CADDIE SHACK, 2021 -- PHIL FOR THE AGES

His mother was trying to get a message to him.  His sister told her she'd try to contact his brother. They both thought the brother was the only one he would  listen to. 

But they were wrong.

He was way beyond all that.  

By the time he hit the back nine, he was listening to himself.

And maybe God. 

On Sunday, May 23, 2021, on a spit of land off South Carolina's coast, Philip Alfred Mickelson was making history.  Only weeks short of his fifty-first birthday, he was winning the PGA Championship, one of golf's four majors. In so doing, he became the oldest golfer ever to win a major.  Older than Jack Nicklaus, who pulled a rabbit out of the hat at Augusta in 1986 to win the Masters at 46.  Older  than Old Tom Morris, one of golf's legends, who won The Open (the British one to us unschooled Americans) in 1867 to became the oldest winner of that tournament, also at the age of 46.  Older than even journeyman Julius Boros, who won the 1968 PGA Championship at the age of 48. 

It would be Mickelson's sixth major, his second PGA Championship victory, and . . . 

His umpteenth or so miracle.

Phil Mickelson is golf's everyman.  In a sport that penalizes both daring and  courage, counsels patience, and routinely frustrates out-of-shape middle aged codgers who wail away every weekend, he is one of us.  Nicklaus, with 18 victories at majors, and Tiger Woods, with 15,  are golf's perfectionists,  logicians who always knew the percentage shot and  never let the field catch them by acting otherwise.  

Mickelson?

He never met a lead he did not threaten to give away.

Or a ball knee deep in fescue, surrounded by canopied trees,  that he'd take a drop on.

Phil just always had to give it a go.

Hence, the miracles.

On Sunday, per usual, he toyed with the weak hearts of golf's middle kingdom, those of us north of fifty and beyond who were glued to our couches and television sets (we still call them that, smart or otherwise) waiting for something to go wrong.  

And, of course, it did.

Even his mother was worried.

As he made the turn, that message she was trying to get to "Philip" (that's his proper name; you know, the one she used when he was a kid to let him know she really meant business) was simple.  Just shoot par.  No need to be spectacular.  Or, as she put it, "activate [the] calves." 

Good luck with that.

On the thirteenth hole, Phil let his  approach shot leak into the meandering ocean inlet to the right of the green. And on the par 3, 238-yard fourteenth, his six iron couldn't climb the fairway front and promptly fell back twenty yards from the green.  Two holes, two bogeys.

And just like that, a five shot lead was down to three.  

A birdie at fifteen paired with a bogey at seventeen (on this 223-yard par three, his tee shot raced through the green to long back rough)  reduced the lead to two when his pursuers -- Koepka and Oosthuizen -- each picked up a shot with their own birdies at fifteen.

So there was Phil. 

Standing on the teebox at 18 with a two shot lead.  

No one my age was anything less than very nervous.  

In 2006 at the US Open at Winged Foot, Mickelson had a two stroke lead with three to play and stood on the 18th with a one shot lead, only needing par to win.  (I was at the 18th green that day, waiting with the multitudes, ready to crown our king.)  He then drove his tee shot into a corporate tent.  (The  multitudes groaned in unison.) He should have pitched out with his second, which would have allowed him to get to the green on his third with a putt for victory and two for a tie.   But Phil, being Phil, had to go for the green, which basically required anywhere from a 30-to-40 degree slice around trees and a two hundred yard carry. 

The shot hit the trees.  (The multitudes groaned some more.)

And Mickelson double bogied his way  into a three way tie for second place.  (The multitudes  cried.)

So, at Kiawah Island on the 18th in 2021, it could have been "deja vu all over again".

But it wasn't.

Why not?

Because the other thing Phil proved on Sunday is that you can teach an old dog new tricks.  

