Nostalgia-The Aging Disease

Something profound happened to me recently. I was at customs in Brisbane Airport, writing down my birth date on the immigration form, and the page jumped out at me. For the first time, two concurrent numbers reflected an uncomfortable truth. I am getting old.

Growing old has never worried me, mainly because it was something that only happened to others. When you are male and young (or think yourself to be), everyone who has a standing relationship of more than six months is old. But this moment in time was something of a wake-up, and upon further examination, I find that I am exhibiting tell-tale, irrefutable signs of aging.

The chief of these is the increasing prevalence of nostalgic thought. The habit of reminiscing about the past was to me, always something that old people did. Invariably, it induced a yawn and a roll of the eyes as the mind immediately wandered off to the present. Day of yore have little relevance to the young.

But lately, nostalgia is creeping up on me, especially when it comes to golf. The summer golf season is simmering, waiting to ignite, and makes me yearn, just a touch, for the heady days of the late 80’s when there was a feverish sense of excitement surrounding the onset of the tournament golf season.

Golf changed forever during this period. The arrival of Norman mania in 1986 lifted both media interest and participation in the sport. A simple test of this could be found playing out at the club I first joined as a junior when I moved to Sydney in 1985.

Kogarah Golf Club is situated right next to the airport in central Sydney. It is highly visible, and with plenty of passing traffic. Despite this, in 1985 you could fire a gun there on some days and not be seen or heard by anyone. Every Friday afternoon, a group of guys would head out for a skins match – and I mean up to ten players, teeing off in one group. It was never a problem because there was no-one in front, or behind.

Come 1986, this was no longer possible. Golf changed. People wanted to play. Tee times filled up, memberships grew, and most visibly, this new legion of golfers flocked to the summer tournaments to watch, filling the fairways with numbers not previously seen.

Much of this excitement was built around Greg Norman. Why, commercial radio even kept a hole by hole report on his round on the airwaves over the weekend. The Shark was to the 80’s what Tiger Woods is to the noughtie’s, but most importantly, he was Australian.

Remember those tight pants with the front pockets that the Shark used to wear? The ones that made wetsuits look like hessian sacks by comparison? I had them, about five pairs, the more colourful and garish the better. His wide takeway? I had one of those too. Niblick shoes with the flap over the laces? Had to have them – although as soon as Shark stopped wearing them, I threw mine out.

I even used those dreadful Spalding Tour Edition balls for as long as Shark did, until he realised they were crap (after they cost him three majors) and mercifully moved on. I knew they were crap long before him, but if the Shark used them, well, there was only one choice.

When the Shark flew into town, every news crew in existence was at the airport waiting for an exclusive. More to the point, we watched, glued to our screens as he alighted from his jet like Australia’s own version of royalty. He was news, he was golf, and he was the man.

Of course, those days are long past. Shark is in his 50’s, with a dodgy, sutured together body and his mind on other things than golf. We’ve got new stars now, perhaps more of them than ever before, but none with the kind of charisma and magnetism of the blonde bomber.

That’s not to imply a criticism of any of the current crop either. They are who they are -Scott, Ogilvy, Baddeley et al, are all brilliant players in their own right, with their own personalities and individual ways of conducting themselves. By any assessment they are world class golfers, competing with distinction during golf’s most competitive era.

The difference is though that we know what we are going to get from them. We’ll get good, often magnificent golf, but rarely much drama. We don’t anticipate them tearing up the back nine on Sunday with birdie after birdie, chasing down the leader, a cacophonous roar greeting every putt holed. We also don’t foresee an implosion of train smash proportions; the unknown and the unpredictable was what made Norman so tantalising, so utterly fascinating and ultimately, entertaining.

Perhaps that’s the key. Golf is about entertainment, and our expectations of what should fall under that description are now a moving target. The precedent, the model, is built around a one off, home bred, unique individual, the type of which may only come along once in a lifetime. We also have a degree of over-familiarity bought on by the immediacy of the internet and digital age, which, when combined with the rapidly shrinking attention span of the ‘Now’ generation creates an environment ill attuned to the staid, time consuming nature of golf.

But the game is still here, we love it, and it’s not going away in a hurry as a result. This affinity for the game is also the chief reason why we reminisce about its past – the seeds of nostalgia need passion in order to germinate.

Or old people