The cruelty of golf is so well-established at this point as to be something beyond cliche. All sports have the capacity to humble us, but there's something about the gentleman's game in particular: the way it isolates you, the way it pits you against not an opponent you can see or speak to but nature itself, its unique capacity to laugh in the face of your hard work and dedication.
Maybe that's why Tommy Fleetwood's son Frankie became an instant sensation at the Masters Par 3 Contest last year. It didn't really matter to him that, at eight years old, he wasn't nearly big enough or strong enough to carry the water with his tee shot on No. 9. What mattered was that he stare down failure and try his hardest anyway. (OK, sure, it also helped that he was impossibly cute.)
There's profound wisdom in that, a lesson that even adults four times his age struggle to learn (and I'm very much including myself in that group). Which is why we're so pleased to report that not only is Frankie back for another round this year, but he remains undaunted.
Frankie Fleetwood's Masters journey is as endearing — and inspiring — as ever
Ahead of the Par 3 Contest on Wednesday, Frankie and his dad sat down for an interview with Kira K. Dixon. Luckily, his newfound fame doesn't appear to have changed him much: He's a little bigger now, but he's still very much just a kid, approaching the task ahead of him with the sort of singular intensity that only kids can have.
“I just feel scared of tomorrow," he told Dixon. "I've been missing [carrying the water] every year. So, I want to get it."
And who knows? Maybe this really will be the year. He's been working hard over the last 12 months, doing everything from pushups to taking extra swings on the range. One thing's for sure, though: He won't shy away from the challenge, and he won't want to cut any corners either — he told Dixon at one point that he wants to "try and be better than this guy," pointing to his dad, and he was deadly serious when he said it, too.
Of course, he's hardly the first son to want to earn bragging rights over his old man. But there's something charmingly quixotic about his quest, something that makes it captivating even though we know it's doomed to fail. Not to go full "Frankie Fleetwood is all of us," but, well ... we've all been there, feeling small in the face of something larger than ourselves, something we know we might not be equipped to conquer.
That is, after all, so much of what life is about: the doing of things that scare us. Golf has endured for so long in large part because who wouldn't love to take a walk in the woods and occasionally whack a ball around, but also because it's a microcosm of the world at large. We'll all stare down some water we're not sure we can carry, eventually. We should all hope that we handle it with a fraction of Frankie's grace and good humor.