I’ve been thinking about the humble divot a lot of late. I can understand you wondering if there is something the matter with me, or why I have nothing better to do, and I have the same concerns at times, but then I return to the pressing, important subject of the divot, and drift away again.
It began with what I took to be a friendly challenge, from that warm and intimate place they call the internet. A gentleman living across the pond was presumably so bored that he read some of my ramblings, and casually suggested (screenshot below) that there might be content worth unearthing in the more mundane constituents of a golfing life.
I had a go at the car park suggestion (here), and that seemed to go ok - over a thousand views (although whether that is a good thing is open to question - it perhaps calls into question how you are spending your own precious and finite time…), but divots seemed a deeper topic somehow, so I have been mulling it over like some demented fool.
Perhaps the Rules would be a good place to start, for a change. In case you haven’t memorised the latest version of the golfing equivalent of “the propositions of Euclid” (another Alistair Cooke reference, although he suggested the Rules were in fact, less exciting than Euclid’s work. They’ve updated them since he passed away, though, simplifying them to make them more user-friendly, although the jury is still out, or possibly asleep, on that point), Rule 1.2 of the 2019 Edition includes, under the heading “All players are expected to play in the spirit of the game” a requirement to take “good care of the course– for example, by replacing divots, smoothing bunkers, repairing ball-marks, and not causing unnecessary damage to the course”
I realise I come at such factors as the Rules, and those beautiful handicapping matrices from a fairly left-field position, given that I play golf only for fun, and can’t count high enough or care sufficiently to keep my own lousy score most of the time. But most of what I think is important for the beginner to know appears within Rule 1.2, as “Player Conduct and Spirit of the Game” seem far more relevant to the golf I love than the other thousand pages. I might as well try and read the rest in one of the 30 other languages they are available in…perhaps one of these other translations might be delivered in plain English.
It feels like only yesterday that I was on the grass range, nervously taking final instructions from the Club Professional, who would shortly sign me off to start playing on the course as a junior, thereby relieving my parents of my company for a few endless summers. Having had a few lessons indoors beforehand, hitting balls from mats, I was apparently hitting the ball too cleanly (not something I can recall being accused of since) so he was keen that I start taking a decent divot, but equally keen that I race after it and replace it.
Intentionally ripping holes in the pristine turf, directly in front of the Clubhouse and under the watch of a number of senior members, wasn’t the least self-conscious situation I’ve been in, but I did as I was told, and have remembered his insistence that I would only be allowed on the course if I “looked after it” ever since. It would be many years until I would learn more about the art and science of growing turf, but those early, slightly menacing warnings stuck, along with the importance of playing quickly, and treating the game and your fellow golfers with respect at all times.
With pitchmarks, I can never understand those who don’t look to repair their own, or for that matter any others they walk past. For it is almost always the case that if your ball has pitched on the green, you have hit a half-decent shot…we all remember the first time we managed to get the damn thing in the air, after all, and it feels to me like a privilege to be repairing the proof of a well hit approach. Even the pros do this, I’m told, though I would rather polish the skirting boards than watch modern tour golf.
But with divots, they are only sometimes the result of a fluid, controlled impact, flying in front of us as straight as the ball that has just left its comfy grass perch. When that happens, we’ll skip up to collect and carefully replace it, eager to then march on towards the pitchmark and perhaps a rare par or birdie. Other times, they will serve testament to a hurried, violent lunge, and be so mis-shapen that you wonder if you were holding the right end of the club, or whether you’d be better served switching to become, at this late stage of proceedings, a lefty. Or to try another, easier sport, which must mean pretty much any other sport, for golf is anything but easy.
With the pure shot, your divot might resemble the little mats they make you play off before a major event, but with every bad one, and there will be many, the exposed soil will have been gouged out at every which angle but straight, and you wonder if your swing looks not like Johnny Miller’s after all, but more like that of a drunken woodcutter, with no sense of direction and a degree of angry exhaustion.
Now and then, and hopefully no more frequently than that, you will start to form a deep divot before the clubface has even had a chance to speak with the ball, and the resultant fat shot runs the risk of destroying any remaining self-respect you were clinging onto. If it is a pitch shot you are failing to execute, there is a risk that the divot flies further than the ball, which could render your playing partners silent, turning away to try and hide the forbidden laughter, their shaking shadows betraying the comic nature of your latest, pathetic act of butchery. Rule 1.2 doesn’t actually mention not laughing at each other’s golfing misery, but it is written between the lines, implicit in the code of the game. It’s about the only thing without a few paragraphs in there.
