Pitchmarks #102 - “Decision Fatigue”
The Old Tom One…
I wake up feeling shattered, spent. Overwhelmed. No spare capacity for inputs, though they keep on coming, let alone the energy to make decisions.
I opt for no breakfast, for the binary yes/no is so much simpler than the cascading menu options that could follow a yes. So I hit the road with only coffee, in search of headspace.
I need long, wild horizons; cool fresh air. A pause from the treadmill; a dose of wilderness. And Cleeve Hill delivers that sort of medicine each time I climb up there, but particularly today. For we are first off in The Old Tom One - an event to explore the liberation of playing with a single club in hand, each and every shot hit with one choice weapon.
In some sadistic twist, one of our three maniacs decides we should choose each other’s tool from the club’s retro stock, then pick our missile at random from the mooch bucket in the Pro Shop. Simon spends most of the week texting “putter”, and so deserves to be condemned with some flanged thing from the middle of the last century. It has a steel shaft, just about, but the leather grip certainly hasn’t become any tackier over the intervening decades.
Dickon makes the mistake of being caught admiring the head of some ancient John Letters blade, whose ferrule design weirdly reminds me of platform shoes and flares, and his punishment comes when he is handed the club to discover it looks more like a toothpick in his hands. For the next three hours, he will flush the ball across the Hill with a seven iron that looks more suited for his ten year old son, Ernie.
In turn, or perhaps in revenge, Dickon hands me a bladed six iron that resembles a surgical instrument, and it is three holes and about ten painful thins before Simon clocks exactly which club I am cursing. These Sounders are not for use, he tells me; “display purposes only”, but the thing is I’ve nothing else on me to use bar a pitchmark repairer, undeployed to this point due to the wind-shy trajectory of my strokes. I feel some exhilarating thrill from the illicit equipment, but in truth the whole thing feels like we are on the wrong side of golf’s normal code - an delicious, adult equivalent of playing truant, perhaps.
It is a strangely refreshing version of the game, this; one that screams of creativity, and innocence. Free of the burden of club selection, or the baggage of - well - baggage, we race around. Hit it, follow it, hit it, and the natural flow of this golf brings out the best in our swings. Plus Cleeve Hill is in the best condition I have seen it in the three years since I first gazed across this pinnacle of golfing vistas. The turf and presentation are obscene when you factor in that the club employs two - TWO! - greenkeepers, and runs the equipment on a budget most clubs might allocate to the gardening.
It has always played like links, but today it dawns on me that it isn’t like links, it is links. Don’t ask me how this turf got up here, I don’t know. Some glacial event, I would guess. But up here it is. I also don’t know how only two people can get it to this state, and that after weeks without rain. Nor do I know how Simon gets it round in less than most of the members with a putter, or how he carries the quarry on the fifteenth with it. Or how the infant seven iron in Dickon’s hand keeps knocking it ten yards past my best six. None of it makes much sense, or perhaps it makes perfect sense, and I don’t recognise this simplicity.
Once in a while we all need a break from the world’s complexity, from relentless decisions. So The Old Tom One arrives in perfect time to recalibrate my aching grey matter. And the result? I don’t know exactly, but I do know we got round, and only lost one ball between us (a decent shot of mine that presumably flew the third green and is perhaps in the next quarry down or the wash pool). And I know it felt like the most fun we are likely to have on a golf course until the next one, in summer 2026.
I return the Sounder six iron to the rack, though I have come to love it dearly over the course of our adventure. Then I climb in the car to drive home, inspired where I was earlier exhausted, and spend the return leg charmed by how positive I feel, how energised I have become. I suspect several hundred thousand other people have golfed their way through this Saturday morning, but I doubt many have had as much fun as we have, freed from all the paraphernalia of our collective addiction.
Decision fatigue is a distant memory. Joyous play is a recent one.
Wonderful! A crook, a ball and a hole. So simple🙏
Cleeve has been on my ‘bucket list’ for quite sometime and after some friends, you included, played in the Old Tom One last year I thought I must play in the event this year. Unfortunately, it clashed with our Senior CC qualifying so it was not to be, however, given how badly I played I should have just gone to the Old Tom One! Must get there next year.