Spectacular moments can be the hardest to find words for. Sunday
at the Masters Tiger Woods hit a chip shot that's already the stuff
of legend. But you wouldn't have known why from the way the AP
first reported it, describing it as "the shot that swept down a
ridge and funneled its way slowly into the hole." Not until 622
words later did the AP story capture one of the chip's most salient
features: "The ball ... caught the slope at just the right place
before taking a right angle turn toward the hole. It was still
about 25 feet left of the hole when it began rolling slowly toward
the pin." That's the first clue the reader got that Wood's shot
wasn't aimed at the pin, but required an incredibly roundabout way
to get there.
Without providing any detail, a New York Times
columnist did better simply by referring to the chip shot as
"slithering." Tom Boswell of the Washington Post
gushingly, if not entirely clearly, wrote, "Woods holed an almost impossible chip,
after a 25-foot side-hill break with the ball toppling into the
hole after pausing for a second on the edge." The Post's
Leonard Shapiro said the shot involved "using the sloped bowl
around the green to funnel a shot back to the flag."
For the most vivid account, disconcertingly, one had to rely on
the Post's resident clown, Joe Achenbach: Here's the
perfect description he provided:
"...Tiger's off the 16th green in the rough, he chips the ball
not toward the hole but way left of it, up onto a high point of the
green, where the ball stops, and then slowly begins to roll and
weave and wander its way back down the slope, toward the hole, as
though it smells it. The ball seems to be out of gas but keeps
rolling, and finally reaches the lip, and stops, and for two
seconds it doesn't move, and then it drops, for birdie."
Now that's good writing. It could be taught in journalism
school. But there's one problem. It's not clear Achenbach is
impressed at all. The rest of his entry is a postmodern riff about
how corporate forces used powerful magnets to steer the ball into
the hole in order to raise the value of Woods's endorsements. It
can't be a spectacular moment if it's a joke.
So far, outside of Comedy Central, no one has treated another
recent spectacular event quite as cavalierly. But it's still
anyone's guess what impact Pope John Paul's death and funeral will
have had on the media that gave up more than an intense week of
their lives to cover. We know one thing already, though. Prince
Charles's wedding couldn't have come soon enough. It made few
theological demands on the journalists and cameras assigned to it.
But I did hear that Katie Couric was genuinely moved by the funeral
on St. Peter's Square. You never can tell.
But then there's Frank Rich. No matter how moving an event, or
even life-changing, it seems the left can always be counted on to
regroup and fight to reclaim whatever territory it lost. Thus Rich
celebrated his return to the New York Times' op-ed page --
an expanded Sunday edition at that -- to attack "the Schiavo-John
Paul double feature," which he characterized as a politically
exploited theocratic celebration of the "culture of death" that is
now starting "to inflict damage on the living," among whom he
includes himself, presumably not for all eternity. It's safe to say
he wasn't moved by what he saw from St. Peter's Square. "We don't
know the identity of the corpse that will follow the pope in
riveting the nation's attention," he concludes with his trademark
sweetness.
About the only competition Rich had came from the British
Guardian's rabidly anti-Catholic Polly Toynbee, one of those female columnists Susan
Estrich would impose on the Los Angeles Times. "How dare
Tony Blair genuflect on our behalf before the corpse of a man whose
edicts killed millions?" her column began. She compared John Paul
II to Lenin, because "both put extreme ideology before human life
and happiness, at unimaginable human cost."
Most interesting, though, was her claim that "the millions
pouring into Rome (pray there is no Mecca-style disaster) herald no
resurgence of Catholicism." They just want to have something to
tell the grandchildren about. We'll see. But strange she would even
bring up the possibility of Catholic resurgence in a Europe that
already has been written off as post-Christian.
Spectacular events have consequences. Last week wasn't a
fireworks show. Surely what we saw will have longer-term effects
than even Tiger Woods' chip shot for the ages. At least if Joel
Achenbach doesn't weigh in.
topics:
Trade, Catholicism
