Sport and the Echo Chamber of Grievance
- Walter McFarlane
- 2 hours ago
- 9 min read
So today I procrastinate. Instead of polishing my blog on the Supreme Court, I started writing this piece about the lessons of sport. Perhaps it’s inspired by the World Cup, but I’m not a fan of soccer. I am, however, a huge fan both of PGA golf and of NASCAR auto racing. My week began watching the car race in Atlanta and ended watching Sunday’s thrilling finish at the British Open golf tournament. I’d like to talk about lessons from each.
The NASCAR race began with a pre-race interview with the young, wildly controversial driver, Carson Hocevar. Hocevar is controversial because he’s reckless. He’s fast but too aggressive and too unapologetic about the consequences when it all goes wrong (read, he puts a lot of other people’s cars up onto wreckers). During the interview, he was being asked about those things by a couple former, accomplished NASCAR racers. They asked leading questions attempting to help Hocevar see the error in his ways and help him understand he’d have more success if he drove a bit more conservatively without alienating all his fellow drivers. They pressed, asking if he was concerned at all that alienating all the other drivers was going to cost him in the end. He gave an ill-advised and immature response, culminating with comments like “bring it on” and “I don’t know if anyone really wants to get into that war.”
During the race another driver with all the talent in the world but who also lacks the results he should have, Bubba Wallace, was doing Bubba Wallace things. He has never gotten out of the car and had a microphone put to his face where he hasn’t talked about how someone somewhere has wronged him or kept him from succeeding. And this race was no different. Coming off a turn he entered too fast, Wallace had to lift out of the throttle causing his car to come down the race track directly into the path of his teammate, Ty Gibbs. Gibbs had nowhere to go and no time to react. The two cars made contact; Wallace spun out. But Atlanta is a long race and Wallace would eventually make his way back to the front.
Ryan Blaney is one of the most popular drivers in NASCAR. He has come by that popularity because he is very good and very nice. He is well-liked by his fellow drivers because he races hard but clean, never taking risks that put other drivers in unnecessary danger. Full disclosure, I am a huge Blaney fan. I even watch the races with an earbud in one ear so that I can listen to his in-car radio at the same time. Yes, that big of a fan. Blaney had a superfast car for this race. He won the pole in qualifying. He won the first two stages of the race and was looking good to win the race itself. With 29 laps to go, Wallace was in first place with Blaney right behind him. Blaney went to the outside for a pass and Wallace blocked him late putting Blaney into the wall. This was the second incident Wallace caused in the race. Blaney’s contact with the wall was hard enough that his car picked up a huge vibration, concerning enough they weren’t sure if they could continue without coming into the pit for repairs. But being so close to the end of the race, they decided to risk it by staying out on track.
With three laps to go in the race, the cocky young Hocevar was in first place, Blaney with his potentially damaged car was in second, and Wallace was in third. And as could only happen in the movies, the three cars came to the checkered flag three-wide, running side by side by side. Now in racing, cars running door to door slow each other down. To get an advantage to break out of that situation, a car needs “help” from behind, meaning that another car behind them in the field comes up and pushes them forward giving them just enough momentum to get past the cars beside them.
The movie script continued. While there were three cars side by side for the lead, there were only two cars coming up from behind that could potentially help. Those two drivers would have to decide who to push and who to leave stranded. Coming up behind Wallace, in the inside lane, to try to push him for the win was his teammate, Gibbs. Yes, the same driver that Wallace cutoff earlier in the race causing him to spin. The other driver coming from behind, Christopher Bell, had a choice. Would he push the respected Ryan Blaney or would he push Carson Hocevar, the driver who has said “bring it on”?
Blaney crossed the line first, winning the race because Bell chose to push him. Wallace came over the line second, pushed by Gibbs. Hocevar crossed the line fourth, pushed by no one. NASCAR officials would later strip Wallace of his second-place finish because he deliberately crossed below the out-of-bounds limit on the inside of the track to improve his position.
Microphones were put in all three drivers faces after the race. Hocevar blamed the fact he wasn’t getting any help from behind on other factors, never considering his own behavior and comments may have come back on him. Wallace, right on brand, had a lot of blaming to dole out. First, he criticized his teammate for spinning him early in the race, failing to recognized his role in putting a teammate in a bad position where he couldn’t react. He then blamed NASCAR for interpreting their own rule wrong. For context, even Wallace’s boss and fellow driver, Denny Hamlin, later said the rule was enforced correctly. Wallace then circled back to blaming Gibbs for giving him the push, seeing it not as the push it was to try to help him win the race, but rather as the push that gained him the position that caused the penalty! That’s championship-level blame game.
The winner, Ryan Blaney, was asked about being put into the wall by Wallace and the damage it caused. He had every chance to throw Wallace under the bus for a bad block. Instead Blaney said, “I tried to make a move and just got loose and hit the fence.” He took the blame instead of assigning it. Champion behavior.
That is more NASCAR than most of you ever cared to hear about, so let me move on to golf for a second before ultimately getting to my point. This weekend’s British Open was thrilling spectacle…links golf, a dried-out surface where the ball rolls until it reaches trouble, deep pot bunkers, and 15 mile per hour winds.
