Scottie Scheffler is right - winning is rarely the reason sport makes you happy
— Scottie Scheffler at Portrush on Tuesday
Tell me about it, Scottie. The oven door in our kitchen is broken at the minute. It falls off every time you go to open it – my kingdom for a hinge pin. Even when it's closed, it sags to the right a little, like a clapped out jalopy with a dodgy front axle. So there's always a little heat escaping out of the top right corner.
As a result, we've had to adjust baking times and temperatures. Now, you could go the scientific route – measure the gap, calibrate the airflow, invoke Bernoulli and so on. But that all feels a bit too Bryson DeChambeauish and we're more of a Rory McIlroy house. Play it by feel, judge it by eye, go with whatever vibes are in the air.
And you know what? We haven't burnt a thing yet. In fact, just this week, we banged out a tray of chocolate chip cookies that would give a dentist the price of a kitchen extension. Or at least a new oven. Beautiful, they were. Sweet, chewy, moreish.
READ MORE
But no sooner were we chowing down on them than Scottie Scheffler's pre-tournament press conference jumped to mind. What's the point? Like, what actually is it? You do the thing and the thing is great but then the thing is gone.
'I think it's kind of funny,' Scheffler said. 'I think I said something after the Byron this year about... like it feels like you work your whole life to celebrate winning a tournament for like a few minutes. It only lasts a few minutes, that kind of euphoric feeling.
'
To win the Byron Nelson Championship at home
[Scheffler grew up in Texas], I literally worked my entire life to become good at golf to have an opportunity to win that tournament. You win it, you celebrate, get to hug my family, my sister's there – it's such an amazing moment. Then it's like, 'Okay, what are we going to eat for dinner?' Life goes on.'
Scottie Scheffler just gave one of the best (and deepest) press conference answers ever heard.
— Golf Digest (@GolfDigest)
Who knew Scottie Scheffler was such a nihilist on the side? His lengthy foray into the realm of the great philosophical questions would remind you of the scene in The Sopranos where Tony is grousing to his therapist about the fact that his kid is talking all of a sudden about having no purpose.
Dr Melfi: 'Sounds like Anthony Junior has stumbled upon existentialism.'
Tony: 'Fuckin' internet…'
And to think we used to mock Scheffler for being boring. Suddenly being the best player in the world, the golfer of the decade so far (sorry, Rory), suddenly his global pre-eminence isn't even his greatest achievement. Forget the career grand slam – anyone who can make a golf tournament press conference genuinely interesting is a rare talent indeed.
Glory in sport is such a beguiling notion. It's more than that, in fact. It's a north star, it's the thing that all the other things are supposed to be for. In elite sport especially, you set targets so that you meet targets. And then you set new ones and newer ones again, all the way up until you reach the ultimate one. Then you get the glory.
Scottie Scheffler: Anyone who can make a golf tournament press conference genuinely interesting is a rare talent indeed. Photograph:But nobody tells you what it's going to feel like. Read any good sports books and time and time again you will come across descriptions of the hours after winning. You're Kellie Harrington sitting alone in a cavernous Olympic foodhall in Tokyo, crying. You're Tiger Woods, refusing to go out for a celebration dinner after a tournament win because that's what's supposed to happen.
Glory is indefinable. That's why all the sports psychologists talk about the process rather than the result. Your motivation has to be the doing of the thing rather than the winning of the thing. Chasing fulfilment through winning is a fool's errand.
Joe Brolly did an interview one time where he described the aftermath of winning the All-Ireland with Derry in 1993. 'I was standing in the shower with Fergal McCusker, my great friend, and I said to him, 'Like, is this it? All that, for this?' And I felt that. Everybody was celebrating like mad and they were going wild. There were loads of women on the go and all that and I was just thinking, 'Fuck, what a disappointment all that was.''
Leaving aside what a disappointment it must have been for Fergal McCusker – you win your only All-Ireland and the first order of business is to stand next to a naked Joe Brolly as he ruminates on the meaning of life – there is something bracing and ominous and true about it all. Winning resolves nothing other than the fixture at hand. Anyone depending on it to make them happy probably has deeper stuff to sort out.
Joe Brolly celebrates Derry's All-Ireland win in 1993 - but not for long. Photograph: James Meehan/Inpho
It's All-Ireland hurling final weekend and two worlds are colliding. On the one side you have Tipperary – young and dreaming and ahead of schedule. On the other you have Cork – weighed down under 20 years of hurt, a whole county basically 10 months pregnant.
Whoever is jumping and roaring at teatime on Sunday will have invested so much of who they are into it. But Scottie Scheffler has news for them – they better have something else on the go, too. Something else that matters. Something real and deep and theirs.
