Dulce et Decorum Est
Like most sports activities, golf has its rules for play and rules for those associated with the game, rules that are especially evident at country clubs, where a John-Fetterman oversized sloppy hoody, shorts, and running shoes would beget ostracism if not outright banishment. On the course and in the clubhouse decorum is everything. Those who choose to participate in this gentleman’s and gentlewoman’s activity, must comport themselves with dignity as defined by tradition centered on “good-natured competition and sportsmanship.”
But just as anarchy lifts its angry head in the midst of a functioning civilization, so impropriety raises its hooded head amongst the plaid pants, golf shirts, and smartly designed golf bags on the many links around the planet. The fairways aren’t always as fair as intended; the relaxing pastime is not always as relaxing as presumed.
Leisure activities don’t always breed leisure. Nonessential pastimes like golf, for example, can engender frustration as well as reward, social disruptions as well as unity, and anger as well as peace. Pastimes can be ramps for bad behavior to merge onto the main highways of life. Those clubs lying at the bottom of ponds on golf courses, those marriages interrupted by long hours of frivolous play for one while the other tends to home duties, and those incidents of rage over petty circumstances all make golf a microcosm of human society lived on a pretend geography and in a purchased social setting.
Whereas living in the “actual cosmos” of society is generally free, living in the golf world comes with a price. Public golf courses require fees; country clubs require both deposits and fees, usually too exorbitant for the commoner. The point is that one pays to play on both types of golf courses. One buys into the microcosm that is golf, and in buying-in, one commits to the local and international rules of decorum, violations of which have social and financial consequences.
The Incident
As an example of indecorous behavior in a golf setting, take the recent story of a guy I’ll simply refer to as NAME WITHHELD who was playing on the Crooked Creek Golf Course in Ottawa Lake, MI. For whatever reason, the 41-year-old man threw a temper tantrum, ripped off his shirt, and challenged other golfers to fight him. *
Foreshadowing NAME WITHHELD’S Incident
I’m not a golfer.
But I have played golf about a dozen times, most recently about 40 years ago if I don’t count a few miniature golf outings with grandchildren whose timing of that obligatory windmill obstacle seemed greater than mine. Those decades ago, my father, brother-in-law, and another golfer asked me to join them on the links (as they say). Reluctantly, I went. I knew I could drive a ball far but hardly ever straight because I never had a lesson, not even from a relative or friend. I knew I had little patience for putting and very little skill at it. I had learned about golf by seeing it played on TV a couple of boring times. So I thought I could imitate the stance, stiff left arm, and clock-hand rotational swing. How hard could it be? I had played baseball, a game with a ball moving at varying speeds and through different planes. This little golf ball just sat there.
While we played, a few young guys for whatever reason thought they should play through us. Ordinarily, that isn’t a problem, I assumed, but these guys became belligerent for no apparent reason, much like the story of NAME WITHHELD in Michigan. And, believe it or not, one of the guys in a fury challenged us to a fight after ripping off his shirt in the manner of NAME WITHHELD. Highly indecorous behavior, right? Even I, unfamiliar as I was with golf etiquette, knew that. But nothing seemed to calm the guy down, though his threat of violence ultimately amounted to nothing. His anger rose to the level of rage much like NAME WITHHELD’s rage as reported in the press. And even though I cautioned him that it would be unwise to fight my 6’3” brother-in-law who was a former professional athlete drafted by the top NBA team of the era, he frothed. Fortunately, his anger did subside, and he went stomping off with his buddies who seemed to be a bit embarrassed by the incident.
