After Brooks Koepka hit his pointless approach to the 18th green on Sunday, the seething crowd enveloped him.
You think COVID-19 is still going? It may be for you, but check out the pick-up-truck crowd down in South Carolina. Their postpandemic summer is shaping up to be a rager. The only unhappy person in that mob was the only one still working.
“It would have been cool if I didn’t have a knee injury and got dinged a few times in the knee in that crowd because no one really gave a …” and you can guess how that ends because Koepka was not in the best mood.
It wasn’t that he’d lost a golf major he should have won. It wasn’t even how he lost it. It was who he lost it to. Brooks Koepka – the sort of person who lifts weights while he’s in the shower – lost the PGA Championship to his dad.
How long has that winner, Phil Mickelson, been at this? He’s been the new guy, the popular guy, the second fiddle, the cursed guy, the guy who made good, the unpopular guy, the guy who stuck around too long, the guy who hung in there despite the odds, the self-deprecating guy, the popular guy and now he’s the new guy again. He has done it all, and then wound back around and started doing it again. Soon to turn 51, he’s lapped himself.
If we are now in the era of the geriatric pro, Mickelson is their new king.
People have played into their 50s before – Gordie Howe leaps to mind. But no one has ever been top-of-the-game into their 50s.
During Sunday’s broadcast, they kept flashing a graphic showing the other geezers who’ve won a golf major. It was No. 2 that grabbed your attention – Old Tom Morris. He won the 1867 British Open at the age of 46.
I’m going to assume Old Tom got that nickname for a reason, but holy moly. In what should be the prime of life, Old Tom looks like he’s got one foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel. He doesn’t look old. He looks embalmed.
Even Jack Nicklaus (46 when he won his final Masters) has the weathered head of a man who’s spent too much time standing in a salty wind.
By modern standards, Mickelson doesn’t look young for his age. Hale and hearty, certainly. Considering the camera adds weight and golfers like their outfits skin-tight, he’s in fine shape. But no younger than your average upper-middle-class swell.
What struck you as you watched Mickelson during his victory march was the crowd following right behind him. They all looked like him. All men, all dressed the same way, all at or nearing the same mile marker in life, all looking pretty spry.
There has been a lot of talk in recent years about how these athletes are managing what they’re managing. How are Tom Brady, Roger Federer, Serena Williams still so good years after contemporaries in previous generations had broken down and given up?
The intersection of medical advances and money obviously play the major role. Old Tom Morris didn’t travel with his own team of physios. He probably thought there were vitamins in gin.
With so many more resources at their disposal, it’s natural that pros would begin devoting a portion of themselves to extending their careers in order to accrue further resources.
But what role does a changing culture play? How much of this is us being reflected back to ourselves through sports?
It wasn’t so long ago that sports were a child’s obsession. There was a time in your life when you memorized career batting averages, and then you grew out of that.
Obviously, adults liked and watched sports, but it was considered weird for a grown man to be preoccupied by them. This was especially true the higher you moved up the socio-economic ladder.
That has radically shifted in the space of just a few years. Sports fandom has become a respectable grown-up pastime, to the point where adults who do not like or watch sports feel vaguely embarrassed by it. As if they’ve missed out on something important, like learning to play an instrument.
It’s no longer odd to see a 50-year-old guy at a hockey game decked out in the same outfit – team jersey, ballcap, jeans, sneakers – as his preteen kid.
I try as best I can to avoid sports discussions away from work, but the people you really have to avoid them with – like, really have to – are men between 35 and 55. Before you know what’s happened, you’ve been dragged down a stats-heavy rabbit hole so deep, no amount of “that guy over there just told me Mats Sundin was better than Dave Keon” can get you out.
If the only people who went to movies were in their 80s, what do you think the average Hollywood star would start to look like? It seems reasonable that as the typical fan gets older, the typical player will as well.
Obviously, there are physical limitations on the elasticity of the “typical” sports star. The majority of players in just about every sport will always be in their 20s and early 30s.
But any crowd likes to see itself reflected back. Your average fortysomething would be affronted were it suggested to him he’s ready for the glue factory. Which is why no matter how much he hates him, he loves seeing Tom Brady getting over on all the twentysomethings in the NFL.
He’s not rooting for Brady. He’s rooting for himself. He’s being convinced via the magic of 2-D imagery that he could still get in there and mix it up with any guy of any age (which he can’t, and he knows, but he enjoys pretending).
These cultural forces may not be what propelled Mickelson to his most recent major, but they are part of the background that made it possible.
Watching that hooting crowd trailing behind him ensures there will be more Mickelsons in our future.
Because pro sports didn’t get to be the largest entertainment business in history by staging dazzling feats of athletic genius. They got there because they are really good at figuring out how to separate people from their money.
Cathal Kelly