The Phil playing these days is a plant-based shell of his former self.  Gone are the diet soft drinks, extra helpings  and extra pounds.  He'll wax eloquent on the anti-oxidant effects of his special blend of coffee. Channeling Arnold Palmer, golf's first everyman, he still responds to the crowd with a ubiquitous thumbs-up. And there's no absence of the old magic.  On five, just to remind us, he holed his bunker shot, and on 15, he outdrove the field.  But he was otherwise zen-like as he moved from shot to shot, sun-glassed and studious as he and his caddie, brother Tim, planned the next offering. 

From the left rough on 18, his second shot, a nine iron  from 150 or so yards out, landed sixteen feet from the hole.

At which point his biggest problem was escaping the post-Covid crowd that could not contain itself.

In 1980, Caddie Shack used golf as a comedic window on life's theatre of the absurd.  On Sunday at Kiawah Island, however, what was once thought to be absurd was turned into something real.

Age was just a number.  

Maybe.

When it was all over, a reporter asked him to identify the biggest sacrifice he had made on his way to Sunday's rendezvous with destiny.

"Food," said Phil.

At home, those for whom age is not just a number heard that . . . 

And  popped another beer.

MOTHER'S DAY 2021 — LISTENING TO LIZ

Sunday is Mother's Day.

At least it is here in the United States.

Norway had its celebration in February.  

Argentina won't celebrate until October.

Georgia (the country, not the state) had its in March.  

So did Ireland.  

Sometimes the Irish Mother's Day is in April.  For them, it occurs on whatever Sunday happens to be the Fourth Sunday in Lent.  

Five other countries, including the United Kingdom, do the same thing. And for this group, it's not called Mother's Day.  It's called Mothering Sunday and its origins are medieval.  Christians in the middle ages visited the church in which they were baptised, or their "mother church", on Laetare (Latin for "rejoicing") Sunday. 

This occurred around the middle of Lent and was a respite from a season that otherwise involved fasting and penance.  The epistle for the day was from St. Paul's letter to the Galatians in which he celebrates the church's birth in Jerusalem, the "mother of us all".  This was twinned with the Gospel narrative of Jesus turning the loaves and fishes into enough to feed five thousand hungry followers.  

So, on Mothering Sunday, medieval Mass goers took to their church in the morning and a feast in the afternoon.  

On Monday, it was back to Lenten penance and fasting.

Which was no fun in the Middle Ages.

In the United States, the creation of Mother's Day was actually a political act.  In 1870, Julia Ward Howe, a suffragette and peace activist, issued her so-called Mother's Day Proclamation.  It called upon mothers throughout the world to promote the "amicable settlement of international questions" and "the great and general interest of peace."  In 1872, she asked that June 2 be set aside as a "Mother's Day for Peace". 

In 1907, Anna Jarvis, the daughter of Julia's friend and fellow peace (and "Mother's Day for Peace") activist, Ann Reeves Jarvis, held a memorial for her mother at a Methodist church in West Virginia. This caught on, and by 1911 all U.S. states were observing Mother's Day.  In 1912, Jarvis herself trademarked the phrase "Second Sunday in May, Mother's Day, Anna Jarvis, Founder", and in 1914, President Wilson declared the day a national holiday. 

As the years flew by, Jarvis soured on her creation.  She thought that confectioners, florists and Hallmark were over-commercializing the day. In 1923, she protested at a candy makers convention in Philadelphia, and in 1925, she was arrested for disturbing the peace at a meeting of the American War Mothers. The war moms were selling carnations, by then a Mother’s Day staple, to raise money.

Jarvis wasn't really against the war moms. She just wanted Americans to take Mother's Day . . . 

Seriously.

And in 2021, she may be getting her wish.

This year, America's most serious Mom is Liz Cheney.  

She is the mother of five, the daughter of a former Vice President, and Wyoming's sole member in the US House of Representatives.  She is also one of the few Republicans telling the truth about Donald Trump and his big election fraud lie that led to the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol.  