The cookie is gone in a few seconds. The afternoon of the school holidays spent baking them? That's the point.
Also, even existentialism has a shelf life. By Friday afternoon, the first thing that popped up when you typed Scottie Scheffler into X was a video of him peppering the flag on 17 on Thursday, soundtracked by someone - possibly even the great man himself - farting and the commentators in stitches laughing.
Life goes on, indeed.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Irish Times
2 minutes ago
- Irish Times
Have you heard the one about the scrapped Edinburgh joke award?
The award for 'best joke' at the Edinburgh fringe is dead and permission to laugh at its funeral is granted. No arrests will be made, no fines issued. The annual list of allegedly the funniest gags to be heard across hundreds of shows staged at the month-long festival has been sent to the comedy scrapheap, with the organiser/culprit, UKTV-owned channel U&Dave, releasing a straight-man statement citing an 'opportunity to reflect' on how it supports grassroots comedy talent. To be fair, U&Dave – known as Dave before UKTV slapped a 'U&' on its channels to make them sound like a family of deodorants – does do its bit to spotlight comedy talent, which used to be something bigger broadcasters took more of an interest in before their nerves failed. What UKTV didn't say was that its pun-heavy rundown of handpicked one-liners had the risible effect of reducing hours of intelligent, precision-timed, carefully honed comedy sets into a creaking, groaning slab of rage bait. READ MORE Take, for example, last year's winning effort by English comedian Mark Simmons: 'I was going to sail around the globe in the world's smallest ship but I bottled it.' Most wordplay is reverse-engineered, but it's not great when the steel beams of a joke are so fully exposed, is it? Still, the British public voted this the best joke of the fringe from a selection offered to them by a panel of critics and comedians doubling as U&Dave collaborators. Voters might have been less wrong if they had instead plumped for Arthur Smith's third-placed absurdity, 'I sailed through my driving test. That's why I failed it.' But I'm falling into the trap now. I'm engaging. It never mattered what came out top. As long as it struggled to bear the weight of the 'funniest joke' accolade, it did its job as cheap filler content that reliably provoked stiff breakfast-host laughter or, more usually, a sceptical sigh. As it goes, I have a high appreciation of the shameless pun, though almost-puns are tough to swallow. This week I learned that former Undertones frontman Feargal Sharkey has a policy on these. When the singer turned environmental campaigner was spotted struggling with his earpiece on BBC Breakfast, a viewer, referencing lyrics to solo hit A Good Heart, commented that 'a good earpiece [these days] is hard to find'. Sharkey cheerily outlined his normal penance for 'the bad-pun lobby', proposing a £20 donation to his chosen charity. [ From the archive: 37 mostly appalling jokes to make you groan – and maybe even grin Opens in new window ] This was all in good spirit, and didn't muddy Sharkey's advocacy on UK water reform. The problem with the Joke of the Fringe wheeze, by contrast, is that it wound up misrepresenting the essence of the festival. It wasn't U&Dave's fault, but the list's reproducible nature meant it attracted more attention than the genuinely prestigious Edinburgh Comedy Award and, in the process, reaffirmed the views of people predisposed to believe that stand-up comedy is a bit rubbish, a touch childish; the product of a Vitamin D-deprived cohort yet to get a real job. Never mind that at festivals such as the fringe, you will discover some of the cleverest, most magnetic people delivering 50-minute masterclasses in stitch-inducing storytelling, their styles ranging from the surreal to the polemical, their words as judiciously selected as poets'. Other gag lists will now fill the void. But this media fodder, rather than promoting the craft of joke writing, risks contributing to the minimisation of stand-up and reinforcing the dismissal of comedy as something other than art. It all becomes part of the same attitude that saw comedians here in the Republic barred from applying for the Government's Basic Income for the Arts pilot scheme. They're not artists, you see. Well, the State says so. Humour is subjective, as proved last week by reactions to the Coldplay kiss-cam couple. Some people thought the pile-on a clear nadir for surveillance society and media tabloidisation, with unfunny pitchfork-culture vibes thrown in. Others found it hilarious, for some reason. I didn't laugh, obviously, but reading a recent edition of satirical magazine Private Eye, I was struck by the acuteness of a cartoon capturing Westminster's hypocrisies and moral failure on Israel and Gaza. This was in light of the UK government's move to proscribe the organisation Palestine Action . 'Unacceptable' Palestine action, it read, was to spray military planes with paint, while 'acceptable' Palestine action was to shoot Palestinians queuing for food. A retired teacher called Jon Farley was also taken with it, so much so that he stuck a blown-up printout of it on a placard and brought it to a silent demo in Leeds. Alas, this got him arrested , as police officers didn't recognise it as political satire. Maybe they were more pun fans. Or maybe some truths, pinpointed by satirists, are just too dark to countenance. Either way, arresting people for 'carrying a joke', as editor Ian Hislop put it, suggests a U&Dave-style 'opportunity to reflect' is urgently required.
