It’s the dog days of the summer. Accordingly it was a slow sports week last week. The NFL, NBA, NHL and college football are all in their offseason and had essentially nothing going on, and MLB and MLS had and have their all-star breaks.
However, golf had a pretty big event on the sports calendar. The Open – which for many years was known on this side of the Atlantic Ocean as the “British Open” to differentiate it from the U.S. Open – was held this past weekend in Northern Ireland at the Royal Portrush golf club.
One of the four “major” golf events – the others being The Masters, the U.S. Open and the PGA Championship – it is the last major of the year and the final chance for a golfer to lay claim to one of these truly remarkable titles.
And that was where the sports news bombshell of the week occurred. It was such a bombshell that many non-sports news outlets covered it.
During a media interview before the tournament started, Scottie Scheffler, the No. 1 golfer in the world since May 21, 2023, was asked a question about how he defined a slump, and then a follow-up question to name the longest he’s celebrated a success.
What happened next became an internet and news sensation for sports fans and more. Scheffler spent more than five minutes detailing how what he did for a living, playing and winning golf tournaments, didn’t matter. He said, “To get to live out your dreams is very special, but at the end of the day… what’s the point? This is not a fulfilling life. It’s fulfilling from the sense of accomplishment, but it’s not fulfilling from a sense of the deepest places of your heart.”
He went on to say, “…That’s why I talk about family as being my priority, because it really is. I’m blessed to be able to come out here and play golf, but, if my golf ever started affecting my home life, if it ever affected the relationship I have with my wife, with my son, that’s gonna be the last day I play out here for a living.”
It almost goes without saying that Scheffler then went out on the course and blew away the rest of the field, winning The Open by four strokes over his next closest competitor.
This was an amazing story. And through the wonder of the internet and the hundreds of entertainment options we have available to us, this pulling back of the curtain, so to speak, is just one of many instances of great athletes letting us normal people in on some of what goes through their minds. And maybe it can give us regular folks an idea of maybe how we too ought to be thinking about living life. Thinking of fun and family, for example.
Last month the fourth season of the television show “Welcome to Wrexham” concluded on FX. Personally I didn’t think too highly about the rest of the episodes this season, but this final episode had one of those pulling-back-the-curtain moments that makes you really think about life.
Granted, because the episode aired months after the season ended, we knew what the result for the team was, but what we didn’t know was the story of how they got that last win. And that was the pulling-back-the-curtain moment.
Rob Mac (formerly McElhenney), one of the co-owners of the club, was asked by the head coach (manager) to give a pre-game speech to the team before the deciding game of the season. Mac stated that he didn’t feel he had the right to talk to a group of young professional athletes about what they did for a living – not having ever been one himself.
But, he decided to try. He reached out to a friend who is one of the greatest players of all time at his sport (the name and sport were omitted from the show), and asked the sports legend, if he was to hear from the owner before a massively important game, what would he like to hear?
What this player confided was to tell the team to have fun. To play like little boys because they had already done the work of a man. The final point was, “they need to go out there and play like they did when they were 10 years old, and were having the time of their lives, because I promise you, that’s the only thing that they will remember.”
Of course, the team goes out, plays one of its best games of the season, and wins.
Fun and family.
Locally we have a great example of this behind-the-curtain look in Penn State’s wrestling team and their coach Cael Sanderson. For an article in the Deseret News last year, he responded to a question by saying, “I mean, it’s just a game, right? We want to win, and people want us to win, and the kids — it’s important to everybody. But just keeping things in perspective.”
Years earlier, after winning his final match in a 159-0 undefeated collegiate career, Cael was asked what made him better than everyone else? “Just a lot of luck, and just having support from my family, and the competitiveness we had growing up. This is all about family. All about family.”
And fun. Like what he told wrestler Zain Retherford before a match during Zain’s freshman year, “Just go have some fun, and make some mistakes.” A line that has been echoed a number of times by Penn State wrestlers in interviews both on-and-off the mats. Just have fun.
And popular culture, the movies for example, have certainly shared a similar message or two down through the years – however fictionalized they might be.
Like when Julia Robert’s character – a famous actress— speaks to Hugh Grant’s character —a small bookstore owner —in the seminal moments of the movie “Notting Hill,” and wonders if he could like her again. After Grant’s character explains the obvious fame and fortune differences between their characters, Roberts’ character dismisses all that by saying, “The fame thing isn’t really real you know. And don’t forget, I’m also just a girl, standing in front of a boy, asking him to love her.” Family.
Or in the movie “The Rookie,” when Dennis Quaid’s character, after running a gauntlet of slings and arrows in his path to become a major league pitcher, finally gives in and decides to give it up, pnly to be reminded of the joy in the game from the simple pleasure of watching a young kid play Little League. The next day he’s back in the locker room with a smile on his face and says to his buddy, “You know what we get to do today, Brooks? We get to play baseball!” Fun.
We live in an age when we have access to oodles of information from boodles of sources. It can be a curse or it can be a joy. But when that information gives us insight into the thoughts and practices of people who have achieved excellence in their craft, especially sports, it is a huge bonus for we the normal people. Getting a glimpse into how they handle their lives, and then deciding to use the positive influences when we find them – that’s something humans have never had access to in any quantity. As opposed to the multitude of messages we get from people involved in sports and other endeavors in life who eat, sleep and breathe their “jobs.”
But we live in the year 2025 and do have access to these differing viewpoints and information, and should be grateful for it, because fun and family – that’s what it’s all about really. And when it’s all said and done, they’re the only things that we will remember. So, go spend some time this summer having fun with your family!