It is a lie Trump is still telling and one that two-thirds of self-identifying GOP voters now believe.  It is also a lie that GOP office holders for the most part refuse to confront and excise. Even those like Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy, both of whom condemned Trump loudly on January 6, have gone soft. Cheney, however, will not bend.  She voted to impeach Trump for inciting the insurrection last January and has regularly condemned him since for repeating the false claim that he did not lose last year’s election. She just as regularly has told the GOP it cannot continue to either ignore or endorse Trump’s lie if it is to remain a viable party in a viable democracy.  

For that truth-telling act of political apostasy in what passes for the current Republican Party, Cheney is about to lose her position as Chair of the House Republican Conference.  That is the third-ranking leadership position within the GOP's House caucus. She will probably be ousted next week.

Being a good mother is difficult.  

It requires honesty . . .

Intelligence. . . . 

Love . . .

And the ability to meld all three qualities into a sort of north star capable of responsibly guiding a child from infancy to adulthood and beyond.  

Done well, its dividends multiply and compound.  Good parents, especially good mothers, beget children who become good parents. Either by dint of genes or example, and probably a little of both, they model conduct, the Darwinian results of which cannot be overstated or under-appreciated. They are all positive and they are multi-generational.

Done poorly?

Well, that's what keeps psychologists in business.

Today's Republican Party is a mess.  

It is still being parented by Donald Trump.

When it desperately needs Liz Cheney.  

Trump is neither honest, intelligent nor particularly loveable. He's actually pretty much the exact opposite on all three counts. As the titular head of the Republican Party, he now has his children -- GOP voters -- drinking the kool-aid  that says the 2020 election was stolen.  In turn, those kids are the reason GOP legislatures throughout the country are proposing or enacting so-called election integrity statutes (over 350 at last count) designed to lower turnout in non-Republican precincts and accomplish via voter suppression what the GOP cannot accomplish via legitimate elections.  

This is bad for the GOP and even worse for America.  

The country needs two viable, functional and responsible political parties.  The GOP’s inability to repudiate Trump, however, has turned it into a toxic echo chamber. 

In the 2020 election, record numbers of voters turned out, approximately two-thirds of those eligible, and afterward county boards of election throughout the country counted all the ballots, often under intense oversight. States successfully navigated the pandemic with expanded mail-in voting, early voting, drop boxes and outreach. It turns out that when government makes it easier to vote, more people vote.

We should be singing its praises. 

Instead, Trump and his band of acolytes are pretending that his orders to “find votes” and Rudy Giuliani’s rejected legal claims were proper and should now be turned into the law of the land. In the newly enacted Georgia (the state, not the country) statute, in addition to limiting early, dropbox and absentee voting, Republican state legislators have made themselves the judges in any future disputes over what votes to count and certify. Other Republican redoubts are following suit.

These are the fingerprints of fascism.

In their run-up to ousting Cheney next week, Republican House members are claiming she cannot continue as conference Chair because her anti-Trumpism is stepping on the party’s anti-Biden messaging. They are correct. It is. But that merely unearths the Faustian bargain that is today's GOP. Its ability to oppose Biden and its future electoral success now depends on it holding onto Trump’s fascist wing.

Without them, the party splits.  

With them, however, America dies.

The two necessary conditions for the survival of the American republic are democratic elections and peaceful transitions.  It has always been thus.  Repudiating them in 1860 resulted in a Civil War that killed over 700,000. Repudiating them today will have equally dire consequences. As the American population continues its statistical march toward diversity, a politics that hamstrings these new voters by consciously making it more difficult for them to vote and then not counting their votes when they do is the road to illegitimacy. The winners and whatever policies they enact will be disregarded. In Yeats’s famous formulation, the center will not hold.

Cheney knows this.

She is no liberal. People like me disagree with her on taxes, the war in Iraq, water boarding, abortion, the Supreme Court, her opposition to Biden’s pandemic relief and infrastructure plans, her overwrought attacks on “wokeness”, etc.  In short, we disagree with her on pretty much . . .

Everything.

But not on this Trump-thing.

On this she is dead right.

So Republicans, especially all you evangelicals, on this Mothering Sunday . . .

Listen to one of the few people standing between you and the devil.

Listen to Liz.