Final Project

As I said in my previous post, I had no idea what I wanted to do for this narrative.  I had golf in mind because it’s something that I’ve played for awhile but besides that, nothing.  I pretty much decided to just play a couple rounds and have my pictures taken and see what happens.

On the course I tried to get as many pictures as possible to increase my chances of finding some good ones.  I had most of them taken while I was teeing off and I did this because they are typically the most interesting and they would affect me the least while playing.  There were quite a few that I liked.  I not only found some interesting pictures but also was able to pinpoint things that I have been doing wrong in my swing.  At this point, I still had no clue what I was doing.

I started to sort through the pictures once I got home and found maybe ten that I thought were promising for the project.   I started looking for pictures of famous golfers online just for a starting point.  I finally decided to use pictures of John Daly, Tiger Woods, and Happy Gilmore.  I superimposed John Daly’s head onto a picture of me right before impact.  I staged the image like how he ended up getting suspended from the PGA.  He teed off of a Coors Light can on national television…my hero!  I Put Tiger’s head on a candid shot of me after I hit a bad shot and thought that the pictures had stopped.  Tiger’s picture was from when he was upset of the ordeal with his mistresses and his ex-wife Elin.  I thought that it worked very well with how my body was posed on the shot.  Finally, I put my head onto Happy’s just because I wanted to be attacked by Bob Barker.  I really don’t have a better reason than that.

After the fact, I noticed that every picture had something in common.  I did not intentionally choose a “bad” situation from each player’s life, it just happened.  Thinking about it, it’s probably because they are the most memorable.  John Daly was never a really respectable player but he was still a semi-decent golfer.  If you asked anyone about John Daly’s most memorable moment in golf, they would probably say when teed off of that beer can.  The same could be said about Tiger.  He was/is one the best golfers around but even though it happened awhile ago, most people still have his cheating scandal in memory.  It may not be a closely connected, but most people would probably think of the Bob Barker fight in Happy Gilmore and not something like the final shot he made to win the tournament.

I guess that the whole point of this was that we often latch on to bad memories.  When looking back, it’s often easier to remember how something didn’t work out for you than something that did.  I could have used a picture of Tiger Winning the Masters but I was drawn to one of him in anguish.  That may be a comment on me but I don’t think I’m the only one that does it.  If I learned anything it’s that I should see the flaws in my swing and try to improve them, not see them as my whole game.  We all make mistakes but we should learn from them and play the next hole.