DIMINISHING RETURNS BY TOM CHIARELLA
   I’m playing golf, as I almost always do on Thursday afternoons. Everything else traipses along. The sun is shining; hordes of insects are rising out of the ground. Large passenger planes arc their way across the sky, leaving their smoky trails like veins of gas. Somewhere, I’m sure, birds are migrating, and rivers are wearing themselves deeper into the earth. Even my partners are struck by the sense of the world being larger than us all, the great sweep of things. They are discussing the Indian tribes that once ruled the area. Me? I’m wondering why I didn’t bring my new lob wedge.
    But the day is good. I stand at 1-over after 13 holes, and I’m reaching into my bag of tricks like never before. In the last three holes, I have chipped in for bogey, stuck the pin from a fairway bunker and rolled home a 60-foot putt for birdie. I have visited myself upon the gods, and they have been kind. Before these miracles, I pulled off some ho-hum pars and one solid birdie. Meanwhile, my friends chatted their way through some of the excitement.
    There is more talk about finding arrowheads than there is about the fact that I am through 13 holes in fine shape, my finest ever. As my cart ascends this little escarpment to the 14th tee, I note that in any case, time is lapsing. Either they are about to notice my score, my round, my enviable state-of-mind and draw attention to it, jinxing my day to a close, or I myself am about to give in to the inevitable gravity of the finishing holes, the elephant’s graveyard of great rounds. In some ways, even this simple realization means I’m finished. I have positioned myself against my own destiny, allowed myself – no, dared myself – to look at the outcome rather than the moment.
    I have been considering the last holes en masse, as a looming body of work. What’s making me sick is my sudden realization that what I am feeling is not doubt. It is a larger barrier than that, darker, more unrelenting. It’s not doubt. The last holes have arrived. It is certainty. I jump out of the cart at the tee box to stretch, hoping to vanquish these thoughts. I pick a point on the horizon. I need to finish. This time, hell or high water, I will finish. I will press through these last holes and not let it slip away. I stare into the distance. No one is watching me. The world is indifferent to my anxiety. My friends are talking. “Arrowheads,” one of them says, “are all around us.”
    A round of golf is like a lot of things. Writers never tire of this particular simile. A military battle. A single lifetime. An epic journey. An entire day. A year, replete with the progress of the seasons. My friend Wayne says it’s like a trip through the supermarket, with the dairy section representing the finishing holes. But one thing a round of golf is not like is a good song on the radio. No don’t get me wrong, there is music in golf – I get that. I hear the beat, I sense the balance of a melody somewhere, even on my worst days. But unlike a round of golf, a good song on the radio has no room built in for small uglinesses, for failure in any measure, for the harshness of a shank or a putt left 10 inches below the cup. A good song on the radio has a melody and rhythm that doesn’t fail it when the musician gets hungry or lets his mind wander to a stack of bills. Unlike a round of golf, a good song on the radio comes unexpectedly, not on a schedule, and it is short, not strung out forever by the people playing in front and behind it. Most importantly, a good song on the radio finishes. It converts. It ends well. There is a reason that R&B musicians call out “bring it on home” toward the end of their songs. Nothing should slip away at the last.
    This, of course, is my beef. Why is it that, day after day, a good round of golf must slip away from me only in those final moments? Why must I feel that little click in my chest at the 13th hole that tells me the fun is about to be ended? And I’m no quitter: I fight that stuff off. But why can’t I bring it on home? Why can’t I find a surge, a rise, a momentum that allows me to end on a high note? Part of the issue of the final holes is the dwindling sense of possibility that comes with a smaller number of holes to play. There will be fewer chances to make right the wrongs of holes past. And as the round grinds down, the game itself becomes more finite. With three holes to play you ought to have only 12 or 13 more jobs to do – six putts, two drives, three irons and two wedges.
    It is in this way the round starts to feel less like a quest, less like a cycle of life, and more like a grocery list. So Wayne was right about the supermarket after all. And as you reach the end, as you make the final turn toward the butter and the bags of shredded cheese, you see that you have only so much left to do. The game must dwindle down, become smaller, as your round closes out. With three holes to play, your job is simple, somehow definable. You would think this concept in itself would make those last holes easier.
    What happens more often is that the center does not hold. The game tends to grow more slippery in these last moments, in the final few aisles of the super market. Little things start to add up. A drive pushed a few feet into the rough leaves you blocked on the approach to a short par 4. A five-foot putt breezes the hole. Your iron comes up fat. And suddenly you’re one hole deeper into the round, and with things now out of balance, there’s less time to find your rhythm again.
    When you start a round of golf, the world yawns before you. Time stands still. The elements, for all their power, seem completely tangled up in what you are undertaking. Water, earth, air. Golf is in some measure all these things. It is a menu of possibility, a wilderness ready for the taking. You pony up for some manifest destiny, shoulder your bag and go.
    And yet, as a round closes, no matter how well it’s going to that point, the sense of diminishment is profound. The day fades. The sun falls. The holes dry up. And for me, the greatness of a round slips away. I have often made a poor round tolerable with a good closing sequence. Concentration seems natural when you’re fighting from behind. But I have never made a great round better in those last moments.
    Simply put, toward the end, a shot means more. It is, after all, one of maybe eight remaining rather than one of, say, 80 more to be had. No wonder then that so many great rounds die in these moments, slipping into a series of poor choices, weak executions, unfocused moments.
    So you thump home, across the mountainside, over the rivers, through the forest of arrowheads that surrounds us, invisible to our weary eyes. As we hang on to the last moments of a great day, we try to keep its promise alive. But, simply put, the legs tire; the mind grows greedy.
    Wars have been lost for no less than that.