Fore Father

Watching golf on television brings the past into the present

- Guy Martin

THOSE OF US OLD AND analog enough to have grown up “with television”—meaning, those of us whose childhoods in the 1960s and 1970s coincided with the broadcast medium’s own furious adolescent growth spurt—were fortunate viewers. It was believed that broadcast television would, first, revolutionize journalism with its immense graphic immediacy, as it still does. Vietnam was the first real televised war, fought and lost on the field, almost in lockstep as it was shown being fought and lost in the American living room. Secondly, and arguably not least, our generation was also given the great gift of ringside seats at the spectacle of the medium’s best producers learning to televise sports as they presented the relatively unvarnished competitions to us.

On Friday nights, I sat with my grandfather watching the fights, learning at his feet to love the hard gentlemen of the ring, Rocky Marciano, Sonny Liston, and the sublime Cassius Clay. But it was under my father’s tutelage that I really began to grapple with the vast intricacies of athletic triumph and defeat, both on the playing field and on television. A double letterman in track and football, my father still bustles down to the gym today, at 90, if that one boiled-down fact can be made to evoke the character.