Hot Shots Golf 3
Better grip it and rip it!
I am on the 17th hole and I have one up on my opponent, a hairy Australian man known as “The Sasquatch.” I try to steady my nerves. It’s difficult because I just drank a cup of coffee and ate a blueberry cake donut. My fingers are vibrating imperceptibly, but enough to throw everything off. The caddie mutters, “so uncool.” I’m in the sand. I try to get out, but the ball can’t make it over the slope. I find myself back to where I started. The Sasquatch declares “That’s it.” We are even.
This is a game about timing. There is the microtiming of button presses to hit the ball just right. There is the macrotiming of being at the right place, in the right moment. Most importantly, there is the metatiming of being in the right heart and mind. In the biography for Lin, the Chinese golfer, the game states that she “focuses ‘energy’ into her clubs.” I take it the game is trying to be tongue-in-cheek with their quotations, but I absolutely believe that golf takes energy more than anything else.
My favorite golfer in this game is Stacey. She wears glasses and speaks in meek chirps. “Go home ball!” she whispers as she putts. “Heck yeah!” she says to herself and no one else as the ball drives deep onto the fairway. When she gets a bogey, she crumples into a ball on the ground. I understand her.
When I was 12, I would visit my uncle who lived in Pennsylvania. On these trips, we almost never left the house. Family time like this was meant to be spent over home cooked meals, occasionally takeout, and watching TV. He was dating a woman who had a son half my age. In my memory, he looks exactly like the boy from Stuart Little. Because he owned a PS2, I would play with him. For one week, we played nothing but Hot Shots Golf 3 . We got better together. We joked about how the characters talked. I imagined that this is what having a little brother feels like. My uncle did not stay in a relationship with this woman, and so I only knew him for two years. I don’t even remember his name. But now that I think about it, I realize that he is a full grown adult. As I write this, I’m looking at pictures of adult Jonathan Lipnicki and pretending that it’s him. I’m thinking about how we had bonded for a short period of time and that’s all the time we’ll ever have together. It’s satisfying.
I don’t know if I got much better at this game over my hours of playing it. I don’t know if progression happens like that. Playing well feels more like entering a state of clarity. I cannot control when I score -6 overall, I can only bask in the moment when it happens.