Pitchmarks #101 - "I know just what you mean"

One of the famous Churches Pew bunkers at Oakmont. Expect to hear groans from within it…

Of Milan Kundera’s masterpiece “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting”, Ian McEwan wrote that “one is torn between profound pleasure in the novel’s execution and wonder at the pain that inspired it”. He is right; the exquisite dialogue loses little in translation from the French, and Kundera’s ability to find humour in simple, human interaction makes it an annual read for me. I bought my paperback copy in 1998. It is starting to look weary, but then so am I.

But “the pain that is inspired it” is in reference to the backdrop for the tales of Clementis and Eva, Marketa and Jan, as behind the narrative lies the author’s yearning for his homeland, and for those times before the occupation that drove him from Czechoslovakia. Early on in the book a mechanic recounts, for the benefit of a menacing stranger who will soon arrest him, that “in Prague, a guy is throwing up. Another guy comes up to him…shakes his head and says ‘I know just what you mean…’”

Most things remind me of golf, but surprisingly often, golf reminds me of Kundera, and his gift for revealing life’s absurdities. So when the breeze delivered to me, across the third fairway, the screech of anguish that followed a dear friend’s latest violent slice, I felt like calling back “I know just what you mean…”

Perhaps a study of our facial expressions - as we watch the ball and clubface part on an entirely different angle to that which was hoped for and called for - would make for an interesting set of portraits. It could be a window on the eternal suffering of the human condition, amplified at regular intervals by this cruel “sport”. We live and die alone, and in between endure golf on a largely individual basis, but - when seen together as a set of portraits - perhaps our plight might seem more collective, somehow. More tribal.

Another portfolio might pull together the sounds we make as each shot reveals itself a traitor; groans and sighs, breathless self-directed tirades. After a good front nine, my own game disintegrates before a peg punctures the turf of the twelfth tee, and I catch the sound of the subsequent disciplinary rant as it hangs in the air. Golf denudes me, then I berate myself. And from the other side of the next fairway, Luca is yelling - and I mean yelling - “what is wrong with you?” at himself. The same old mistakes, followed by the same old squeals and grunts. At least the date has changed.

This week the U.S. Open returns to the mighty Oakmont for a remarkable tenth time. At almost seven thousand, four hundred yards, with one hundred and sixty eight bunkers and an extraordinary set of fast greens, the par of seventy is no mean feat, even for the modern professionals.

But - if the course plays the way it just might, long and firm and fiery - then those mysterious wizards that effortlessly excel at golf as if caught in some celestial mantra might get a glimpse of how it often feels to us, and we might hear down the satellite line a few choice expressions of their own, or catch their frustrated whimpers of agony over the gasps of the gallery.

I’d rather they didn’t throw any clubs, or resort to expletives, or spit in the hole - after all, Hogan and Nicklaus and Miller and Els all managed to win there without giving themselves away like that - but if they struggle as they plot out survival from that marvellous, brutal legacy of a golfing test, I think I might understand. And sympathise.

Even in the persecution that drove Kundera from occupied Prague, though, there is hope. Hope is what drives his characters to explore in such style their alienation, and a forlorn detachment from where they want to be. And hope is a key ingredient for everyone who has ever lifted a golf club to then feel a ball leave the centre of the face. We hope that this feeling will return, that we might get back to that precious state, of watching the ball sail merrily down the middle. And when such curious things occur, our faces are not twisted scowls, but the first beginnings of a delicate, innocent smile.

Hidden in between all of the struggle, these fragments of glory that make it all worthwhile. That make it all involuntary. We shall each be paid back, sooner or later; our occasional consolation a closing birdie perhaps, or the sweep from the swindle, or the unnamed trophy for the U.S. Open. The rest of the time we will have another dose of grumbling and bleating, whether from the second cut of heather or from the strange confession box of The Church Pews at Oakmont. I see you in there, grappling. Trying and failing, and shortly after, wailing. You know how we feel, now. And “I know just what you mean…”