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My small community of Decorah, Iowa (population 8,000), is raising $6 million for an athletic complex that will include three baseball/softball diamonds and eight pickleball courts.

My small former employer, Luther College (student body of 1500), where I taught Politics for 33 years, received a gift of $20 million from a former student to build a new basketball arena (for its men’s and women’s teams) and add a wrestling building, again, for both genders. In the past two years, Luther has added three new sports, bowling for men and women, and wrestling for women, for a total of twenty-two, eleven for the women and eleven for the men.

For twenty-five years, I volunteered to do the shot clock for men’s and women’s basketball games. Each team has either 30 seconds (for women) or 35 seconds (for men) to shoot the ball once they gain possession. Someone’s finger must be on the button. It kept me in a game I cherish, even though I was on the sidelines.

I’ve always loved sports, as illustrated by the books inside the pink circle in the photo of our living room library shelves. Soon to join the top shelf are biographies of college basketball’s greatest men’s coach, John Wooden, golf’s first international star, Arnold Palmer, and Iowa’s own Caitlin Clark.

Later today, I’ll join Mike, George, and Butch for two times around one of the five nine-hole courses within twenty miles of our town. You can’t beat golf and Iowa corn.

*

Of course, money has corrupted so much of sport. In that sense, games have lost their innocence on the big stage. However, I read about sports because everything in our society can be viewed through the prism of athletics, encompassing the good, the bad, and the ugly.

The Caitlin Clark story is not just about an extraordinary athlete, but about the struggle for gender equality. The same is true for Jackie Robinson, who, in 1947, took one small step before Martin Luther King, Jr. and thousands of others moved us ever so closer toward the equality promised in The Declaration of Independence.

But it isn’t only about big societal themes.

Today, on the little golf course stage in northeast Iowa, it will be an age-old story, me against a foe, a very cunning, implacable, and impersonal foe, like the blank computer screen. As Arnold Palmer said, there’s an art and a craft to golf.

Executing a golf shot is the craft, seeing it is the art.

Isn’t that beautiful? And so very true of so much in life. It’s about the craft, the doing, and the art, the seeing.

In two hours, I’ll practice the blending of craft and art.

Just as I’ve been doing and seeing for the last two hours and twenty-six minutes.

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