Contact Golf
“Holy cow!” I thought. I’m glad I don’t play this game. Frustrations abound throughout the golf courses around the world. People angry with themselves. People angry at others. Maybe the PGA should adopt the rules of Contact Golf that I devised 55 years ago as an alternative to the game of gentility: Two or four can play, but they use one ball and no cart. A flip of the coin determines who hits off the Tee, but then it’s a free-for-all on the fairway as they run to make the second stroke until someone, Polo-like, hits it onto the green. At that point only one rule applies: No blindside tackle on a putt. (Years after devising contact golf rules, I saw that the idea had spread with others joking about contact golf)
Some sports like football, hockey, wrestling, and boxing have built-in violence. But even in those games anger is just as anathema as it is in golf. So, violence doesn’t have to derive from anger. It seems that for millennia, we humans have been able to dissociate one from the other, thus there are penalties in those sports for unsportsmanlike displays. Do you find it interesting that we can distinguish between a violent legal hit in any of those sports and an “illegal” unwarranted one stemming from a player’s anger?
An Angry World
To say that the Ottawa Lake golfer’s anger is a sign of the times is to ignore history. From the tale of Cain and Abel to today, humans have been angry, often violently so. Personal and social peace is elusive, even rare. Our species exhibits anger for an indefinite number of reasons, not just incidents experienced on the golf course. Go figure.
Anger often begets anger, so the angry usually suffer some blowback consequences of their loss of control. NAME WITHHELD, for example, has a rap sheet born in his anger and public outbursts, and now he is banned from the golf course in Ottawa, Michigan. He is paying the price for indecorous behavior.
That persistent anger in our species might be the reason that civilization’s moral systems generally aim at a common goal: Peace, both individual and social. Little is more valuable in the continuance of life. But convincing any of the “angry” that their public display is detrimental not just to others but also to themselves is very difficult. NAME WITHHELD appears to have been angry for years as police reports document. One even wonders how he attained a relationship with three other golfers willing to play with him. Surely, they were aware of his public displays of anger. Were they just enablers? Did they play golf with him in hopes that his documented anger would not affect them directly? Is that kind of peaceful coexistence a microcosm of enemy countries armed with weapons of mass destruction?
Isn’t failure to confront people over their detrimental actions one of the reasons for chronic anger and crime? Do we fail our species by enabling? Do we fail our species by cowering in the presence of a potential outburst? Do we fail because we just don’t have the “tools” to handle anger and angry people?
Better to ask, “Are there such tools?”
NAME WITHHELD and His Golf Partners Should Read Walking through Anger
As an outsider, I’ve been privileged to attend conferences held by specialists in anger management. I’ve also been privileged to be the father of one such specialist. The books these specialists have written all aim toward a more peaceful world. They range from psychological categorizations of anger to mechanisms for managing it in self and others.
One might think that getting control of anger is just a matter of self help. It isn’t. The experience and insights of anger management specialists like my son provide them with practical mechanisms for achieving peace and understanding behavior. And whereas it’s true that some among us might spend a lifetime in rage—like NAME WITHHELD—it’s also true that many of us can learn techniques to manage who we are in various challenging circumstances, being in the company of an angry person one of those circumstances.
The problem of anger is like most human problems: It is complex because it incorporates not only the actions of and consequences to the angry person but also the effects on and responses of others affected by the anger. This complexity of doer and receiver or doer and responder lies as the foundation of Yield Theory, a methodology that my son created for psychotherapists but that anyone can access and use in dealing with self and others. The fullest treatment of this methodology appears in his Walking through Anger.
Had NAME WITHHELD’s golf partners read the book, the incident on the golf course in Ottawa Lake might not have reached national attention, which is in today’s social media culture “par for the course.” They might have saved themselves from an unpleasant incident by defusing their potentially explosive acquaintance beforehand by preemptive actions. That three other people chose to play golf with an explosive person is an indication of hope in the absence of effort, however. Hoping is not a mechanism. Wishing that there won’t be an incident does nothing to prevent the incident.
