Art Imitates Life

How a golfer's disappearance might be explained through my novel, Sandman

You may never have heard of him. If you don’t follow sports, and specifically golf, you certainly don’t know his name. He’s not Tiger, and he’s not Arnie or Jack Nicklaus, or even some of the names non-golfers have come to recognize: Rory McIlroy, maybe?

But he could have been a household name. Maybe a legend.

I play and watch the golf, and I remember Anthony Kim quite well. But I didn’t know his full story until a fellow writer sent me the link to a recent New York Times article about Kim’s nearly mystical disappearance from the game, his epic talent, and the artistic link Kim’s real story has to my novella, Sandman: A Golf Tale.

When Kim came to the PGA Tour he was touted as the next Tiger Woods. No, really. This is not hyperbole. That label has been placed on a few others from time to time over the years, but Kim was the real deal. Other PGA players were in awe. Golf reporters couldn’t believe what they were seeing. He had power, touch, other-worldly confidence. He was a child prodigy, like Tiger. He had a strong and some would say over-bearing and demanding father, like Tiger, who relentlessly pushed his son toward what he had seen as his God-given greatness.

But after several epic wins on Tour and being labeled one of the game’s biggest stars, Kim suddenly left the spotlight, and he never came back. In fact, he never said goodbye, never made a public appearance, never said a word. It was a total retreat and one full of mystery.

It’s been ten years. And the questions remain: Where is he? Is he coming back? In the Times article it was noted that a fan recently spotted him at restaurant and took a photo with him, as if he were some mythological figure lost in the shadows. Kim wore a hat and sunglasses as a disguise.

In my novella, Sandman, a highly talented teen golfer wrestles with his potential greatness, the meaning of the game; he struggles with what happiness means, and with the belief that he may have some spiritual obligation to his natural talents. Not unlike Kim, it seems. Both stories, as the Times article highlights, “stir all kinds of questions about sports and celebrity.” In Sandman, the boy learns of the legend of a former St. Andrews caddie who had once loved the game for its Zen-like connections to life, who like Kim, also disappears to a solitary, nearly monastic life, begging the question, as the Times wrote: “What does it mean, really, to disappear?”

In this day and age, truly disappearing is more difficult than it’s ever been. But Kim is doing his best. Still, we don’t know exactly why.

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We’ve all heard the phrase: Art imitates life. It’s been said that the phrase is as old as Aristotle’s work Poetics, believed to be one of the most widely read texts on how to write fiction. Aristotle wrote of the relationship between prose and the real world, and the idea of world-making in fiction through the eyes of what we see in life.

But is this the same as life imitating art?

In his essay “The Decay of Lying,” Oscar Wilde wrote, “Life imitates art more than art imitates life.” He claimed art (visual but also other forms) affects the way we look at the world. He noted how “fog” seems so mysteriously beautiful to us because painters gave it beauty in their works. Before this, fog was a an inconvenience, even a menace. Our perception of something (life) is changed by art (paintings, fiction, poetry). How we see the world is influenced by the art we consume.

So maybe the bigger question here is not why Anthony Kim gave it all up and has attempted to evaporate into the mist, but rather how we perceive Kim’s choices. Could how we judge him be influenced by the art we’ve experienced—the paintings we’ve seen, the music we’ve heard, the novels we’ve read? For instance, if you had first read Sandman and then learned of Kim’s story afterward, would this have changed how you initially judged his decisions? I suspect it might. And if you had never read Sandman, you likely would have a very different take on his choices. Art could have an influence on how we feel about Kim’s disappearance, what he may or may not owe the world, how he shares his talent, how he reacts to celebrity.

Maybe reading Sandman would help us understand, even if just a little, Kim’s decision, somehow explain it. And in the bigger scope of things, maybe help answer why some of us choose not to go with the flow of accepted society, with what is expected of us in the modern world, with what is required or demanded of us, but rather with what our heart tells us is the better thing to do.