Often, the fat pitch has a further consequence, in that you may be left with a slightly shorter edition of the same nightmare, and turn away laughing as they might, your golfing “friends” would be sensible to not stand directly behind the flag, as the heavy fat is often followed by the lethal thin, the golfing equivalent of the exocet missile. The fat and thin exist together somehow, the yin and yang of the amateur game. In between these might come the rare double-hit, and if you can survive and move beyond the shame that one (two?) of those brings - that feeling of helplessness in the face of an unkind universe - well, then the world is your oyster. To suffer in this way is to know deep down that things can only get better from here. You’ve seen “rock bottom”.
Luckily for those who need the most help, in that re-write of the Rules, the double-hit no longer incurs an additional penalty beyond that of the total and utter humiliation inflicted in those intense moments. No explanation is given for this change, but one can only imagine that within the reformation committee, charged with making sense of the old Rules, there is one or more who have experienced, via the double-hit, the stark loneliness at the centre of human existence, the epicentre of suffering, and were then charged an extra stroke for the privilege. We have them to thank next time we perform this hellish duff.
It might be worth thinking about why this insistence on repairing divots appears so early in the Rules (other than the fact that, given the less than thrilling narrative of the book as a whole, the later something is mentioned, the less likely it is that any golfer will read it), and I believe this is because it is important in two respects.
Firstly, let’s deal with the science of growing turf. This is the golfing equivalent of the dark arts, and there is a different story to be told of that shady dimension, but not here. Yet a glimpse at the divot may be helpful. As you walk over to the foot-long strip of turf upon which your ball once sat alluringly, you will see the torn roots of the hundreds of individual grass plants sticking out of the underside.
In decent turf, where either the rootzone is sandy enough to enable deep root growth, or where proactive maintenance (such as verti-draining, the punching of deep holes) has manufactured pockets through which the roots can delve, each plant will seek to have roots far longer than the public bit that sits neatly trimmed above the surface. Your local greenkeeper might often apply foliar feed, which is a way of applying a tailored nutrient mix to the leaf of the plant, but grass is often reliant on the nutrients that are within the soil, and in situations where a flush of growth is required - e.g. to recover from aeration and top-dressing applications - foliar feed cannot deliver the level of nitrogen and other nutrients that will aid fast recovery and defend against disease.
So the roots try to delve deep for the sustenance they require, in the face of this regular mowing and short height of cut. Even with sharp cylinder blades, every trim will inflict a wound on the plant, but grass has been around for far longer than human beings, and is nothing if not stubborn. Your most recent contact with the ground has ripped the plants away from the rest of their roots, and while the quickly replaced divot will not actually mend those tears, the plants will push the remaining stump of root back down and thereby regenerate its primary supply chain for food and water.
Unrepaired, and without at least some divot mix (sand-based topdressing, sometimes with some seed in - depending on climate, time of year, budget, etc.) to fill the gap, this gouge will slowly heal. Some grass species have a more aggressive lateral growth habit than others, and will therefore grow in from the sides more quickly, and there are other ways to encourage recovery, such as the use of plant growth regulators, which both encourage this sideways expansion and restrict the upwards growth, producing a thicker sward and reducing the cost associated with more regular cutting, and with removing the clippings.
But although grass will eventually fill an unrepaired crater, the soil level will have dropped slightly, which will diminish the overall quality of that part of the course over time. One divot hole does not equate to very much, but put 30,000 rounds a year or more through a golf course, with a certain percentage of divots left unrepaired, and you can quickly understand why it should not be a surprise to occasionally catch a bad lie in one. One small benefit of your own customary slice is that you are likely to find less fairway divots…
So that is the turfy bit dealt with. If you replace the lump of earth, quickly, it stands a chance of knitting back in well. If you don’t, it will either not repair as fast, or will result in a slight pockmark where there was once pristine grass. But the other compelling reason to make the effort to go and track down that lump of sod, and take the few seconds required to carefully and firmly reposition it, is more in keeping with what I percieve as the overall theme of Rule 1.2, this requirement to honour “the spirit of the game” by “acting with integrity”.
The sort of lazy selfishness that might cause an irritated golfer to not bother to repair their own divot seems to me so abhorrent that, were anyone daft enough to sell me a course of my own, I would take advantage of the option stated in the rule book for The Committee to impose a specific Code of Conduct for what it regards as “serious misconduct” (actually, on reflection, I would probably not bother with rules or handicaps at all, and instead suggest that people go out and have fun, but that’s another topic for another day).
