPN or NBC coverage.

Yesterday afternoon Phil Mickelson came to the 18th, where Holly and I were sitting in the grandstand, at -1 for the tournament after a hard fought day of even par golf. Phil is my favorite player, I play with his putter and even find myself waddling like him sometimes when I'm on the course. He is always a crowd favorite--especially true this week because of his wife's publicized battle with breast cancer--and he approached his ball on the final green to a standing ovation from the jam-packed grandstand.

He stood over a 30-footer for birdie and the radio in my ear (a life-saving contraption offered by American Express to cardmembers) chirped about how the crowd would erupt if he found a way to make birdie. Holly quickly agreed with the announcer, noting that she certainly would. I was hopeful but skeptical: we'd been watching players finish the home hole for about two hours and we'd seen A LOT of putts missed on all sides of the hole. As Holly had noted earlier, it was like there was a lid on the cup and your ball would break away from it no matter where you aimed.

Phil was putting towards us, and we could see that he was aiming a full six feet left of the cup. As the ball was on the way, the crowd rose in anticipation. With ten feet to go, it looked like it was going in, and when it did the eruption was instant. My heart didn't calm down for 20 minutes. Here is a low-quality You Tube video I found this morning, (not bad considering it happened less than 24 hours ago) and I am proud to say that Holly and I are just a little part of the roar you hear when the ball finds the cup.

I also learned this week that my Mother-in-Law went to school with Major Champion Justin Leonard's mother. I will now be sure to root for Justin whenever I can.

Virginia Gubernatorial Primary

This morning, I will be voting for Creigh Deeds to represent the Democratic party in the 2009 Virginia Governor's race.

If you're registered to vote in Virginia, remember to vote this morning. Virginia primaries are open so even if you're not a member of a party (technically I'm not, since we don't register voters as members of parties) you are welcome to vote.

Efficiency Complex

With the type of studying that I did in graduate school, I've become very enamored with the concept of efficiency. It's clear, looking around, that the rest of the world is as well. This makes good sense: we have computers and microchips in everything that can be programmed to do the "little" things for us, thus freeing up our minds to focus on the bigger things.

In a way, this might be a bit of double-edged sword. We've all read the little dictum that "sweating the small stuff" can be hazardous to our health, but it's a dangerous situation when we decide to stop paying attention to details.

I thought about this a lot during the spring, as my class mates and I pored over cover-letters and resumes for each of the countless job applications that we sent out. Invariably (I dare you to write 20-plus cover letters and not have a typo) we'd realize that we'd sent one in with some grammatical error that would surely disqualify us from consideration. I'll admit it, I sent in an application packet to a consulting firm and then realized a week later that my cover-letter was missing a period.

These depressing realizations were always accompanied by the same exclamation: "But the green line didn't appear!!!"

Our word processors and web browsers have become so "smart" that they now do most of the work for us. We can write an entire document without even capitalizing our own letters or bothering to put apostrophes in our contractions. Isnt that awesome?

And yes, in the rare occasion that we misspell "excited" or confuse "there" and "their," we expect our computers to either correct it instantly or throw one of those magical lines underneath it so we can do it ourselves. Of course, we don't usually have to figure out how to spell "apostrophes" on our own, we can just right-click and the computer helps us again (yes, I did that in the previous paragraph).

I never thought too much about this. It made my life easier and didn't seem to have much cost associated with it (other than the $500 price tag of some office-software suites that shall remain nameless). Yet, the implications of it all came crashing upon me as I was getting out of my car last night.

Holly and I bought a new car, and for our purposes it is basically "tricked out." Among other things, its entry/ignition system is such that you have to do NOTHING in order to get into and out of the car and start it. You walk up to the door with the key in your pocket and it unlocks. You press a button on the dashboard and it--recognizing the key in your pocket--starts. Once you're driving, if it gets dark or starts raining, the headlights come on for you (I've always had such a difficult time recognizing darkness, so this is very helpful to me).

When you get to your destination, don't worry about turning off the headlights or locking the door. Just walk away and the car--sensing your departure--takes care of everything for you.

Now, this is all fantastic. In fact I think it's the coolest thing I've ever seen. But it scares the dickens out of me. This whole situation is just begging for me to lose my keys or leave my other car's headlights on--for it I still have to do all of the luminary work, like a sucker--and kill the battery.

So, I've become worried. Will the efficient-riffic (yes, I invented that word just now and no, Firefox is not happy about it) technology at our command cause us to lose track of the small stuff? I have an efficiency complex, but I also have a "details complex." Life is what happens in the details: the stroke of a paintbrush or a note on a page of music or (in my professional life, sorry) the meaning of an individual observation to a larger truth.

Don't get me wrong, I am very thankful for technology. I'm hardly a Luddite. I prefer using analysis software and a calculator to a slide-rule and a pencil. I don't want to turn back the clock or banish my Macbook from my life. I just want to remember that though we're not supposed to sweat the small stuff, it all turns out to be "small stuff." So, with computers and cars and software geniuses taking care of it all for us, what is left?