Irish Times
2 minutes ago
- Irish Times
The Guide: Billie Eilish, Mogwai, All Together Now and other events to see, shows to book and ones to catch before they end
Event of the week Billie Eilish Saturday, July 26th/Sunday, July 27th, 3Arena, 5.30pm, (sold out), After six years and three immensely successful albums (the latest of which, Hit Me Hard and Soft , lends its title to her current world tour), Billie Eilish is as much an activist as a pop star, often fusing political and socio-sexual issues within her songs. From 2019's All the Good Girls Go to Hell (which addresses climate change) and 2021's Your Power (which highlights the sexual harassment of young women) to 2024's Lunch (which explores same-sex attraction), she has never concealed her opinions to gain favour. The show and the music? In a review of Eilish's July 10th 24-song set at London's O2 Arena, UK newspaper The Independent said : 'The night unfolds like a series of magic tricks … She wields as much power in her stillness as she does in her hyperactivity.' Consider yourself lucky if you have a ticket. Gigs Mogwai Saturday, July 26th/Sunday, July 27th, Vicar Street, Dublin, 7pm, €51.40; Tuesday, July 29th, Mandela Hall, Belfast, 7pm, £43.95, This year celebrates Mogwai's 30th anniversary as one of the best post-rock bands out there. It took a while for Mogwai's often bruising sound to develop, and it wasn't until their 2003 album, Happy Songs for Happy People, and the 2004 follow-up album, Mr Beast, that they began to gain commercial momentum. Soundtrack work followed, most notably for the 2006 documentary, Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait, and latterly for the 2022 Apple TV+ series Black Bird. Mogwai's most recent album, The Bad Fire, smartly continues with their quiet-loud-quiet style morphing into what The Quietus describes as a series of 'pneumatic crescendos'. Special guests are Glasgow sibling duo Cloth. READ MORE Don't Touch My Knob Friday, August 1st, Elizabeth Fort, Cork, 8.30pm, €20, Áine Duffy Gender diversity is a regular problematic issue when it comes to event line-ups (and, of course, radio play ), so much so that Cork musician Áine Duffy devised a one-day mini-festival featuring an exclusively all-female programme. Alongside Duffy performing, other acts include DJ Natalie Mac (co-founder of the Electronic Music Council), multi-instrumentalist Ria Rua, and comedian Sinéad Quinlan. 'This isn't just a gig, it's a statement,' says Duffy. Women, she adds, 'are taking back the stage'. Festival All Together Now From Thursday, July 31st until Sunday, August 3rd, Curraghmore Estate, Co Waterford, (sold out), John Grant More compact than Electric Picnic but with similar levels of creative oomph, All Together Now features a ridiculously eclectic range of artists, along with the kind of sidebar strands and events that are expertly devised and operated. From top to bottom, the line-up is superb. Headliners include Fontaines DC, London Grammar, CMAT, and Wet Leg, while further down the bill there are numerous must-see acts, including John Grant, Baxter Dury, 49th & Main, English Teacher, A Lazarus Soul, Landless and the perennial festival favourite – Many More Across All Stages. Partnered with music offerings are in-conversation events, visual arts, theatre, food and panel discussions. Film GAZE Film Festival From Tuesday, July 29th until Monday, August 4th, Lighthouse Cinema/IFI, Dublin, Plainclothes The 33rd edition of GAZE features Irish, European and world premieres of international features, animation, shorts, and Irish-language film. Compelling highlights include Plainclothes, starring Russell Tovey as a 1990s New York undercover police officer tasked with entrapping gay men; Drive Back Home, featuring Alan Cumming; Norwegian film-maker Dag Johan Haugerud's award-winning Oslo Stories Trilogy: Dreams; the documentary Strange Journey: The Story of Rocky Horror; and the rare 1990s lesbian classic, High Art, starring Ally Sheedy and Patricia Clarkson. Sidebar events include post-screening discussions with visiting filmmakers. Stage The Lunch Punch Power Hour in Conference Room 4 From Thursday, July 31st until Saturday, September 6th, Peacock Stage, Abbey Theatre, Dublin, 8pm, €32.50/€20, During lunch hour in a locked office, three ostensibly diligent employees decide how best to spend their company's annual Corporate Social Responsibility budget. Such a task might seem feasible, but without management peering over their shoulders the workers launch into awkward, farcical disputes that expose uneasy disclosures and power plays. Caitríona Daly writes, Raymond Keane directs. Literature John Hewitt International Summer School From Monday, July 28th until Saturday, August 2nd, Market Place Theatre, Armagh, Co Armagh, Inspired by Belfast-born John Hewitt's enduring legacy as a poet/historian/activist, this annual summer school and arts festival investigates significant, diverse societal issues of the day through the voices of artists, authors, and thinkers. Events include In Conversation sessions (David Park, Monday, July 