The headlines after Friday’s round should have been that Lucas Herbert, from Australia, shot a 62, tying the all-time men’s scoring record for a round in a major tournament. Instead, the headlines were all about American golfer, Bryson DeChambeau. On his 5th hole on Friday, DeChambeau hit his drive very far right into very tall fescue. He was fortunate that the ball was even found, that’s how far right it was and how long the grass was.
There is a rule in golf that all golfers know and that all professional golfers have a responsibility to know. And that is to “play the course as you find it.” Specific to this situation, a golfer can’t do anything to improve the path of his intended swing. So for example, if there was a tree blocking a player’s backswing, he couldn’t cut down the tree. This also means, he can’t deliberately mat down grass behind the ball to make room for the club to swing back and through during the actual swing. But DeChambeau, a pro golfer of ten years who has been playing tournament golf for 23 years, walked into this patch of fescue stomping around as if he was making wine. He matted down every piece of grass behind his intended swing…several times…making it easier for him to ultimately swing the club. It was a clear rule violation.
DeChambeau was told in scoring after his round that he would be assessed a 2-stroke penalty, putting him three shots behind the leader instead of just one. Officials from the R&A, the governing body for this tournament, took him back out to the spot of the infraction. There we were all able to witness the temper tantrum of a five-year old as DeChambeau pleaded his case, to no avail. But it didn’t stop there. DeChambeau said that because of the penalty, he was unsure if he would play the next day. He refused to speak to media. And he held the tournament hostage until the next morning over whether or not he would continue to play, and whether the R&A would have to adjust the tee times of most of the other golfers in the field as a result. And he kept volunteers at the course well into the night while he hit golf balls in the dark as he sulked. He sucked the air out of the room. And he did it because, as the golf writer Eamon Lynch would later say, “he exists in an echo chamber of his imaginary grievances.”
DeChambeau did show up Saturday morning. He played an okay round of golf, finding himself four shots behind the leader. Things were seeming to return to normal. The headline after Saturday’s round should have been that two more golfer’s, Sam Burns from the United States and Ryan Fox from New Zealand, both equaled the scoring record, posting their own rounds of 62. But it wasn’t, because DeChambeau wasn’t done sucking the air out of the room. Instead, he went to the tournament offices demanding his scorecard from the previous day (to what end, we do not know). It was apparently a heated conversation and his request was denied. Either way, the story was not done. Either way, he had not accepted that his actions led to a penalty. Either way, he had not gotten on with it.
But Ryan Fox would have the last say in this year’s British Open. He backed up that 62 with a perhaps more impressive 68 on the final day – more impressive because it was done from the final pairing with all the pressure of a major tournament on his shoulders. More impressive still, it was done in spite of the adversity he faced in that final round. On the 15th hole, the hardest hole at Royal Birkdale, Fox hit a near-perfect tee shot but got a very bad break. As can happen in links golf, a shot that is a yard from perfect can end up dead. And this shot ended up in a bunker, up against the back lip. He had no shot toward the green. He wasted no time. He didn’t complain. He stepped into the bunker and hit the ball backwards, away from the green. He then hit a perfect chip and putt, walking away with a really good bogey to lose just one shot to the leader. He would bounce back with birdie on the next hole to get that stroke back.
Fox got to the 17th tee. He decided to play it safe, hitting an iron that couldn’t possibly reach the troublesome fairway bunkers. He hit it perfectly, right up the middle of the fairway. It landed and ran and ran and ran and ran, until it did actually reach one of those bunkers. He hit an iron, that at most usually travels 260 yards, 325 yards! He got up to the bunker to see another awful lie. He didn’t complain. He got on with it. There wasn’t enough room to stand in the bunker to hit it. Instead, he stood outside the bunker, crouched down low and hit the ball safely out. He would card a par on that hole and move on to the last tied with the leader.
On the 18th tee, he turned to his caddie and declared he wasn’t going to play it safe. He was going to go for the win and own the results even if he messed it all up. He hit a perfect drive. He hit a perfect approach shot. And wasting absolutely no time at all, he stepped in with every part of him feeling as if it were shaking and made an 11-foot putt to win the British Open.
Bryson DeChambeau shot over par on the last day finishing in 14th place. Even had the penalty not happened, he would have finished tied for sixth. But the interesting thing about it is that even after the penalty on Friday, he was still five strokes ahead of the eventual winner, Fox, at that point. Even with the penalty, he was still only 2 strokes behind Fox after Saturday, the same number of strokes Fox was behind the tournament leader at that point. But one golfer kept getting on with it. The other did not.
Golfer, DeChambeau, and driver, Wallace, both had the responsibility to know the rules of their respective sports and to play within them or to suffer the consequences. Both either didn’t know the rules or deliberately chose to ignore them. And both put the blame for that on the governing body, instead of on themselves. The real problem with placing blame is that it prevents the self-reflection necessary to grow and to become better.
Blaming someone or something is easy. Stepping into the bunker and hitting it backwards is difficult. Driving a car with a bad vibration over the finish line is difficult. And the same is true in life and even in politics, my normal subject matter. It is easy, for example, for those on the MAGA right to say illegal immigrants are responsible for all our woes. It is easy for those on the progressive left to say that capitalism is responsible for all our woes. But the answers are never that simple and we, as country, need more self-reflection and less blaming.
I can’t say for sure whether the right attitude can truly change an outcome, though I have a hunch. But what I do know is that the proper attitude, regardless of outcome, can change how you feel both about yourself and life in general. Anyway, and as always, I preach what I need to practice.