Of Disc Golf, Manliness and Democracy

How I unraveled in a frisbee golf game–and what my loss says about hyper-masculinity and risks to our republic

I’ve been writing about masculinity lessons from my dreams. But a recent evening was a living nightmare.

It didn’t seem that way on the surface.

I was playing frisbee golf with dear friends on a pleasant California evening.

But it was excruciating on the inside. Over the course of the game, my confidence cratered. And my performance tanked.

There were times I didn’t have any idea where my disc would go when I threw it. And it often landed far from where I wanted. Fifty feet to the right. Up a tree, costing me five strokes.

I unraveled. I fell apart.

And I felt like a triple loser.

I lost the match, my composure, and the wisdom I thought I’d gained about how none of this should matter.

This is an old story of mine. Of cracking under the pressure of competition and feeling less-than as a result. Not tough enough as a man. Worthless.

You might be saying, “lighten up, dude. It’s just a game.” On one level I get it. No big deal to play badly in a friendly disc golf game.

But I think there’s value in unpacking the shadow side of this match, the shame it conjured up for me, and the wider social impact of all the “games” we play.

I suspect my little story of personal suffering is part of a bigger one, a public one about what it means to be a man and how our obsession with competition threatens democracy today.

***

Not that everyone experiences the kind of meltdown I did. Or that many people have as many panic attacks mid-game as I have had.

But my painful disc golf outing gets at shared, profound costs of our fixations with competition and achievement. I’m talking about a culture in which we have arranged nearly continuous contests for ourselves. Not just in elections and sports. But in school. And at work. We have set up systems of comparison and rivalry such that life resembles one big game of trying to “get ahead.”

And when we aren’t battling against others, we’re often “competing against ourselves.” We are about setting personal records, meeting the standard, upping our performance. A billion dollar coaching industry has cropped up, built on this ethos of self-improvement.

The “American Dream” itself is steeped in a compulsion to achieve and outperform. Giving our kids “a better future” also pressures them to climb the corporate ladder, to win the rat race, to keep up with the Joneses.

What can seem as wholesome as mom and apple pie comes with a seamy underside of scolding, shaming and rotten materialism.

We paper over that unpleasantness, in part through Cinderella stories of underdogs beating the odds. But increasingly, those tales are fantasies that blind us to how social mobility is declining in America and the already well-off keep consolidating their gains.

I don’t mean to say reaching for goals and engaging in competition is inherently bad. But our myopic focus on winning has led us to lose our way. We’ve lost sight of some important principles. We’ve lost some of our humanity. We’ve lost something of ourselves.

Our highly competitive, achievement-oriented society tells us we can feel worthy only when we rise to the top. Anything less than that is, well, less-than. It is failure. Loserdom.

This hyper-competitive culture is of a piece with the cramped, confined version of masculinity that has shaped men and governed societies for millennia. The patriarchy. And it has pitted men against each other, celebrated individualism and ridiculed emotions other than anger. It has banished the receptive, connective, vulnerable aspects of men’s souls, even as it has put men above women and supported racism and other forms of domination.

***

I have done pretty well in this system — in large part because of a lot of privilege.

But I’m a sensitive guy. I think I’ve felt the agony of not measuring up more acutely than most.

That night of disc golf on the U.C. Berkeley campus, for example, I wanted to crawl under a rock as I kept screwing up. My two pals playing with me were entirely kind, offering suggestions for getting out of my head and making better throws. And I think I managed to be a “good sport” towards them, applauding their successes and thanking them for their encouraging words. But I wanted to be a million miles away from them as the night wore on.

At the same time, resentment and bile built up. Why did my buddies get to have all the glory and good feelings of beating me?

Such ugly feelings have come up for me more than I would like during “friendly” games.

And I’ve been haunted by my poor play in crunch time. Similar shame has surfaced for me because of my mediocre career progress. And silly as it may seem, I’ve been plagued by my favorite sports teams’ failure to win championships. When the Buffalo Bills lost four straight Super Bowls I felt even more fully like a hopeless also-ran.

Call me a canary in the competition coal mine, then. And from my painful perch, I see the suffering, the humiliation of failing to win, play out all around us.

I believe our hyper-competitive culture is at the root, for example, of the resistance many men demonstrate to diversity and inclusion initiatives. If it is all a zero-sum game, a race to the top of an ever-narrower ladder, why would men want to concede power?

Clinging to power is even more pronounced in the political realm. Donald Trump’s refusal to admit he lost the 2020 election makes sense for a man conditioned to be a “winner.” And he taps into the deep humiliation and fear many white, working class folks feel about falling behind financially and losing status in a multiracial country.

Unfortunately, Trump’s unwillingness to concede a loss has infected much of the Republican party at this point. “Election deniers” now make up more than half of Republican candidates. Part of the problem is a dysfunctional primary system that rewards extremism, as commentator Fareed Zakaria points out. But the “tyranny of the minority” Zakaria identifies also has much to do a hyper-masculine, hyper-competitive culture at the heart of America and much of the world.

And that culture is fueling a scary possibility. Republicans may well take control of Congress and key state offices, Trump could come back to power as President in 2024, and we could lose the free and fair elections we’ve long taken for granted.

***

I’m trying to remain hopeful and take the long view during this dark moment. As Brene Brown put it several years ago, we’re witnessing “the last stand of power over.” In other words, we’re seeing the desperate actions of a dying philosophy of domination.

Indeed, the dangerous, unhealthy, “confined” masculinity that has gripped men for millennia is giving way to a version of manhood that frees men and all those around them to live fuller lives. Connection and compassion are central to this emerging manliness, balancing out the competition, aggression, isolation and emotional stuntedness that has long defined what it means to be a man.

Young Americans also are more likely than older generations to appreciate racial and ethnic diversity, and less likely to see the United States as superior to other nations. Sentiments of equality and harmony may well carry the day–and keep us from destroying ourselves through war or climate destruction.

Such a positive, less-competitive future would amount to a throwback of sorts. The vast majority of our existence as human beings has been in hunter-gatherer societies, where values of egalitarianism, autonomy and gratitude prevailed.

Our forefathers and mothers would not recognize today’s society, in which winners take all, people are often bossed around at work and a mindset of scarcity dominates.

No wonder our world often resembles a dystopia.

I caught a glimpse of this wider social sickness on my way home from the recent, painful frisbee golf outing.

I was riding BART, the Bay Area’s subway, back from Berkeley to San Francisco. And a disturbed man paced back and forth in my train car. A black man in his 30s, he may have been homeless by his disheveled looks. At one point, he stopped a few feet from me.

“FUCK!” he shouted in my direction.

I was terrified. I was afraid he might attack me.

He didn’t. But his anger–his verbal aggression–makes sense in a hyper-competitive, racially biased, deeply divided world that all but discards those who don’t win.

If only that one scream could wake us up to our disconnected culture of constant contests.

Could help us see the nightmare we’re choosing to live every day.