Giving both the doer and the receiver the wherewithal to preempt anger with peace is the goal that anger management specialists like my son aim to reach through not only their research, books, and articles on the subject, but also through videos, therapy sessions, and public talks, some of which are available free on YouTube. **
Much Anger
A perusal of just the last millennium’s year-by-year history reveals that no year has been without its anger and violence. No year has been free from war, from local tribal wars to regional and international conflicts, some of them ongoing for not just decades, but for centuries. Some regions are steeped so deeply in continuing conflict that even small gains in peaceful relationships are hailed as triumphant accomplishments. The Middle East comes to mind; its a region in which for centuries “peace” meant either genocide or subjugation, both of which engendered more anger and violence than peace. The world of humans has long been an angry world though in every age people assess their own circumstances as extraordinary.
And whereas it is true that modern rapid 24/7 communication makes more people aware of incidents of anger they might never have heard about in previous eras, there’s no evidence that today’s “anger world” is any more angry than previous eras. Today’s political turmoil, for example, probably can’t compare with times of civil wars, such as the one that tore England apart in the seventeenth century and the one that tore America part in the nineteenth century. Consider that civil wars have occurred in every location and that all such wars engender intense anger.
But social media and 24/7 news coverage have exacerbated and widened the reach of anger. As one living in southwestern Pennsylvania and as a non-golfer, I would never in a previous age have known about NAME WITHHELD’s outburst on the links at Ottawa Lake, Michigan. Just opening a link to an online newspaper exposed me to that angry outburst. Similarly, many people are daily exposed to angry political pundits, politicians, and special-interest individuals and groups. All this anger feeds anger.
The idea of an entity that persistently preys on human anger isn’t new, of course; that’s what the Satan (the Adversary) does in the Judeo-Christian tradition, Ahriman does in Zoroastrianism, and the Dragon Nidhogg of Norse mythology does. Could there be a more insightful dramatization of this self-feeding or self-propagating anger than the script Jerome Bixby wrote for the original Star Trek series entitled “Day of the Dove”? Directed by Marvin Chomsky, the Gene Roddenbury sci-fi episode centers on an entity that feeds off anger as it motivates warring factions in a continuing cycle of anger, fighting, death, and rebirth. The details are unimportant save to say that the two leaders in the fight agree that the only way to stop the cycle of anger and violence is through peaceful cooperation, even in mutual mockery of the entity.
That so many religions include belief in an entity similar to that portrayed in “Day of the Dove,” indicates to me the historical persistence of the idea that anger comes from “without,” that is, from some external cause. Although it is true that angry people react to “triggers,” the anger that manifests itself in NAME WITHHELD’s outburst on the golf course can be triggered by the most trivial of events. In the instance of NAME WITHHELD’s anger, it was the landing of an errant golf ball hit by a woman golfer. It didn’t hit him, by the way. But to reveal there is no place on the planet that is free from the spirit of anger, there in the fresh air of the great outdoors on the Crooked Creek Golf Course that spirit arose as it does in the Star Trek episode. And true to modern form that chooses recording an incident over nullifying it, someone in the group videoed NAME WITHHELD’s ugly outburst; that video got him banned from the course.
The 24/7 ubiquitous coverage of our times is both boon and bane. It is the latter because it is a constant intrusion on our privacy. It is the former because it holds us up to public view. I wonder whether or not NAME WITHHELD’s attitude has changed and whether or not after seeing himself nationally and internationally exposed as especially angry, that he might say, “I reject this obedience to this evil entity that has plagued humans from their outset.” Probably not, of course, because a rap sheet of similar incidents hasn’t wrought any change that could have prevented his golf course outburst.
If there is an entity that seeks to feed off anger, NAME WITHHELD’s behavior is evidence for it. And maybe the widespread anger across America is also evidence that some external force is at work. But to accept such a force is to reject responsibility and free will. The anger management specialists believe that personal responsibility is the only real solution to humanity’s persistent anger, that it is the only way to nullify anger’s manifestations.
Much Peace
As Dr. Christian Conte, author of Walking through Anger and other books on behavior management is wont to say at the end of any of his talks, including those on YouTube, “As always. I wish you much peace.”
I wish you much peace.
