The astonishing Collin Morikawa was in the news this week, kissing the British Open trophy, something a man would rather not do with the Delta variant around, not knowing how many hundred folks had touched the thing, but he was excited, having won the Open on Sunday with a four-under-par 66, a 24-year-old Berkeley grad joking with his caddy, cool under pressure. Last year, the PGA, now the British, on to Augusta. 

Some people have that coolness under pressure, such as the engineer who was sent to the guillotine, but the blade wouldn’t drop even after several attempts, so they decided to reduce his sentence to imprisonment, but he looked up and said, “I think I see your problem.” Other people get into a tight squeeze and prepare themselves so well for defeat that even if they come through a winner, they can’t enjoy it. 

Mr Morikawa putted beautifully as a crowd of 32,000 watched from surrounding hills. He made a birdie putt on the 7th while the 38-year-old tournament leader chipped into a bunker and chipped from that bunker into the opposite bunker. The kid stood strong. 

This, as all of us old coots know, is the future. Some 24-year-old is waiting in the weeds who will snatch the prize from our tremorous hands and we’ll be forced to grin like good sports and congratulate the little twit when we’d rather strangle him with his bike chain. 

I love young people, don’t get me wrong. We hung out with the nephew and his wife this week who are totally cool. My generation never used the word ‘totally’, we didn’t dare think in terms of entireness. We were “sort of happy” or “kind of interested”, but we couldn’t commit 100% because we had no reliable authorities on style. I know people who’ve never shown their wedding pictures to the children because the sight of the pastel polyester would make them collapse screaming. The nephew and wife are totally into what they’re into and it’s awesome. We never achieved awesomeness. Awe was what you’d feel if Jesus appeared to you in person and touched your head and made you intelligent. You’d be awestruck, so you couldn’t use the same word for, say, the way someone’s hair looks. But now they do. My young people think it’s “awesome” that I’m writing a novel. I hope so, but am not always sure. 

I was working on my new novel as I watched the British Open and I could sense a strong field of 24-year-old novelists on the scoreboard as I worked on page 110 of my book and was filling the right margin with a handwritten addition – a popular radio minister is caught in a motel in Omaha studying photographs of young women in thong bikinis and though you can see this sort of thing on any beach in the country, underpants with less cotton than you find in an aspirin bottle. His great secrecy and sense of shame make the deed seem perverse, and he’s kicked out of the church and takes a job at a SuperAmerica, pumping gas for elderly customers who can’t figure out how to insert their credit cards — and I sensed that my description of firm ovoid female cheeks had jumped me ahead of a lot of young Berkeley novelists who are dealing in anguish and alienation — and then on 113 I wrote a few paragraphs in which a 24-year-old guy is hitting golf balls on a football field and one strikes a lady’s cockapoo in the flank and this gentle dog, enraged, leaps at the golfer and bites him and its right front claw catches the earring in the golfer’s left ear and rips the earlobe and he falls to the ground screaming and incurs traumatic injury that necessitates the hiring of a life coach named Mallory, who teaches remedial life skills, such as (1) change underwear daily, (2) make bed, (3) brush teeth. It sounds weird, but it’s very believable.

I’m calm but I’m fairly certain I’ve got the National Book Award nailed for 2022 and I’m happy about that, but when photographers ask me to kiss the golden bookend trophy, I’m going to say, “Kiss my foot”. Old vets like me don’t do that. I’ll hold the trophy down at my side, very cool-like, like you’d carry a six-pack. “When did you know you had it?” a reporter yells. “I never imagined I didn’t have it,” I’ll say. “When you got it, you know it and it’s awesome.”

Originally published by GarrisonKeillor.com and reprinted here with permission.