In the face of speeding modernity, it's the creation of memories which slow down time. In golf, those memories are abundant, and have the ability to make life seem just a little bit longer. (Photo by Golf Guides USA)

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By BRETT CYRGALIS
Sporadically throughout the golf season, Brett Cyrgalis will write some semblance of opinion about the week in golf here.  He is managing editor of golfguidesusa.com, as well as a sports writer for the New York Post and author of a forthcoming book from Simon & Schuster on golf's scientific revolution and its mystery.

The NHL season drags on, and so do I.  From watching the Islanders in Philadelphia, then the next night seeing them wrap up their regular season in Buffalo . . . to five nights in Pittsburgh, where the playoffs start . . . to Long Island, where I go straight to the arena without stopping at home . . . to Pittsburgh again . . . to Washington, D.C., for the Rangers . . . to Boston for the Rangers . . .

It all becomes one big blur, with months of time crunched together into a conglomeration of small moments, memories.  Hockey arenas are different, but the same.  Some nights are better stories than others.  Some nights are more memorable for what happened after I walked out of the arena.  Some nights are utterly forgettable.

So I get a day off, a Wednesday, in mid-May.  The sun is out.  It’s warm enough.  I meet my Dad for a casual round of golf at 11 a.m.  It is not a release, because there is more season, more cold seats high in the rafters, more bad press-box food, more bad decisions about the candy buffet in Boston.

But it’s a respite, a short breath before a long run.

So we play, I hit it OK, and we enjoy ourselves.  By 2:30, we’re inside the grillroom, me enjoying a Guiness, Dad enjoying a martini, and some friends at a table enjoying some peanuts and pretzels in a small glass bowl.  Laughs are had, the Mets are made fun of even after Rick Ankiel hits a triple off the left-field wall – maybe because it was Rick Ankiel hitting a triple off the left-field wall – and come 4, everyone is set to go home.

My fiancé is away on business, so my desire to go home isn’t elemental.  What I want, actually, is more of this.  Not the laughs or the beer, but more time.  I don’t want a precious free day to disappear.  I want it to last.

So the question now is time.  How can I slow it down?  How can I pump the brakes on something that seems to rush by, ad infinitum?

And I think about Einstein, and the malleable nature of time.  The general theory of relativity, of how gravity warps time-space, about how the faster you move, the slower time gets, about how at its very core, time isn’t a constant.

And I think about the terrific little narrative book by Josh Foer, Moonwalking with Einstein, the one that details the author’s trip through the World Memory Championship, and digs deep at the concept of how the brain registers time.

In describing his interaction with an amnesia patient known as “EP,” and referencing a scene about one of his memory coaches, Ed Cooke, Foer writes:

Without time, there would be no need for a memory.  But without a memory, would there be such a thing as time?  I don’t mean time in the sense that, say, physicists speak of it: the fourth dimension, the independent variable, the quantity that dilates when you approach the speed of light.  I mean psychological time, the tempo at which we experience life’s passage.  Time as a mental construct.  Watching EP struggle to recount his own age, I recalled one of the stories Ed Cooke had told me about his research at the University of Paris when we met at the USA Memory Championship

“I’m working on expanding subjective time so that I feels like I live longer,” Ed had mumbled to me on the sidewalk outside the Con Ed headquarters, a cigarette dangling from his mouth.  “The idea is to avoid that feeling you have when you get to the end of the year and feel like, where the hell did that go?”

So there is the idea – time quantified through the creation of memories.  If you jam more memories into the hours and minutes and seconds, it allows for the lengthening of time.  At the very least, it’s the internalized feeling that time has slowed.  I don’t think this is something scientifically provable – not yet, anyway – as it is more a question of psychological interpretation.  How long does a day feel?  How long does a minute feel?

For full disclosure, this all came to me afterward, after I put my shoes back on and headed back out to the golf course.  I jumped in a cart and shot to the first open tee, No. 7.  There I found a nice little niche in between all the afternoon foursomes, and I played and played and played.

I hit a high fade 3-wood into the ninth fairway, put a wedge right up over the flagstick, and missed the downhill birdie putt inexplicably short for the second time in three hours.  I hit a block driver off of 12 into the gully right, chipped out with an 8-iron, hooded a wedge just left of the green, chipped to seven feet and missed the bogey putt on the low-side left.

There was no keeping score, no tally marks of fairways hit or greens in regulation.  It was all just sunshine and bogies, and I remember the vast majority of it.  By the time the shadows had stopped being long and started being all encompassing, I had played 39 holes in eight hours.  I went home, sautéed some shrimp in a light, white-wine, garlic and jalapeno sauce, put it over some rice and sat down on the couch.

It was late, and I was tired.  I had to wake up in a couple hours to drive through the gridlocked midtown tunnel for a Rangers morning practice before a playoff game, a day when I would walk out my front door at 9 a.m. and walk back in at 2 a.m., and think it all went by in a flash, like the last month has gone by in a flash, like the last six months have gone by in a flash, like most of the first 29 years, now the past.

But golf, that ancient game of mystery, it just lingers there to be had, hanging over each bit of life – mine, at least – like a reminder about your control of time.  What is there to like about hitting a ball, chasing it, and hitting it again until it’s buried in the earth?

Memories. 

Modernity is so fast, yet right there you have the chance to slow it down by creating more memories.  Old people like golf, and maybe most of them believe it’s because it’s easy to do, it keeps them active, it’s social, and they like the outdoors.  That’s all well and good – and true.

But maybe, somewhere deep, it’s about prolonging the inevitable, about fighting off death with more and more life.  About pushing back against the relentless pressure of time.  About knowing, at least for a brief moment, that you have some say in the speed of your life.

The original version of this story was posted on BrettCyrgalis.com, where the author posts personal tidbits from his life and from the reporting of his forthcoming book.

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