*https://nypost.com/2023/09/22/viral-full-hulk-golfer-has-history-of-run-ins-with-the-law/
**See Dr. Christian Conte’s YouTube channel.
Like most sports activities, golf has its rules for play and rules for those associated with the game, rules that are especially evident at country clubs, where a John-Fetterman oversized sloppy hoody, shorts, and running shoes would beget ostracism if not outright banishment. On the course and in the clubhouse decorum is everything. Those who choose to participate in this gentleman’s and gentlewoman’s activity, must comport themselves with dignity as defined by tradition centered on “good-natured competition and sportsmanship.”
But just as anarchy lifts its angry head in the midst of a functioning civilization, so impropriety raises its hooded head amongst the plaid pants, golf shirts, and smartly designed golf bags on the many links around the planet. The fairways aren’t always as fair as intended; the relaxing pastime is not always as relaxing as presumed.
Leisure activities don’t always breed leisure. Nonessential pastimes like golf, for example, can engender frustration as well as reward, social disruptions as well as unity, and anger as well as peace. Pastimes can be ramps for bad behavior to merge onto the main highways of life. Those clubs lying at the bottom of ponds on golf courses, those marriages interrupted by long hours of frivolous play for one while the other tends to home duties, and those incidents of rage over petty circumstances all make golf a microcosm of human society lived on a pretend geography and in a purchased social setting.
Whereas living in the “actual cosmos” of society is generally free, living in the golf world comes with a price. Public golf courses require fees; country clubs require both deposits and fees, usually too exorbitant for the commoner. The point is that one pays to play on both types of golf courses. One buys into the microcosm that is golf, and in buying-in, one commits to the local and international rules of decorum, violations of which have social and financial consequences.
The Incident
As an example of indecorous behavior in a golf setting, take the recent story of a guy I’ll simply refer to as NAME WITHHELD who was playing on the Crooked Creek Golf Course in Ottawa Lake, MI. For whatever reason, the 41-year-old man threw a temper tantrum, ripped off his shirt, and challenged other golfers to fight him. *
Foreshadowing NAME WITHHELD’S Incident
I’m not a golfer.
But I have played golf about a dozen times, most recently about 40 years ago if I don’t count a few miniature golf outings with grandchildren whose timing of that obligatory windmill obstacle seemed greater than mine. Those decades ago, my father, brother-in-law, and another golfer asked me to join them on the links (as they say). Reluctantly, I went. I knew I could drive a ball far but hardly ever straight because I never had a lesson, not even from a relative or friend. I knew I had little patience for putting and very little skill at it. I had learned about golf by seeing it played on TV a couple of boring times. So I thought I could imitate the stance, stiff left arm, and clock-hand rotational swing. How hard could it be? I had played baseball, a game with a ball moving at varying speeds and through different planes. This little golf ball just sat there.
While we played, a few young guys for whatever reason thought they should play through us. Ordinarily, that isn’t a problem, I assumed, but these guys became belligerent for no apparent reason, much like the story of NAME WITHHELD in Michigan. And, believe it or not, one of the guys in a fury challenged us to a fight after ripping off his shirt in the manner of NAME WITHHELD. Highly indecorous behavior, right? Even I, unfamiliar as I was with golf etiquette, knew that. But nothing seemed to calm the guy down, though his threat of violence ultimately amounted to nothing. His anger rose to the level of rage much like NAME WITHHELD’s rage as reported in the press. And even though I cautioned him that it would be unwise to fight my 6’3” brother-in-law who was a former professional athlete drafted by the top NBA team of the era, he frothed. Fortunately, his anger did subside, and he went stomping off with his buddies who seemed to be a bit embarrassed by the incident.