28th, 1.30pm, £12; Ian Rankin and Jane Casey, Tuesday, July 29th, 8.30pm, £16; Donal Ryan, Wednesday, July 30th, 1.30pm, £12; Wendy Erskine, Thursday, July 31st, 1.30pm, £12), poetry readings (Hannah Copley and Gustav Parker Hibbert, Thursday, July 31st, 11.15am, £12), and public interviews (Sally Hayden, with Malachi O'Doherty, Friday, August 1st, 9.45am, £10). Visual art Reveal/Conceal Until Saturday, August 16th, The Cowshed Gallery, Farmleigh, Phoenix Park, Dublin, admission free, Orla Barry, All Bow to Badger Bringing together 25 multidisciplinary artists from the Louth Craftmark Designers Network, Reveal/Conceal features work covering sculpture, print, textiles, glass, jewellery, ceramics and painting. Featured artists include painter Orla Barry, fused-glass artist Aoife Burke, ceramicist Maureen Finn, textile artist Mel Bradley, Suzanne Carroll, whose work explores ecological loss through painting, and Rachel Tinniswood, whose blending of fabric, thread, wax resist, and hand/machine-embroidery explores environmental frailty and nature's tougher textures. Still running WTAF!? Until Wednesday, July 30th, various venues/times/prices, Galway, Moss Russell, WTAF!? WTAF!? (aka Westend Theatre & Arts Festival) is a newcomer that welcomes 'DIY dramatists, rogue musicians, chaotic creators and anyone who's ever felt like they don't fit the mould'. Included in the inaugural event are theatre (Night in Nighthawks, Massimo Bar), jazz fusion (Karl Clews Trio, Monday, July 28th, The Blue Note Bar, 6pm), and circus (Eye of the Storm, Róisín Dubh, Wednesday, July 30th, 8pm). Book it this week Hard Skin, Bellobar, Dublin, October 18th, Pillow Queens, NCH, Dublin, October 21st, Deftones, 3Arena, Dublin, February 16th, Vittorio Angelone, Vicar Street, Dublin, April 26th/27th,
Irish Times
14 minutes ago
- Irish Times
Vona Groarke: ‘The best thing that could happen for Irish poetry is for people to buy poetry books'
Earlier this month, Vona Groarke became the 10th poet in a distinguished line to be named the Ireland Professor of Poetry. At the age of 60, Groarke is ready for a new challenge. She is finishing up her time as writer in residence at the prestigious St John's College, Cambridge, and her children are grown up. 'Suddenly the adrenaline has kicked in,' she smiles. 'Also a sense that I'm not going to live forever and whatever work I want to do, I ought to just do.' The Ireland Chair of Poetry Trust was set up in 1998 to celebrate Seamus Heaney following his Nobel Prize win, and every three years since, a poet of honour and distinction is chosen to represent the chair. Previous professors include Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill , Paul Durcan and, most recently, Paul Muldoon . Groarke describes Muldoon as a tough act to follow. She's an admirer of what he achieved during his time as professor of poetry, particularly his seminar series How To Read A Poem, which offered the reading public strategies for accessing contemporary poetry. 'It was a really clever way of not dumbing down poetry but also bringing people in.' READ MORE Groarke may be a more understated presence than the rock star poet Muldoon, but she is looking forward to bringing something fresh to the role when she begins this September. Her work speaks for itself. Over the past 30 years she has written 15 books, including nine collections of poetry, a book-long essay and her brilliant book Hereafter, a complex dialogue with her late grandmother's life as an immigrant in New York, which Groarke wrote during her time as Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library. One thing she will not be doing during her tenure as professor of poetry is force-feeding the nation poetry. 'I notice in England there's this idea of 'bringing poetry to the people' and I need to put asterisks around that idea because I think, yeah, if they want it . We're not in the business of ramming poetry down anybody's throats so if we invite them and they accept the invitation, then that's wonderful. If they don't want to accept the invitation, then we shouldn't consider that a failure. People are interested in different things. And also, if we try too hard to interest people who don't want to be interested in it, you end up sometimes compromising the art form and emphasising things other than the aesthetic element of it. I think in Ireland we're pretty good at not doing that but we need to be a little vigilant around that area, to respect the craft, to respect the aesthetic, to respect that it is an art form and it's not for everybody.' She is very much a believer in poetry as an art form first and foremost. 'There is a fashion for talking about the social application of poetry – poetry as a force for change, poetry as a force for expressing anger, a protest – and it can be those things, but we mustn't lose sight of the fact that it is also an art form and it has elements of craft and aesthetic and we lose something if we lose sight of those.' How does she feel about becoming something more of a household name as the professor of poetry? 