Guilty to a Tee By MICHAEL BÉRUBÉ
I have a terrible confession to make: Yesterday I played a round of golf. It gets worse. I also played a round the day before, with my 19-year-old son, Nick. The last time I played golf on back-to-back days was September 1999. The guilt is terrible. For two consecutive days, I did not revise my book manuscript or work on the copy-edited versions of a pair of new essays (they're sitting on my desk under a packet of golf tees). I did not get anywhere with the tenure cases I'm reviewing this summer -- or with the books I'm supposed to be reviewing.
Then again, I did birdie the hardest par four on the back nine, rolling in a 15-footer from the fringe (it was a devilish pin placement). So there's that.
Every summer, I find, it's the same thing: My colleagues and I promise ourselves that we'll catch up on everything. We'll finish those projects, clean our offices, get our fall course preparations out of the way -- and we'll also dust off our golf swings or our tennis games or our softball cleats. We'll be really productive and totally relaxed. And we'll sweep out the garage, too, one of these days.
I've never met anyone who didn't envy professors' summer vacations. And why not? Here, surely, is one area in which professor-envy makes sense. We don't really work six-hour weeks during the school year; only scallywags and ignoramuses would say such a thing. In my experience, it's a 60-hour week, though we have the considerable luxury of deciding -- as most workers do not -- which 60 hours. But summer vacations? Almost four months off from teaching, in a country where most workers are lucky to get a couple of weeks and some unlucky enough to get only a couple of days?
I worked summers from my high-school years through my final days in graduate school; I got my first summer off in 1990, when I became an assistant professor. You would think that whenever college professors get too depressed or whiny about their lot in life, they could simply chant to themselves the mantra, "May, June, July, August."
But you'd think wrong.
For many of my friends and colleagues, summer is a time of anxiety about both work and leisure. Professors tend to be driven people; many of us have internalized a fairly severe academic regimen in which we are accustomed to jumping through hoops and meeting deadlines, even when no one's watching (maybe that's why Foucault's accounts of modern self-policing caught on so readily in some academic circles). So we often seem to spend half our "downtime" worrying about why we're not getting more things done.
In graduate school, I used to worry about what would happen when I stopped taking courses and began writing my dissertation: Without the end-of-semester deadlines, would I dither and meander? When I was an assistant professor, I used to worry about what would happen if I got tenure: Would I suddenly snap and wander in the desert for 40 years? It turned out that the answer to both questions was no, and now that I've been jumping through hoops and meeting (or missing) deadlines all this time, I find it physically impossible to stop. I don't even know if I'd want to.
And then, every summer, I tell myself that whatever else I do, I'm going to make a little time to play some golf and relax. Some of my colleagues here in central Pennsylvania devote their summer leisure to tennis, or kayaking, or hiking, or fly-fishing; it doesn't bother them that the outdoor season in these climes begins as late as May, because they don't have time during the semester to do very many outdoor things anyway. Golf, however, is another matter. It requires years to master, it tends to be more expensive than tennis or fishing, and it takes a full five hours out of your day. Last but not least, somehow it just doesn't seem appropriate for a liberal professor from the humanities wing of the campus to buy a local club membership or test out a new $400 driver. For the record, I do not have a membership anywhere, and my driver cost $150. But it still adds up, and it's still hard to be casual about golf.
I don't feel guilty about playing ice hockey on the weekends during the school year, because there's really nothing useful I'd be doing at 7 a.m. on a Saturday, and the games are only 75 minutes long. But an entire summer afternoon of golf, when I should be reading or writing or both? It seems ridiculously self-indulgent.
Last year I played all of four rounds of golf; the year before that, 12. I didn't play at all from 1991 to 1997, from the time my second child was born to the day when the historian Jeffrey Herf called me up and said, "Michael, I just can't find any intellectuals who play golf." I replied that I was a liberal intellectual with ratty old clubs who hadn't played in seven years, and therefore an especially unlikely partner; but Jeffrey gradually persuaded me, over the next three years, to take a few summer days off, to buy what he called "modern" clubs, and to take seriously the proposition that you really have to hit 9 or 10 out of 14 fairways off the tee and polish up your short game if you want to score in the low 80s.
