So we reach the turn, and as I pick up his ball and chuck it towards him, R says “I’ve no idea what the score is, but it feels like all square to me”, and I simply nod. I’ve no idea either, but we’ve been talking solidly since we strolled off that first tee, so it’s not surprising. We’ve covered a lot of ground already.
I realise that not only do I not know the score in the match, but I’ve not even bothered to measure myself against the par of each hole. We’ve both hit some fine shots, though, and wonder if those miracles come into existence as a result of this detachment from outcome. Most of the swings I’ve made have been free and easy, clear of the normal, stifling self-talk; more like brief, fluid intervals in our dialogue.
During the front nine, R misses a few greens on this, his first visit to West Byfleet, and his pitching today is reminiscent of my own. As he flits between the thin and the fat, I stand and watch with a deep empathy for these momentary lapses in an otherwise tight short game. For I too have moved in that spectrum between the thin and the fat, though I never know which way the pendulum will swing next.
This game has the power to make you feel immortal, when the ball soars among the clouds, and lands softly by the flag, but it’s as if you have to earn these glimpses of an eternal bliss through the veil of a hundred thousand failures. R’s pitching woes last for nine holes; mine have been there in my head and in my arms since eighty-something, but I still I hate watching him in this fleeting dip into my territory. We’re in this together, us golfers; we know the pain that we’ll all go through before the next flash of brilliance somehow manifests.
As we start the back nine, with one eye on the darkening sky ahead, I am reminded of an experience not so far from here, which seems to strike a chord with our inability to keep score, or to really care about such vulgarities. We had an auditor come in every year, to check over the books, and I would have a list of queries about this process of keeping track, of accounting; eager to find a way of doing a better job.
I’d go into each question expecting some sort of clarity to emerge, for I thought that accounts, like maths, is a black and white affair. Where numbers are concerned, surely it is binary, in the same way that a scorecard or match score should be. Each stroke and every pound belong in a specific box, and, in a world where a straight answer seems more elusive than ever, surely an auditor could provide a realm where certainty exists.
But more often than not, he’d offer only an enigmatic smile, and the words “more or less”, and no doubt savour my naive expectation of something a little more concrete. When “more or less” seemed to have run its course, he would switch to “give or take”, which only served to compound my frustration.
So R flushes one down the centre of the tenth, and I tell him about all this, and he laughs, for it reminds him of a concept I’d written about somewhere, where “the world of measurement” is replaced by “a universe of possibility”, and in confessing he can’t remember where I’d written it, he gifts me an opportunity to remind him, and to point in the direction of the work of Ben & Ros Zander, and a book that has had perhaps as strong an impact on me as golf itself.
The piece he’d referred to was “Rank Outsiders”, a riff on our tendency to want to endlessly categorise - “This course is better than that one”; “he’s a great putter” or “she’s stingy on the gimmes”. R loves great golf as much as I do, recently returned from places where the game exists in its purest form, but this notion of not worrying about some artificial order of things strikes a chord with him. As we weave our way round, he is eyes-open, looking at the green complexes and the mowing lines, soaking in the architecture, marveling at the loveliness of it all.
But rather than comparing West Byfleet with the other marvels we’ve explored together, his appreciation seems more open, just a smile and a clear sense of enjoying the golf without needing to apply metrics. We try to keep score from the turn, and as we stroll off the back of twelve, I delight in watching his face as the thirteenth - a gorgeous, downhill short hole over a lake appears. “This is rather lovely”, he says, almost licking his lips in anticipation, and at that point I know that I may have an issue in terms of whatever flimsy scoreline we’re pretending to care about.
His short iron rips into the blue sky, high above the trees behind the green, and floats down to within a foot or two, never threatening to leave this path of excellence. It is one of those shots that seems to stop time in its tracks, where even though it’s your opponent who has somehow made it happen, it remains a thing of beauty, a sight to behold. “Well, that was fun”, he says, and we quietly marvel at how golf manages to show each of us at least one of these sacred moments per round, the magnetic glue that keeps us coming back.
I try to ignore that ball of his beside the pin, and hit one of my own, but these miracles can’t be forced, and so I collapse a little through impact, and pull it left, catching a tall pine just beyond the water. If this picture-perfect hole were a photograph, my response to R’s fine stroke fails to find the main part of the image, clattering into the vignette on the left edge of the frame. R is “roughly two up” as we make our way across to the next tee…
A few minutes later, we arrive at the fifteenth green, and with R’s ball through the back in two, I sense a chance to steal a hole back. His earlier pitching woes must surely be on his mind, and I am in good shape to make four, but golf serves another of its delicious lessons in humility as R’s chip makes it way steadily through the tight sward of another Abercromby run-off, up and onto the green, and straight at the hole. It strikes the aluminium flagstick with a venomous crack that seems to me - an innocent victim - to drown out even the clattering sound of the passing train.
And then, of course, it drops from sight, but neither of us are surprised, as it was only ever going in, and no words are required here, only our shared roar of laughter. Life goes on around us in the settling calls of the starlings, in the occasional glimpse of a pipistrelle, and in the young voices drifting over the railway line from a playground, but we are once again immersed in the drama of this game, and of a small ball’s power to astonish us when we least expect it.
I struggle on for another few hundred yards but then it is time to remove our caps, and look each other in the eye, and shake hands. R has won today’s encounter by approximately four and two, and it feels about right. More or less. And as the day starts to fade and the bright lights of the lounge beam through the dusk, we hole out at the last and are round in a little under two and three quarters. Give or take.
And this is what golf is all about for me, nothing to do with metrics or statistics, but more about plumbing the depths of the friendships we make out here. Putting ourselves back in the curiously valuable play state of childhood, out of reach of the drudgery of modern life. In some kind of worship to a piece of land, and to the artistry that turns such vast lawns into timeless puzzles for the generations. In search of deep and meaningful connections - to our playing partners, to the environment, to ourselves. How can so much be found within this daft game, I wonder?
I’m not up for rankings, I claimed earlier. So to paraphrase the late Brian Clough, one of the last great characters of another beautiful game - a sport which in its purest form provides a drama and a sense of community perhaps as powerful as that of golf - “I’m not saying golf is the greatest game in the world, but it’s in the top one”…more or less.
Thank you for reading Stymied, and if you are already subscribed, or have helped spread the word, I am hugely grateful. Please continue to share them with your golfing friends!
Thanks also to R for his company and wisdom, to West Byfleet for being such a fun place to play, and to golf itself, for being the thread that weaves all this together.
More fun playing that way
I used to play with a chap who would just focus on who gets the honour on the next tee!
Nice article with which to start my week end, and it’ll come rushing back to me as soon as I write down a 7 on my card during tomorrow’s medal, and ask myself why on earth I chose to enter - other than to acknowledge those for whom this particular trial is named - Battle of Britain.