Sports

Disc golf is a few years from having more places to play in America than golf has. Whether it will ever have more players is something nobody has counted yet.

The same hits score more runs together than apart. Over a season that is worth about two wins, and most of it does not come back.

Some unorthodox moves are wrong only in the textbook. Others are good only because nobody expects them. The difference decides how often to make them.

What it felt like following Cameron Smith down the back nine of a major championship, and witnessing a kind of athletic brilliance that doesn't require perfect shots.

Two golfs. Two generational talents. Two championship venues that refused to yield. Two major droughts. Two triumphs?

"What is the best sport?" has no answer, and "what is the best sport at each age?" sounds like the fix. A child should play this, a teenager that, a fifty-year-old something else, a grandparent something gentler.

Watch a long hitter in golf or a long thrower in disc golf and the motion looks easy. The hips turn, the body unwinds, and the club or the disc leaves at a speed that seems out of proportion to the effort.

A few minutes after a knockout, the fighter who was knocked out is usually standing in the middle of the cage. The referee holds both wrists. The announcer reads the time and the method.

A golfer walking onto a disc golf course for the first time knows more than they think.

Peoria, Michigan, Los Angeles, Norfolk, Iowa. The list was written down as the outline of a story about disc golf, five places that seemed to belong together without an obvious reason why.

Skaters read a city differently from the people who built it, and the city has been answering ever since, in two ways that look opposite and work the same way.