By Gary Topping–
Bobby Jones, the great American golfer of the 1920s, was as much a founder of the sport in this country as Babe Ruth was to baseball and Jack Dempsey to boxing. On one occasion he sent a rare errant shot out into the rough. These days, television cameras would be there to record every stroke, but Jones in that instance pursued his ball alone. When he reemerged onto the fairway, he announced that he had hit another bad shot and charged himself with an extra stroke.
The spectators were amazed at his honesty and wondered why, since he was the only witness, he didn’t just keep quiet about it and save himself the stroke. For his part, Jones was equally amazed at the readiness of the spectators to expect dishonesty just because he could easily have gotten away with it. His response was something like, “Hey, those are the rules of the game. Praising me for following the rules is like praising me for not robbing banks; it’s behavior you have a right to assume and expect.”
My cluttered memory has a habit of serving up far-fetched examples like this in unrelated contexts, and I immediately thought of it as I watched all the eulogies for President George H. W. Bush recently. It seemed to me that speaker after speaker called attention to Bush’s decency: “he was such a decent man.” When one lives as long as I have, one hears many such eulogies, but I could not recall a single one in which the simple virtue of decency was highlighted and singled out as something worthy of praise. Don’t we just assume decency, as we assume that Bobby Jones would keep an honest score card?
Surely this is a commentary on the deplorable state of public discourse and comportment all the way to the highest levels of our society. We yell at each other, we insult each other, we apply demeaning and dehumanizing names to each other. For all of my reservations about President Bush’s politics, I readily affirm that he and indeed his entire family were and are decent people, as most of the political and social leaders in my lifetime have been. And I have to keep asking myself why I feel compelled to keep singling that out and emphasizing it. Soon, I hope, decency will recede once again to something we can assume, like an honest golf score.
