Someone has to touch the flagstick
Welcome to The One-Iron, where I'm going to aspire to tell you one story, or explain one thing in golf & the world in which it resides, once a week. Come along for the ride.
There is room for some form reasonable debate on whether capitalism has fully failed us as the guiding light for our society.
Sure, it unquestionably appears we’re in the death throes when, say, an Orwellian facial-recognition surveillance service with ties to fringe right-wing groups is leveraging a global pandemic as reputation repair. But the guiding economic theory of our western world is not sentient being, you cannot kill it, and it does not die. The best way to start a free golf newsletter is not with a mealymouthed rambling on the inner workings of some Marxist revolution.
Why would he lead with this? Why is it underneath a picture of Mark Russell? Why was Mark Russell selected by the TaylorMade Death Panel as tribute to have to touch the flagstick all day on Sunday?
Under the most charitable reading anyone can muster, the capitalism thing has not and is not working for sportswriting. The Maven’s half-hearted, woefully undercapitalized venture seems destined to run the most iconic brand in perhaps all of American writing — Sports Illustrated — aground. Deadspin was gutted because Peter Thiel got mad. Vox Media has effectively shelved SBNation, the website that built the dang company in favor of sexier ad dollars at Vox and The New Yorker. The Athletic is the shiny city on the hill at the moment, but the end game for the company is still unclear. Candidates to acquire the outlet dry up by the day, and the path to a more cash-flow positive outcome or public listing seems arduous.
The alternative path for survival is embodied by, well, whatever GOLFTV purports to be — a lightly-disguised PR arm for Tiger Woods in the PGA Tour. The trend of access being tied to those with the cash for media rights has long been a concerning trend. Independent journalism, even in an area as superfluous as sport may seem, is important. Challenging questions are important. Topics that make the part of the press tent that comes to glad-hand with players uncomfortable are important. Over the long term, sport isn’t served well by Uninterrupted, or GOLFTV, or any of the outlets that are heavily influenced by the teams, players, and games they claim to cover.
None of this is a new lament, and no one working for any of the above outlets is amoral. We’re all living in a unique pandemic-induced hell that is aggravated daily by the Perelmen-inspired absurdist cacophony of a federal executive branch sitting at the controls. Make whatever money you can to pay for food, bills, your healthcare, whatever. I spent six-plus years happily cashing Jim Bankoff’s checks while being lucky enough to have a real day job that insulated me from the day-to-day hell of the journalism profession.
But those are gone now, as are the asks to write SEO-driven tee times posts, needs to meet a post quota, asks to keep things within a brand voice for a certain audience — and maybe for awhile the credentials and access that come with it.
So, let’s do something different. Welcome to The One-Iron.
My goal is simple: tell you one story you need to hear that you won’t elsewhere, or explain one thing in a way that will make you smarter, once a week.
Much of the time, those stories or topics will be about golf, at least tangentially. Yes, I’ll write about the PGA Tour, and when it returns, you best believe we’ll be touching on the weirdest of the weird from the flavorful European Tour. But, right now, I don’t have access. And I’m not going to ask you to pay a subscription. I have a day job that treats me well. So we’ll use that position, without access, to challenge the game from the outside with a different lens. We’ll challenge the sport’s racial disparities for American players, tell stories from underfunded inner-city municipal courses that are the grassroots of the sport, reckon with how courses can be leverage for the public good, and, without question, all that is unsavory about a golf tournament hosted by SoftBank in King Abdullah Economic City.
Golf gets a pass too much from those that cover it. We turn our head away from odious topics because of the economic powers involved in the sport, the agents and handlers that direct their players to those that will serve up softball questions. But golf is inextricably tied to the world around it, and we’ve got to continue to tell the stories that affect life and society beyond the distance debate. We’ve got to wade into the areas that are uncomfortable. Someone has to go pull the flagstick.
(Look, now you understand the picture. SEE. SEE! What a tremendously cheap, lazy simile.)
(Also, please don’t pull the flagstick if you’re playing at home right now. There’s no reason. Don’t spread your germs and ruin all this for the rest of us.)
If you’ve followed my writing for the past six years at SBNation, you know we’ve written plenty of day-to-day coverage of the tour, plenty of hot takes, goofy pieces, and out there columns.
This will be different. Blogging is a day-to-day grind. Here, I’m going to get back to the ol’ journalism school roots a bit and tell stories. My hope is you’ll hear influences from NPR, Reply All, NYT’s The Daily — the types of things I consume and love on a day to day, but designed for a golf context. Maybe you’ll learn something. Maybe you’ll change your opinion about something. I’m certain it won’t live up to that billing everytime, but I hope you’ll come along for the ride.
Oh, and I’ll just be publishing once a week for now. Everyone’s inbox is busy enough.
So, welcome.
There’s a big world out there.
See you on the tee.