Why "Tee Time" is the Perfect Analogy for America's Greatness

The universe is a great magnet, pulling everything together like a carefully-choreographed dance of puppets with hard steel strings. I've long been a believer that there's a pattern to life, that things fit together when looked at from the right angle and that upon figuring out the dance that damn magnet is trying to create - a mazurka, maybe, if not a psychedelic foxtrot - will all the secrets of life, humanity, futures markets, all of it be revealed.

A recent such galactic coincidence: a reader posts the famous Charles C. Ebbets picture "Tee Time" (also known as "Golf on a Skyscraper") asking us to write up what blend of insanity, courage, and ingenuity would lead to such a picture.

A photo of a unconventional golfer getting ready to make what would surely be an impossible shot and at the same time affecting such a hideous swing that nothing good could come of it. But maybe, with the right wind, a good follow through, the collusion of the great magnet and, of course, God knows where he's aiming but maybe, just maybe the shot would make it.

And then, on Easter Sunday, a day of miracles and resurrections, Bubba Watson, with his weird homemade left-handed swing, makes an impossible hook shot out the woods to bring himself back from the dead, securing his first Green Jacket (if this video is down it's because "the man", network copyright edition didn't want you to see it).

Bubba Watson, the closest we have to a living Happy Gilmore, with record-setting long drives, a fetish for Ellen Degeneres and freakishly tall women (his wife's a 6'4" ex-WNBA player), and his own General Lee to tool around backwoods Florida in (yes, he bought the Dukes of Hazzard's Confederate-flag hooded Dodge Charger) has won a contest that bestows the honor of a blue-blood green sport coat upon the victor.

So back to the picture. A man is poised precariously on the girder of Rockefeller Center's centerpiece GE Building (formerly the RCA Building from its construction until 1988, thus showing the temporariness of identity) as it's being built. This photo is one of a series shot by Ebbets, then the head of photography for Rockefeller Center, the most famous of which is the poster every New Yorker has at one time or another hung on his wall LUNCHTIME ATOP A SKYSCRAPE. 

These are brilliant in that they tackle so many themes, encompass so much of what was great in the industrial construction of America.

Fearlessness is the first thing that comes to mind. Iron workers in general are some of the most fearless men out there. The job is the 4th most dangerous in America (an average of 46.4 men per 100,000 die doing it a year according to one 2008 article), behind being a bush pilot, a logger, or a fisherman. I know an iron worker. They make large sums in OT and hazard pay and if they survive long enough they've got it made thanks to the union's backing. So think of what they had to do for this picture - walk down a foot to 2-foot wide I-beam girder one by one. Balance perfectly as they sit. Bring their lunch pails. Comfortably joke with each other aware that a slight lapse will send them plunging hundreds of feet to a painful death. Then they did it again pretending to nap. And finally the golf guy. Golf, an activity which, like drinking Scotch, those rogue Scots invented and our wealthiest Americans adopted. To poise at that angle, cigarette in mouth, even if he doesn't swing just to keep it, well hell that's just unnecessarily ballsy for a simple PR shot. Today they'd have nets, harnesses, all sorts of safety things in place. Or just shoot it on a closed set. Men back then were what men today pretend to be.

The strength of mankind. This testament to the fact that we can erect monoliths hundreds of feet into the sky over a rock we've simultaneously covered with said constructions to the horizon - it's impressive, if not in its vastness than merely when you think of all the people, all the hands and minds and cuts and bruises and deaths it took to create what we now take for granted. When you think of how quickly American skyscrapers shot up - in general, how quickly America shot up, going in a few short centuries from log cabins and swamps to models of global urban efficiency and innovation - it's just goddamn astounding.

Then there's the Charles C. Ebbets angle. Ebbets, who wasn't credited with these photos until 2003, after a long and expensive private detective search. He took these pictures in 1932 and yet in a few generations the pictures exist but the man is gone. Almost fully forgotten to the history books, his great works have adorned dorm halls and architectural firms and high-end infrastructural businesses. It makes one think about legacy. About what is important - that your name exist beyond you or your work and contributions. Because most of us will go on unforgotten by history and that's a hard fact to swallow. Perhaps our kids and our grandkids will remember us but beyond that - who knows. Creating immortal works of art aren't a guarantee. Perhaps donating a ton of money to an institution or to build something but buildings get renamed, school change hands, people forget and donations made centuries ago eventually get wiped out. So that's the final thing here, that we may be forgotten but that doesn't make our impact on the world any less important as long as we strive to make it. Call it the RCA building, the GE Building, whatever it eventually becomes (the Facebook Building?) those brave iron workers may someday be forgotten but their souls and courage and good old-fashioned American toughness will live on through that great monolith. And whether you say it's by Ebbets or Lewis Hine (misattributed) his vision of what we can say about the building of our world - upward and onward and damn how far from the ground, we're comfortable being where only birds and gods dare to tread - will no doubt define the great Industrial America (and certainly few will realize this was taken during a depression; no, no this is America at its greatest!).

Come to golf. A sport that can be enjoyed by all Americans, regardless of age, sex, even to a certain extent wealth. It was there when the built the RCA building and there when Alan Shepard played golf on the moon.

It's been played on battlefields and backyards and beaches, by presidents and actors and cartoons and basketball players. And thereby it all comes back around to Bubba Watson. Salt of the earth and different from his peers, he's bested them for an honor few of the more button-down golfing establishment will ever attain. Another measure of the greatness of America. Diversity. Ingenuity. Courage. Legacy.

It's Tee Time, motherfuckers. 

That what you had in mind, Reed?

- Ryan