Driving back from the golf club the other day, my son - who had just prevailed over his sister and I in a five hole skins match round the putting green - mentioned how pleased he was that his putting had improved. It certainly had got better - his judgement of pace, and the tempo of his putting stroke, were definitely more under control than in previous loops of this now familiar training ground.
Over-analysing as usual - or perhaps hoping to force some timeless golfing lesson on the pair of them, though I am a living example of how long such things take to absorb - I was curious, and asked him why he thought things had gone so well this time. After a lengthy silence, he simply stated “I will not reveal my secrets”, and in the rear view mirror I recognised the same smirk that once looked back at me from the mirrors of my childhood; one that my parents and teachers knew well.
In idle moments since, his enigmatic response, and the very notion that golf has a secret, have been the landscape for considerable contemplation. I wonder where the idea came from - that sporting endeavours might have some hidden clues, be they physical or mental, that can unlock performance. I wonder if there even is a particular secret he has in mind, or whether, like the rest of us, golf seems to somehow work when we least expect it, and this answer was simply a smokescreen for the first exposure to the unspoken mysteries of this weird and wonderful pastime.
I think about the handful of moments when golf has truly flowed for me, to use a popular term of the moment, and this reflection doesn’t take long, as such glimpses of eternity are few and far between, and entirely devoid of logic. It occurs to me for the eighth time of late that I really should re-read “Golf in the Kingdom”, after a gap of perhaps two decades. The meanings I might glean from that book now must surely be different after all this time - “no man steps in the same river twice”, etc. Or perhaps “no man hits his ball into the same hazard twice”, though I know that one’s not entirely true. But when golf has for a moment or two seemed easy, it felt like it flowed through me, not for me. Great golf is something that very occasionally happens to us.
There’s something in this art of not thinking, or perhaps non-thinking that ties in here. I will sometimes hit a shot that seemed to occur without me in the picture - when I manage to be quiet over the ball and stay in the moment - and I wonder if that is what he found the other day - that the secret of golf might be to forget about secrets altogether; perhaps the great secret is that there is no secret, but you have to stop looking in order to find this out.
There are many important and transferable things to be learned which secrete themselves in this marvellous game, though. Honesty, discipline, patience. The great outdoors, companionship, the benefits of walking. The simple joy of play, and the endless, vicious lessons in humility.
I don’t really mind if he has a secret or not, as by this point I know that all thoughts and tips - all the thousands of golfing solutions that are in black and white print all around us - have a shelf-life of no more than a round or two, and more likely a hole. Sometimes just a shot. And some simply don’t work at all.
But I do love the fact that, in that smirk that peers at me from the back of the car, I can see a message that tells me that golf has got its claws into him. And in the steely, determined glance his sister passes him, perhaps she has been bitten, too. That tells me that we might continue sharing this sacred golfing path together, and in the process find and lose more secrets and golf balls than any of us could ever count.
But we will also share in the biggest secret of all, the one that is hidden behind the public image of this old game. Peer beyond all that for a moment, and head out into a field with a club and an old ball, and golf might whisper to you that it is not what it seems.
If you’re lucky, and you hit a few that soar above the land like red kites, or hole a long one and know deep down it is going in from the moment you hit it, you might realise that this might just be the greatest game on earth, and that although no one ever wins in the long run, we will be happy to spend many of our precious hours trying.
Maybe it wasn’t him speaking at all; maybe it was Golf that spoke to us. For I am starting to think, thirty-five years after my first decent shot, that she will not be revealing her secrets anytime soon. But it doesn’t matter, for we will still go searching, time and time again. Wake up kids, the tee awaits…
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In case you are new in these parts, here’s one from the archive that seems to me to fit well with today’s Stymie:
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Perhaps it's time to dig out my copy of GITK, which I too haven't read in many years.
In true gravity?
Mark