kids and sports as investment
trying to post more, starting with a mass-exodus of half-baked ideas
A father and son came into my store a few weeks ago looking for a putter. I kept an eye on them; the kid was probably fifteen or so and seemed to know his stuff. He looked to have reached that point a lot of young-ish golfers hit around the start of high school, at least in my experience, where he’d start to take golf a little more seriously, whether or not he had aspirations to play competitively beyond high school.
They clearly had money and the dad didn’t have much golf knowledge, but he thought he was persuasive. He had an idea of what was good, or maybe what was just expensive. His son tried a couple of similar-looking putters that he’d been told by his teacher to try. One was really high-end with a price tag to show for it; the other was still nice, relatively affordable and very popular but still running a couple hundred bucks. It’s hard to tell from the way someone putts on a 150-square-foot turf mat whether they’re actually a good putter or not, but this kid had some talent and a lot of inconsistency. The pace of his putting stroke, the best indicator of a good putter, was all over the map. I figured he was overthinking the differences between slower uphill putts and less slow downhill ones or those that broke right or left. At one point his dad asked me how fast the turf putting green was running, if it was running at 12 or 13 on the stimpmeter (which is a very unofficial way of measuring the speed of putting greens; 12-13 is usually around what most putting greens on the PGA Tour run). I’m sure everyone who’s ever worked in customer service has had moments where they’ve said they wanted to laugh in a customer’s face, or maybe they even sacked up and did it. I wish I could put my shame and anxiety away for a minute and laugh in a customer’s face, but I had to walk away from this scene for a few minutes because I nearly burst out laughing several times in the span of a few minutes every time I thought about that question.
The duo went back and forth for at least half an hour, which is a pretty long time to basically do a toss-up between two items. Over and over, the kid said he wasn’t sure and didn’t quite know how to decide which putter he wanted. The dad told him he didn’t care and would buy either one, but it would be something he’d need to rely on for years.
They ended up going with the higher-end putter. I have thought for years that the one they chose is severely overrated and relies on a significant amount of brand-name hype. At checkout, the dad, as so many dads, especially rich dads, do, asked why he didn’t get any discount. I used to laugh at stuff like that, the customer naivete, but now it just pisses me off. How could anyone possibly believe we live in a free society once they see everyone else making the same jokes about their new purchases and pleading for the same discounts? Do they even see it at all?
No, I said, no discount on the most expensive putters in the store, even if you actually buy one. He demands to know what we did with his year-end rebate, which my employer offers to customers between January and March and is basically a gift card with an amount that varies on how much someone spent the previous year. It’s December, your credit for the year is long gone, and there’s nothing me or anyone else here can do about it right now. He tried other tactics: bringing up our competitors’ policy, trying to stand behind the counter with us as some kind of weird intimidation tactic…I don’t know what goes through people’s heads that tells them that’s okay. I was trying to toe the line between customary snark and flat-out disgust with the guy by this point. I felt bad for the kid, who was just wandering in the background of this conversation. Even though his dad had taken a much more hands-off approach with his choice of putter, his gentle reminder that it’d be an investment for a number of years was not far from the same kind of pressure he was applying to me and my coworker now. He seemed to think he could somehow come out on the winning end of a transaction that involved only his money and nothing about himself. He was looking every way he could to insert himself in a way that constituted anything greater than that.
When someone tries to wriggle their way into a discount like that, I have no reason to not believe that they see their kids as somehow separate from the financial mindset they’re applying to the things they buy for them or the way in which they buy them: everything is an investment and must either provide a return or be obtained at a discount. Golf is particularly tricky to thread with kids, because of the prohibitive costs of entry and also the possibility of playing it for a long time. Equipment, practice, and tournaments are not cheap or the type of thing you can pay for just once a year in one sum. But it’s also relatively easy to land a college golf scholarship, at least compared to bigger sports. Even if you don’t go pro after that, there’s plenty of ways to play at a high level for the rest of your life.
But golf, like any college sport, requires a level of commitment and decisiveness which kids tend to lack even if their parents think they know what their kids want. Kids have so many options and pathways and possibilities and their wants and desires change daily, weekly, monthly, as if their id and ego and superego are still rattling around, trying to settle into place. The options grow by the grade as the college-industrial complex and the apparent requirement of a college degree to exist in American life is a more pressing need than ever. I don’t mean to sound like a “kids these days” type, but that indecision teenagers face is something I didn’t start to notice until I was in my early 20s (which is where I am now) and could both still remember vividly parts of that time in my life and also have enough remove from it to reflect on it with an idea of where my life went after the fact. Pressuring a kid to try and guarantee something will work before you even really know if you like something as simultaneously mundane and also finicky as a putter reminded me a lot of this tweet:
If it hadn’t been for the pandemic and the luck to have a place to hide out and have lots of space to myself during lockdown (parents house), my life would be totally different and I sometimes get kind of scared of what it might have been. I was studying something I hated, in large part because I didn’t know what I wanted -- even at 20, with (give or take) five more years of life under my belt compared to this kid -- the coming years of my life to look like. I still don’t. The path my life, and all the people and emotions and products floating in its orbit, take is not ever visible at the time and trying to act like I or anyone else can control it is a delusion.
A large chunk of my own privilege has come from good timing and good fortune striking my parents. But the more active role they’ve taken in securing their own status is not the hard work that they seem to think has distinguished them. It has more to do with taking as little risk as possible in their life’s course. Entire generations of parents internalized their feelings of precarity and, in the process, seem to have misinterpreted their role in the socioeconomic hierarchy (if they affect a role in it all) as a result of work rather than risk-taking. The college-to-marriage-to-homeownership pipeline is popular because people view it as the safest option and because everyone else does it. As if everyone doing something means it is correct. Risk drives kids’ choices in high school, college, and beyond, and as the drive for prestigious academic accolades becomes more competitive as more and more families strive for this pathway for their children, the pool becomes more crowded and the risk goes up.
Teenagers’ bodies and brains are changing faster during these years than they ever will for the rest of their lives. Gradually, often without them noticing, the choices they make anyway will harden into a life path and they’ll reflect on what they did and didn’t do and how fast life changes course at that age. Life now is not always boring but it is certainly slower.
I should have known better than to leer near the front counter when the guy and his kid came back, this time wondering why they couldn’t get a new shaft put in a fairway wood ASAP (though they aren’t the only people to believe that such things are possible and that the guy who does it apparently works ten hours a day, seven days a week). They sucked me in again, and the dad, with a straight face, tried to negotiate a straight merch swap. Give me this club that doesn’t fit my kid, he said, and I’ll give you this definitely-well-used club back. I try not to ridicule customers because the thought of doing it to their face makes me cringe. I tried to be serious with this guy. I wouldn’t want to be treated as less than that, but I’m also not completely delusional. Look at this club, I told him, and tell me you think we could sell it as new. Even if we still sold it as part of a current line, which we don’t.
Humiliation is off the table for people like this, like, completely off the table. I don’t think my pleas to be serious ever registered with him. The word no was not programmed into this man’s neurological interface. Hard to say how the kid felt. He was quiet. He seemed to be there for the golf. He has talent, and his family has every right to try and nourish that talent. And yet I’m not sure he has a chance. Emotional investment that is true comes in the moment, not by sticking to some grand plan. Living in the present, as I will helplessly continue to try to do even if it means dealing with the banality of conformity and the refusal of this society to take any risks that could alter that banality, is as basic as searching for that investment. It doesn’t require money, or at least not in the way parents seem to think.