We would be cunts

“To play or not to play?” that was the question a week ago when Iain McGregor died suddenly during the final round of the Madeira Islands Open. To that point, inclement, unpredictable weather had vexed officials and contestants throughout the week. The European Tour had reduced the tournament to a thirty-six hole event due to the many disruptions to play.

Collectively, contestants, promoters and Tour Chief Executive George O'Grady opted to finish the event after the necessary delay to move the corpse. Opting to carry on had the flavor of a tasteless, corny joke, and press reports as well as reaction on social media had rightly excoriated it as baffling, bizarre and disrespectful. Few will argue that an occasion of trauma, chaos, or shock of any kind compounds the problem of making a hard, rational choice. Such is the fog of war. Even if one gives the benefit of the doubt, it is almost impossible to justify this move.

Before indulging in breast-beating and castigation, perhaps there are reasons why this was, at the moment, the correct decision. After all, the matter was deliberated according to the Tour's statement which cited, “Following consultation with the players and caddies involved...” Fair enough, but it is still hard to identify the logic that outweighed the highly strung emotions of the moment. It was the 1500^th tournament in the Tour's history, but completing a milestone for the sake of completion diminishes any validity of the milestone being noteworthy in the first place. The tournament had been interrupted repeatedly, and there was an opportunity for resolution. What was that about completing something for its own sake? In the aforementioned brief statement there was no explicit justification for carrying on. Merely, it noted that there was a consensus. The European Tour is a private entity which technically does not have to provide the why of its actions. However, under these extraordinary circumstances, a little explanation as to why it undertook this measure would bolster any claim of just authority over the matter. Given how little one has to even induce the motives for continuation, considering the other side of the story and weighing it on the margin is left up to faith. Skepticism is understandable.

Three overwhelming moral questions still linger. Why was O'Grady the final arbiter? What notional value did the decision place on the life of Iain McGregor? Why did the self-professed notion of community break down suddenly when it had to step up most? Once a course or club agrees to stage an event under European Tour sanctions, it effectively rents its premises to the European Tour. From conduct to scoring to dress code, the rules of the European Tour prevail at the site of any tournament it sanctions. So, by the organizational hierarchical chart, it stands to reason that the top officer would have say over anything out of the ordinary that the officials on the ground might not be equipped to handle. Yet, it is startling to consider that the sponsors and promoters of the event did not overrule this decision despite having a significant stake. Perhaps the brands of the companies putting up the prize fund would not be hurt by public backlash in the aftermath of such callousness. However, if the chief executive is entrusted to be accountable when such situations occur, the absence of perspective guiding those decisions is the crux of the matter. Seemingly, it was a non-use of power.

Secondly, if indeed this was a business move, what was at stake? In evaluating this base decision in the best case scenario of base terms, the idea of the life of Ian McGregor was not worth more than EUR 600,000 – the total prize fund of the championship. In the worst case, for any golfer who completed the event after the incident and cashed a check, the individual earnings are the relative values each person determined to be worth greater than the price of conscience. It is impossible to determine whether some of the players had their own moral choices to make such as providing for their children, but continuing en masse to compete does little to disabuse the perception of professional golfers as myopic and egotistical. Somehow Alistair Forsyth, Iain's boss for the event, averring, 'I felt that was what Mac would have wanted,' managed to lose top prize for being presumptuous and shocking. Many metrics assess what a human life is worth statistically. It is hard to apply one to this situation especially. Yet, the dismissive nature of the decision and near universal assent to it cheapened Iain's life and belittled his death.

Upon his own admission, Chief Executive O'Grady considers the action taken as wrong. If he knows why it was wrong, he has not admitted so, and that is no better than having taken the wrong course of action in the first place. This is insufficient on its own, and the paucity of the gesture of admission appears more so when expressed as part of the Tour's PR mantra of being a 'family'. In this crisis moment, the head of the household has behaved no better than a child who has not acquired the faculties for critical thought. Regarding the players, consenting to continue as a group was consensus at its worst. Going further with the concept of 'family', the decision tacitly admitted that caddies are still an underclass not quite as equal in status to players and officials in death as well as in their occupation. Caddies themselves picked up the bags and went back out, and this absence of solidarity was what made the least sense. It also did nothing to repudiate the idea that we are 'rats'. 

The common thread through all involved, barring the noble withdrawal of Messrs Lawrie, Kaleka, and Pieters as well as anyone else who declined to continue, was an utter lack of shame. Fittingly, by the principles of nemesis, the consequence of our individual and collective behavior will be shame. We have lost a colleague and a friend. We have lost the moment to have been great, and with it, much legitimacy and total dignity. 

