I was at my club last weekend hoping to play some golf, but the tournament was rained out. As I peeked out of the locker room door and looked at the gathering of puddles on the putting green, I could see that the chances of playing that day were slim to none. This left me with the option of returning to my office to write another chapter in my next book. Truth be told, playing golf is way more fun than authoring a book chapter. It is not clear why this is so, but it is.

As I gazed anxiously at the puddles I stood next to a man who I did not recognize so I stuck  out my hand and greeted him, saying “why good morning, my name is Tom Ferraro.”  He smiled, shook my hand and said, “Yes, I know who you are; we played golf together six years ago in the closing locker room tourney. You were the A Player of the group.”

If you don’t know what a closing locker room tourney is and don’t know what an A player is, let me briefly explain.   An A player means you are the best player assigned to that foursome in this end-of-year event.

But the question I must ask myself is why did he remember me and I did not remember him?  His recall of me certainly did not have anything to do with my charm, my IQ, my looks, my age or my wit. I have never been charming, not very smart, nor good-looking, am not young and am not funny. So why did he recall who I was and me not recall who he was?

The simple fact is that six years ago I was still a good golfer, had driving skills and good iron play, all of which were  impressive enough for him to implant my name and my image in his head. Kind of like the first 70 pages of Proust’s “In Search of Lost Times,” but with me as the subject of recall and not those Madeline cookies or the Meseglise Way that Proust so vividly recalled.

An old friend of mine who was a member and a nationally ranked golfer once told me that you will only recall the names of members who have better handicaps than you and you will never recall the names of players with worst handicaps than you. This sounds ridiculous, but it’s true. Golf talent is sought after, admired, glorified, adored and respected by golfers who love the game.

If you need proof just think of what would happen if Tiger Woods happened to visit Williston Park and decided to walk into Hildebrandt’s and have a chocolate milkshake. Within 10 minutes there would be throngs of admirers surrounding the establishment and causing Hillside Avenue to shut down. People love talent and especially golf talent.

Why is athletic talent loved so much? Do we admire the athlete’s artistry, their skills, their ability to concentrate, to be perfect, to withstand pressure? Or maybe it’s their fit and graceful bodies and their skin tone.

Probably all of that goes into our love and respect of the good athlete. There is  also something about devoting time to a trivial pursuit that is admirable as well. This is why sports and the arts are so much alike.   To create a perfect round of golf is like creating a perfect painting. Herman Hesse’s classic “Magister Ludi: The Glass Bead Game” touches on this idea. The book was about a group of geniuses that were cloistered together in a villa in the Swiss Alps and spent their life in pursuit of performing perfectly at The Glass Bead Game, which combined physics, math, music, philosophy and marbles into a game that very few could master.

The attempt to do something perfectly is what sports, writing, music and art all have as a goal.  In the film “Ford Versus Ferrari,” Henry Ford II and Lee Iacocca are in hot pursuit of what Ferrari has owned for years, the perfect car.  In one scene Christian Bales, who is playing one of the race car drivers,  is sitting on a race track in the middle of the night and talking to his son about racing. The son looks up at him with admiration as Christian  talks about the pursuit of the perfect lap. “Do you see it out there, the perfect turns, the perfect downshifts, the perfect lap?” to which the son hesitates and says, “I think so.”

For reasons that are not clear, sports, like art, music, writing and even the culinary arts,  are about the pursuit of perfection. And when someone is closer to this goal than others, they’re admired, and remembered.  That’s why just because I was the A player in that group six years ago the member recalled my name. To all of this Jackie Gleeson would say “How sweet it is!”