Golf is not morally satisfying
Hard to say whether Scottie Scheffler's more serious than other athletes or only incautious—but the obvious truth is that neither golf nor any other sport can be morally satisfying. It doesn't matter. So when he declared the other day that he’s not satisfied by golf, he said something everyone has to reckon with—just listen to his interview, or at least the last five minutes:
Modern life has created this problem—so many rewards for such trivial things, the inevitable consequence of endless prosperity, leading to a lack of concern for those things that aren't trivial. So many millions of people end up being involved in fantasies, often through media, usually through commerce, & they don’t know why.
Scottie has one morally satisfying thing in his life, his family. But that would never be able to satisfy the desire for victory or eminence. There is virtue in being a good husband & father, it's not common, but it's not that rare. Husbands & fathers depend on better man than they are for their ordinary lives. He’s Catholic—that seems to be why he’s so honest, as well as why he’s so dissatisfied with golf. You need something more serious in light of which to judge what you’re doing with your life.
Politics & war are the things men love; the calm, the self-control, as well as the violence of the swing in golf—all of that is merely a small part of training for more serious things. Golf is just something gentlemen do while they consider what to live & die for, or how to go about it. The beauty of the game is a consequence, not a cause of the beauty of the gentlemen.
Lee Kuan Yew was an avid golfer. He famously said "whoever governs Singapore must have that iron in him, or give it up. This is not a game." The irons on the golf course simply can't compare.
The pageantry of the "The Masters" has a semi-spiritual feel to it the way Jim Nantz narrates it and NBC orchestrates the music. But of course it's not- Golf on Sunday is not a "church"! See PG Wodehouse: "What earthly good is golf? Life is stern and life is earnest. We live in a practical age. All around us we see foreign competition making itself unpleasant. And we spend our time playing golf? What do we get out of it? Is golf any use? That's what I'm asking you. Can you name me a single case where devotion to this pestilential pastime has done a man any practical good?"
https://www.amazon.com/Golf-Boxed-Set-Collectors-Wodehouse/dp/1468312642
There is so much "coach speak" in sports media that when Schefflers and Charles Barkleys speak honestly it is pretty mind blowing.
A passage from Manent's book on Pascal: "By a pitch of fantastical imagination, we often deliberately and excessively put ourselves to work increasing the importance of a paltry object. It is the very principle of a game: the player "must create some target for his passions and then arouse his desire, anger, fear, for this object he has created, just like children taking fright at a face they have daubed themselves." In investing disproportionate passion in the game, one that we know to be such, we fill our soul, itself very great, with a very small thing. Nothing is more satisfying and capitivating than the game, no matter what the game, for the one who gives himself to it: he is outside himself and yet remains the master" (p. 143).