I don’t know how many newcomers to golf these days are grilled in the same way I was with regard to pitchmarks, divots, and pace of play, but while we need no further deterrents of entry to this wonderful sport - which exists in the midst of, almost despite, all of golf’s baggage - these elements are, I think, fundamental. Golf is a game that can and will teach you patience, humility, common (or perhaps less common these days) decency. You take some responsibility for the damage you create, and act to put it right. What impact might this discipline have if we then carried it beyond the acreage of the golf course, and into our family homes and our working lives?
But I also wonder if there is a deeper lesson to be found in the simple act of caring for the course. David Foster Wallace spoke of the importance of finding ways to care for other people “in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day”, as a means to remind ourselves that we are not so different, you and I. In fact, while working through the extraordinary commencement speech contained in “This is Water”, he is urging us to consider that our hard-wired, egotistical way of being is misguided, and that in the centre of every transcendent experience is a rediscovery that the universe is a collective force, an ancient understanding that today’s quantum physics backs up.
So the additional effort to go and retrieve the shameful clump of earth you just displaced could be not only good for your own conscience, but beneficial on a far broader scale. It’s possible that if you don’t, your own ball might end up in that same rut, with the subsequent flood of emotional reactions that such injustice entails. There’s an old joke about Ben Hogan not being able to play 36 in a day, for his afternoon tee shots would end up in his morning divots, but for most of us an exact replica of an earlier stroke is extremely unlikely, and will in any case land a long way from the short grass where unrepaired divots are most disruptive. But it is still statistically more likely you will end up in one if you can’t be bothered to replace your own, as you have just increased the overall number of them.
We all love to see a fairway in great shape, a sea of happy grass plants luring us like a green runway towards the business end of a golf hole, but even with an army of greenkeepers, a degree of collaboration is required over such vast expanses of turf. Like the occasional gift I leave in the local coffee shop, to surprise a random customer a few behind me in the queue, we might see dutiful divot replacement as not simply a chore that we ought to perform, but as one of the random acts of kindness that Wallace talked of, and a pretty “unsexy” one at that.
You are not only helping the staff, whose backs must ache when, in the turf equivalent of pushing Sisyphus’s boulder up the hill for all eternity, they bend to repair pitchmark after pitchmark, and fill divot after divot. You are also helping your fellow golfer, and yourself, by caring for each other, and giving back to this game that you claim to love so much. Actions speak louder than words, etc…
I don’t know if golfing karma exists, but, if we pause between shots for a moment to consider that we are all inter-connected in some way as Wallace suggests - part of what he calls the “the mystical oneness of all things deep down” - it becomes easier to see this common decency, this notion of caring, as not merely an irritation, but as a chance to make the world a better place moment by moment, with a series of minute, seemingly unconnected acts.
If nothing else, the persistent study of gratitude and appreciation in modern science tells us that, in the simple act of thinking and acting kindly of ourselves and others, we flood our bodies with both dopamine and serotonin, neurotransmitters that make us feel good, and in the process these neural pathways become stronger, making us fitter and happier along the way.
I am sorry…this has gone a bit deeper than even your heaviest divot, and I doubt even Tony Dear has got this far, despite (inadvertantly) setting the assignment. Then again, he said 2,000 words, and that threshold kicked in before the suggestion of a global consciousness entered the equation, so if he bailed out earlier, I understand.
But there is something in this cycle of damage and repair that is the humble divot. To return to Hogan, he was once asked how he gained such deep insights into his mechanical swing, and the reply was that he “dug the answers out of the dirt” - that everything he needed to know he could see displayed in the pattern of his divot. I doubt we will glean the same understanding of our golf from it, but by all means have a look. And then replace your divot.
Thank you, from us all.
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Great reading Mr Pannel, your story reminds me of something I once saw at a club I am a member of. I don't know if alignment had anything to do with it. But a now late, as in no longer with us member. While playing in a match with him, I noticed him picking up divots, putting them in a plastic bag and depositing them in his bag. I asked him what he was doing, he then told me his entire back garden was made of old divots he'd collected over the years from his beloved course. Not sure if he ever lined up properly but he might of, in his back his garden 🤣🏌🏾♂️
Amusing and insightful - great read Richard. So that's why the matted driving range is so useless... no divots to analyse!