'I feel slightly ambivalent about it,' she laughs, 'because I live alone at the base of a mountain in the countryside and I cherish that. I like the retreat aspect of my life.' Groarke was always going to be a writer. 'I think I figured out early on in life that imagination is the most important and least valued aspect of human existence.' The youngest of six children, she grew up on a farm in Ballymahon, Co Longford. She describes herself as a bit of a swot in school and even though she considered studying law (her father ran a legal practice in Longford town and four of her five siblings went into the family profession) she says it was always going to be English in Trinity for her. 'I think I just knew that I was more interested in this than I was in anything else.' Poet Vona Groarke: 'If you give [someone] a novel, it's just one world; if you give a poetry book, you give a multiplicity of worlds.' Photograph: Joe O'Shaughnessy She went to boarding school for three years in Our Lady's Bower, Athlone, before moving to Galway where she did her Leaving Cert at Taylor's Hill secondary school. During this time she lived with her older sister who was married with her own young family. 'I had never held a baby, never played with a toddler, I'd never done any of those things so it was an absolute joy for me to be living there. ' For people who are unfamiliar with her work, she is most often compared to Elizabeth Bishop and she describes herself as slightly more in the Borodin school than the Woody Guthrie school of poetry. She is known for her rigour of form, precision of language and complexity of feeling. She didn't write poetry while she was studying at Trinity, despite a lively scene there. 'When you're reading Wordsworth, Yeats and Shelley they seem to be sculpted in Carrara marble. They don't seem like something you can have a go at yourself.' It wasn't until after she had left college and attended a poetry workshop with Eavan Boland that she found the impetus she needed to begin to write. It's also where she met the poet Conor O'Callaghan. 'We went on to get married and to have two children. We're not still married, but that was very formative. It just seemed like that became a kind of a world, like we were living in poetry.' It was romantic but not easy earning a living as poets in the beginning. She has taught poetry at the University of Manchester since 2007 but sees the creative writing industry as something of a double-edged sword. 'When the creative writing trade kicked in, everybody became involved in that because it was a job that you could do part-time and that would leave you room to do other things and there was something appealing about working in a university and having colleagues and having a pension. I couldn't have managed without it, really, but I wonder if it squeezed our pool of experience slightly. We all have the same jobs, we all do the same work, none of us are farmers or hairdressers or whatever ... It was fantastic, but I think there was a little cost to that in terms of the art form.' [ Garry Hynes: 'My wife was taken from me in the blink of an eye. My whole life's changed' Opens in new window ] She thinks it's a little different in Ireland, where institutions such as Aosdána , of which she is a member, and the Arts Council and even the recently piloted basic income scheme for artists all offer an alternative means of financial support for writers. She thinks Irish poetry is in good health but worries a little about poets being tempted away by the bright lights of novel writing. One of the issues, she thinks, is agents (Groarke has never had one) encouraging poets to expand into other forms. Another is big poetry prizes being awarded to debut collections. 'I think it's actually really bad for the profession and for the poets themselves, because if you've won the TS Eliot Prize with your first book, I'm not saying you only write for prizes, but if you've already achieved what most of us spend careers trying to get on the shortlist for, then it does kind of make you feel like, where do I go next? What's next?' So what makes a good poem in her opinion? 'There has to be, I think, an element of sincerity or the poem misses something. I think the element of sincerity might be the pulse of the poem, and you have to find it somewhere but it may not always be on the surface. I think that the ability in a poem to think and feel coterminously ... it needs to be doing both, not to the same extent or in equal measures, but if those elements are missing then it's probably going to be a limp enough piece of writing.' [ New Laureate for fiction Éilís Ní Dhuibhne: 'I was part of a movement of women writers of Ireland' Opens in new window ] If there was one simple thing that she thinks could invigorate Irish poetry, what might that be? 'The best thing that could happen for Irish poetry is for people to buy poetry books. If you give [someone] a novel, it's just one world; if you give a poetry book, you give a multiplicity of worlds.' Vona Groarke's latest collection, Infinity Pool, is published by Gallery Press