Contact Golf
“Holy cow!” I thought. I’m glad I don’t play this game. Frustrations abound throughout the golf courses around the world. People angry with themselves. People angry at others. Maybe the PGA should adopt the rules of Contact Golf that I devised 55 years ago as an alternative to the game of gentility: Two or four can play, but they use one ball and no cart. A flip of the coin determines who hits off the Tee, but then it’s a free-for-all on the fairway as they run to make the second stroke until someone, Polo-like, hits it onto the green. At that point only one rule applies: No blindside tackle on a putt. (Years after devising contact golf rules, I saw that the idea had spread with others joking about contact golf)
Some sports like football, hockey, wrestling, and boxing have built-in violence. But even in those games anger is just as anathema as it is in golf. So, violence doesn’t have to derive from anger. It seems that for millennia, we humans have been able to dissociate one from the other, thus there are penalties in those sports for unsportsmanlike displays. Do you find it interesting that we can distinguish between a violent legal hit in any of those sports and an “illegal” unwarranted one stemming from a player’s anger?
An Angry World
To say that the Ottawa Lake golfer’s anger is a sign of the times is to ignore history. From the tale of Cain and Abel to today, humans have been angry, often violently so. Personal and social peace is elusive, even rare. Our species exhibits anger for an indefinite number of reasons, not just incidents experienced on the golf course. Go figure.
Anger often begets anger, so the angry usually suffer some blowback consequences of their loss of control. NAME WITHHELD, for example, has a rap sheet born in his anger and public outbursts, and now he is banned from the golf course in Ottawa, Michigan. He is paying the price for indecorous behavior.
That persistent anger in our species might be the reason that civilization’s moral systems generally aim at a common goal: Peace, both individual and social. Little is more valuable in the continuance of life. But convincing any of the “angry” that their public display is detrimental not just to others but also to themselves is very difficult. NAME WITHHELD appears to have been angry for years as police reports document. One even wonders how he attained a relationship with three other golfers willing to play with him. Surely, they were aware of his public displays of anger. Were they just enablers? Did they play golf with him in hopes that his documented anger would not affect them directly? Is that kind of peaceful coexistence a microcosm of enemy countries armed with weapons of mass destruction?
Isn’t failure to confront people over their detrimental actions one of the reasons for chronic anger and crime? Do we fail our species by enabling? Do we fail our species by cowering in the presence of a potential outburst? Do we fail because we just don’t have the “tools” to handle anger and angry people?
Better to ask, “Are there such tools?”
NAME WITHHELD and His Golf Partners Should Read Walking through Anger
As an outsider, I’ve been privileged to attend conferences held by specialists in anger management. I’ve also been privileged to be the father of one such specialist. The books these specialists have written all aim toward a more peaceful world. They range from psychological categorizations of anger to mechanisms for managing it in self and others.
One might think that getting control of anger is just a matter of self help. It isn’t. The experience and insights of anger management specialists like my son provide them with practical mechanisms for achieving peace and understanding behavior. And whereas it’s true that some among us might spend a lifetime in rage—like NAME WITHHELD—it’s also true that many of us can learn techniques to manage who we are in various challenging circumstances, being in the company of an angry person one of those circumstances.
The problem of anger is like most human problems: It is complex because it incorporates not only the actions of and consequences to the angry person but also the effects on and responses of others affected by the anger. This complexity of doer and receiver or doer and responder lies as the foundation of Yield Theory, a methodology that my son created for psychotherapists but that anyone can access and use in dealing with self and others. The fullest treatment of this methodology appears in his Walking through Anger.
Had NAME WITHHELD’s golf partners read the book, the incident on the golf course in Ottawa Lake might not have reached national attention, which is in today’s social media culture “par for the course.” They might have saved themselves from an unpleasant incident by defusing their potentially explosive acquaintance beforehand by preemptive actions. That three other people chose to play golf with an explosive person is an indication of hope in the absence of effort, however. Hoping is not a mechanism. Wishing that there won’t be an incident does nothing to prevent the incident.
Giving both the doer and the receiver the wherewithal to preempt anger with peace is the goal that anger management specialists like my son aim to reach through not only their research, books, and articles on the subject, but also through videos, therapy sessions, and public talks, some of which are available free on YouTube. **
Much Anger
A perusal of just the last millennium’s year-by-year history reveals that no year has been without its anger and violence. No year has been free from war, from local tribal wars to regional and international conflicts, some of them ongoing for not just decades, but for centuries. Some regions are steeped so deeply in continuing conflict that even small gains in peaceful relationships are hailed as triumphant accomplishments. The Middle East comes to mind; its a region in which for centuries “peace” meant either genocide or subjugation, both of which engendered more anger and violence than peace. The world of humans has long been an angry world though in every age people assess their own circumstances as extraordinary.