On the margin and above the rim

Statistician Bill James introduced quantification concepts known as 'sabermetrics. to the sport of baseball. Before these new models, aggregation of results such as batting average, home runs, wins for pitchers, and errors were baselines to determine market value of baseball players. Since 1977, when James' Baseball Abstract first outlined these principles, the new ways of evaluating players, based on calculations relying on weighted averages and ratios rather than simple sums, have changed much of both the business aspect and actual game play. Simply, there were new, reliable ways to determine who was really clutch, and which situations called for certain tactics. By definition, no game can ever be played in the vacuum of a spreadsheet. However, bringing economics optimization theory has turned conventional wisdom on its head in all sports.

Yesterday, this piece regarding Kobe Bryant's infidelity illustrates the sort of Jamesian analysis. Well done, Timothy Burke, et alia. Anytime science triumphs over ignorance, everyone benefits.

Happy Christmas to all. Remember the neediest.

Safety cracking

Appearing in the current Vanity Fair issue is a thoughtful, incisive piece which delves into the theme of perception and reality as applied to the United States airport security apparatus. Citing evidence from security expert Bruce Schneier, author Charles Mann concludes that US$1.1 trillion spent in the 10 year life span of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has had negligible effect in curtailing potential threats. Though far from comprehensively assessing all TSA practices, the analysis does address the inefficacy of using expensive processes and time-consuming checkpoints to target a few obscure methods with an unlikely chance of duplication. By making airports and airplanes harder targets, the focus of potential terrorists will shift elsewhere. The displacement argument is a winning objection to the 'pressure-ouch' strategy. Moreover, for those still keen on attacking air travel, their likely entry will be through special access gates rather than standard, passenger security checkpoints. 

 

As the article states, 'I asked Schneier if he thought terrorists would in fact try this approach. Not really, he said. Quite likely, they wouldn’t go through the checkpoint at all. The security bottlenecks are regularly bypassed by large numbers of people — airport workers, concession-stand employees, airline personnel, and T.S.A. agents themselves (though in 2008 the T.S.A. launched an employee-screening pilot study at seven airports). “Almost all of those jobs are crappy, low-paid jobs,” Schneier says. “They have high turnover. If you’re a serious plotter, don’t you think you could get one of those jobs?”' For those who are both lazy and inclined to mayhem, Schneier's comments provide a pretty good primer in abbreviated, crib-sheet form. Distinguishing between real security and 'security theater', the piece seems to echo the Franklinian maxim that one who trades off liberty for security deserves neither, and, in this case, one has gotten neither. However, does that not lead the fundamental point: how to behave coolly when things get really fucked up? 

 

Yes, preparing to avert future attacks is paramount for the thousands of cryptographers, field intelligence agents, computer programmers, and police as well as the practitioners of statecraft. Yes, vigilance, rather than the mood of blithe blindness to real foreign threats that seemed to permeate and reek through Federal officialdom for nearly a decade under Clinton and Bush, must not deviate. But what do you do at the instant of outrage? If one accepts the fairly flimsy premise that the United States was in a state of war from the point the first plane hit, then how did the television polemics by politicians rate when applied to the military touchstone? The theater in the aftermath permuted, over time, to 'security theater.' Classify both unequivocally as theater of the absurd. 

 

Yet, it is equally absurd to believe that cool reason will always win the day. So, perhaps the biggest challenge in the post-9/11 world - a loathsome expression on many levels - is to write the response rulebook. Chairman Mao Ze-Dong wrote a brilliant read, On Guerilla Warfare, which diagrammed the steps to successful insurgency. The United States military has several field manuals for different theater operations. So do police and fire departments as does the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The RAND Corporation, a think tank, took the time to publish a manual for individual response. So, why not have a cognate for the leadership? The principle applies beyond terrorist attacks, for its ramifications extend to any outrage. Granted, no two crises are the same - 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, collapse of financial institutions. 

 

Yet, though officials respond under uncertainty, it is under much less uncertainty than for everyone else. Because of that position of privilege, their actions broadly influence behavior. Hence, the need for a set of principles. The nation is past due for guidelines of conduct for public officials when people are genuinely scared. No blueprint can say with certainty when the time is right either to draw the brakes or to put the foot on the accelerator. Solely acting within the moment can be as damaging as ignoring the nature of the moment altogether and sticking stolidly to the play book. Such is an example of absolutism which fails to apprehend the context and consequence of reaction. So, in the continued absence of any basic guidelines, all anyone will be prepared for the next time something awfully frightening happens in America will be rash words and ill-conceived laws.