It was towards the end of another glorious afternoon at the golf club, the car park thinning out as the Members drift home, smiling after another few hours spent enchanted by the golf course, and by the view from the Pavilion where they had nursed a well-earned refreshment and licked their wounds.
I wander into the Professional’s Shop, and interrupt a Member and the Pro discussing the golfing equivalent of the dinner party question — “if you had just one more game of golf to be played, where and with whom?” The Member, a scratch golfer in his 50’s, who seems to get better with age like a fine claret, gives a couple of answers. The first is surely one of the obvious ones — Augusta National, with Jack, Bobby Jones, and Seve; the second a lovely, family four at the home of golf, the Old Course.
I remembered that I had been asked this very question in an employment interview before, and it rather took me by surprise in that particular context, but it shouldn’t have. I should have my own answer ready, so common is the theme in clubhouses all over the world, and so enjoyable the deliberate consideration of an appropriate answer.
In the interview, I think I said Bob Jones (he disliked “Bobby”), his great friend, the “Letter from America” journalist Alastair Cooke, and my laid-back childhood golfing hero, Freddie Couples. No doubt if I had ever been invited to Augusta National (apart from the daily invite that arrives during the hours of sleep!) I might have a further deliberation on venue, but I have seen many of the other great courses in the northern hemisphere, and there cannot be another that combines such a spell-binding location with the unspoilt, rugged, architectural splendour that exists at Cypress Point.
Not a bad answer, I guess, but on the bike ride home this particular day I reflect on the Member’s second answer, and on how this game, when played in the present moment with real people who matter in our lives day to day, can be something sublime — a peak experience that goes way deeper. Walking in the fresh air, chatting, emotionally scarred yet enchanted by this ancient game that really goes on between the ears — no wonder golfers develop a lifelong passion for the game.
I think more about this over the coming days, and come to realise that the simplicity of a game with family members or dear friends is all of the game’s appeal for me. A couple of days later, a colleague and I head out for a knock, and we play simple matchplay, no shots, no wretched scorecards, just he and I doing our best, the momentum swinging one way and the other, and our characters coming out in the mental approach at times — now aggressive, now defensive.
Matchplay gets rid of all that is dull, slow and boring of scoring golf — it is binary and thus has the built-in, dynamic drama of a close football match; each shot has the potential to change the course of the battle, or the confidence and momentum of each of us. As we walk around, fully mentally engaged in this sporting combat, I notice other players elsewhere on the course, checking yardages relentlessly, and berating themselves for their inadequacies despite the absurd difficulty of the game they are playing. No doubt they enjoy it too overall, but it doesn’t look that way at times. Golf, like life, is never perfect, but it can be wonderful.
I continue to muse on this, and eventually find my answer to the dinner party question, three days on from that moment in the Pro Shop (and seven years too late for the interview!), but like most things worth knowing the answer was already there, hidden in plain sight — it just needed unearthing.
Whether it’s one last game or a recurring one for all eternity, please can I be on the 1st tee at Wenvoe Castle, playing simple matchplay with D for the millionth time as we did throughout our glorious adolescence? You can keep your stroke indices, your yardage charts, your buffer zones and perhaps even the sublime Cypress Point. Golf as a sport and an industry can continue to stumble along, obsessed with equipment, and the pursuit of perfect turf and smooth bunkers, and petty Club politics, and dress code violations. Meanwhile we’ll just try and knock it further and closer than each other, time after time after time, in search of temporary ownership of the “Wenvoe Cup”.
Modern life and all its stresses and challenges will fade into the background for the duration, as we face a recurrent and joyous challenge that has taken us from teenage years to middle age, and with luck will accompany us into retirement. This, for me, is the simple beauty of this wonderful game, in a world that seems to get more complex and more obsessed with measurement every day. For us, the only measurement that matters is “one-up” or “two-down”.
We will strike the first balls down the hill towards “second ridge” and spend the next two and a half hours fully, deeply, spiritually present in each other’s company and in a match that remains, to paraphrase Bill Shankly on another beautiful game, “much, much more important than life or death.”