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Scottie Scheffler is right - winning is rarely the reason sport makes you happy

Scottie Scheffler is right - winning is rarely the reason sport makes you happy

Irish Times18-07-2025
'There's a lot of people that make it to what they thought was going to fulfil them in life. And you get there, you get to number one in the world, and they're like, 'What's the point?' I really do believe that because what is the point? Why do I want to win this tournament so bad? That's something that I wrestle with on a daily basis.'
— 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.
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Have you heard the one about the scrapped Edinburgh joke award?
Have you heard the one about the scrapped Edinburgh joke award?

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Have you heard the one about the scrapped Edinburgh joke award?

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The Guide: Billie Eilish, Mogwai, All Together Now and other events to see, shows to book and ones to catch before they end

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The Guide: Billie Eilish, Mogwai, All Together Now and other events to see, shows to book and ones to catch before they end

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Vona Groarke: ‘The best thing that could happen for Irish poetry is for people to buy poetry books'
Vona Groarke: ‘The best thing that could happen for Irish poetry is for people to buy poetry books'

Irish Times

time14 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

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