Well, I can shoot in the low 80s now and then, and I even have three 79s to my name; but I never bothered with accuracy off the tee, because I learned the game, in my teens, on the municipal courses of Queens, N.Y. There wasn't much rough on those courses, and not much fairway, either. But if you were under 18 years old and willing to shlep out to the parks department to get a permit, you could play any public course in New York for a dollar. It was the People's Republic of Golf. No country-club memberships, no dress codes, just a bunch of stogie-smoking guys in tank-top T-shirts -- and lessons from the club pro at $14 an hour. I know, I know; I sound like I grew up in the Depression. But it was, in fact, the mid-1970s, and every day when I got home from my summer job, I hopped on an MTA bus and went to Kissena, or Douglaston, or Clearview for a quick round. I haven't played every day since I was 16.
But that's one of the problems with the game, particularly when you no longer live in the People's Republic of Golf. You have to play about three times a week to get really good at it. No professor I know has that kind of time, and many of us don't have that kind of money, either.
I do know of a number of "closet golfers" on the academic left, and I've even played with a few of them. I can't mention their names, for obvious reasons. But the guy who did that Marxist analysis of British cultural production between the world wars? He's a wizard in the greenside bunkers. The guy whose essay on queer theory caused such a stir in the late 1990s? He's deadly accurate with everything above a 6 iron. And the guy whose work on African-American vernacular English is nationally renowned? He hits it 280 yards off the tee, and always puts it on the short grass. None of those people, however, has a single-digit handicap. (I play to something like a 14, but I play so seldom it's hard to tell.) In fact, as one of my colleagues recently remarked, just before she laced a 7-wood to the front of the green, if we ever ran across a professor who was really good at this game, we'd assume that he or she wasn't showing up to work like the rest of us.
Softball, by contrast, is the very essence of a casual sport, a sport almost anyone can play. Then again, there was the summer when I was in Champaign, Ill., that four of my colleagues signed up for the department softball team, and no fewer than three of them injured themselves within hours, painfully pulling hamstrings and straining elbows. I remember flinching in sympathy as one distinguished scholar hit a routine ground ball to short, legged it out, and pulled up at first base with one of his quads locked in spasm. He and his injured compatriots in their mid-40s had decided that this was the summer they were going to get back in shape. I imagine they put off that resolution until the next summer -- when they would also finish that project, clean their offices, get their fall course preparations out of the way, and start working out so that they wouldn't pull hamstrings and quads on the base paths.
Golf doesn't make those physical demands on a body, which is why it's called the game of a lifetime. But for most professors who play in the summers, both the closeted and the out golfers, it's the game of a lifetime because we're never going to have enough time to play it in any one year. "Last year I fixed my backswing," one closet golfer told me. "This year I'm going to learn how to hit the loft wedge." Next year, perhaps, he'll work on his fairway woods, slowly, patiently cobbling together a game, promising himself, "This will be the year I put it all together, just after I send the manuscript off to the press, read a couple of dissertation chapters, and draft that committee report."
The truth, of course, is that my friend will never put it all together, and neither will I. But then, we're never going to be fully caught up with all our academic obligations and our intellectual desires, either; we'll never read all the books we want to read in any given summer, let alone take care of our articles and committees and teaching preparations. Every May we have our hopes; every July 4 we can't believe half the summer has flown by already; and every August we promise ourselves that next summer, we'll finally get it all straightened out.
And then what? Why, then we can relax.
Michael Bérubé is a professor of English at Pennsylvania State University at University Park.
-------------------------------------------------------------- Please Note: Due to Florida's very broad public records law, most written communications to or from College employees regarding College business are public records, available to the public and media upon request. Therefore, this e-mail communication may be subject to public disclosure.