And whereas it is true that modern rapid 24/7 communication makes more people aware of incidents of anger they might never have heard about in previous eras, there’s no evidence that today’s “anger world” is any more angry than previous eras. Today’s political turmoil, for example, probably can’t compare with times of civil wars, such as the one that tore England apart in the seventeenth century and the one that tore America part in the nineteenth century. Consider that civil wars have occurred in every location and that all such wars engender intense anger.
But social media and 24/7 news coverage have exacerbated and widened the reach of anger. As one living in southwestern Pennsylvania and as a non-golfer, I would never in a previous age have known about NAME WITHHELD’s outburst on the links at Ottawa Lake, Michigan. Just opening a link to an online newspaper exposed me to that angry outburst. Similarly, many people are daily exposed to angry political pundits, politicians, and special-interest individuals and groups. All this anger feeds anger.
The idea of an entity that persistently preys on human anger isn’t new, of course; that’s what the Satan (the Adversary) does in the Judeo-Christian tradition, Ahriman does in Zoroastrianism, and the Dragon Nidhogg of Norse mythology does. Could there be a more insightful dramatization of this self-feeding or self-propagating anger than the script Jerome Bixby wrote for the original Star Trek series entitled “Day of the Dove”? Directed by Marvin Chomsky, the Gene Roddenbury sci-fi episode centers on an entity that feeds off anger as it motivates warring factions in a continuing cycle of anger, fighting, death, and rebirth. The details are unimportant save to say that the two leaders in the fight agree that the only way to stop the cycle of anger and violence is through peaceful cooperation, even in mutual mockery of the entity.
That so many religions include belief in an entity similar to that portrayed in “Day of the Dove,” indicates to me the historical persistence of the idea that anger comes from “without,” that is, from some external cause. Although it is true that angry people react to “triggers,” the anger that manifests itself in NAME WITHHELD’s outburst on the golf course can be triggered by the most trivial of events. In the instance of NAME WITHHELD’s anger, it was the landing of an errant golf ball hit by a woman golfer. It didn’t hit him, by the way. But to reveal there is no place on the planet that is free from the spirit of anger, there in the fresh air of the great outdoors on the Crooked Creek Golf Course that spirit arose as it does in the Star Trek episode. And true to modern form that chooses recording an incident over nullifying it, someone in the group videoed NAME WITHHELD’s ugly outburst; that video got him banned from the course.
The 24/7 ubiquitous coverage of our times is both boon and bane. It is the latter because it is a constant intrusion on our privacy. It is the former because it holds us up to public view. I wonder whether or not NAME WITHHELD’s attitude has changed and whether or not after seeing himself nationally and internationally exposed as especially angry, that he might say, “I reject this obedience to this evil entity that has plagued humans from their outset.” Probably not, of course, because a rap sheet of similar incidents hasn’t wrought any change that could have prevented his golf course outburst.
If there is an entity that seeks to feed off anger, NAME WITHHELD’s behavior is evidence for it. And maybe the widespread anger across America is also evidence that some external force is at work. But to accept such a force is to reject responsibility and free will. The anger management specialists believe that personal responsibility is the only real solution to humanity’s persistent anger, that it is the only way to nullify anger’s manifestations.
Much Peace
As Dr. Christian Conte, author of Walking through Anger and other books on behavior management is wont to say at the end of any of his talks, including those on YouTube, “As always. I wish you much peace.”
I wish you much peace.
*https://nypost.com/2023/09/22/viral-full-hulk-golfer-has-history-of-run-ins-with-the-law/
**See Dr. Christian Conte’s YouTube channel.
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