Pitchmarks #118 - "Conquest of Paradise"
I had a draft post written for today, on Felixstowe Ferry, a wonderful outpost of the game where I’d roamed with a friend last week, but for a variety of reasons, I haven’t really had the time this week to polish it.
One of the reasons I could offer was that I spent most of Thursday at the wonderful Rye, with a different friend, and another was that I have been polishing something else - Common Grounds, my second book - which collects together a couple of dozen essays on adventures at the rustic end of the golfing spectrum. More to come on that soon.
But in truth, the main issue this week has been an unexpected one. I’ve long known what the pole vault is, as a sport, but I don’t recall ever having watched it before, or been tempted to. But my wife sent me a social media post of someone called Armand Duplantis, as he breaks the sport’s world record for the umpteenth time, and I click on the link without expecting a great deal.
As the haunting chords of “Conquest of Paradise” by Vangelis come purring out of my tablet, I watch a man in a yellow vest charge along with the sort of length stick that might help clear one’s gutters, the wobbling end slowly dropping towards some box on the track where it will flex and either spear the poor chap or send him hammering into space, upside-down. The whole thing is utterly ridiculous, but I am enjoying the music so carry on watching, though at no point does it look even remotely likely that he will be getting anywhere near another pole - this one horizontal - which he is apparently hoping to clear.
Why this happens, I don’t know, and I struggle to imagine how - of all the thousands of career options available - Mr Duplantis got involved in this lark, though I suspect he might think the same of me, whatever it is that I do. But Vangelis keeps playing, and those legs keep moving, and then the pole sorts of flicks him from a position in mid-air up again, and by the time he carefully lifts his arms to clear the bar by a millimetre or two, he is presumably starting to feel the effects of altitude from this perch in space. The bar is some six metres, thirty centimetres from the ground, and though I tend to think in terms of yards for the same reasons you might, at a guess I’d say he is floating around at roughly the height of - I don’t know, a house? If he did that round here, he could probably pick out the lime leaves and clumps of moss from my gutters by hand.
It’s incredible, and wonderful, and I am lifted by not only the mad obsession that must lead to such feats, but by the fact that things like this can happen. And then we turn up at Rye, and in between shots for the first dozen holes I glance now and then at one strange parcel of that brilliant, rugged ridge over which the course is draped, and wonder if there is something of the pole vault in that thirteenth hole.
“Conquest of Paradise” is still in my head as both a tune and a phrase as my drive heads down towards the left hand reaches of the fairway, perhaps the hole’s equivalent of a box from which to attempt take-off for an heroic second. And from there, as people have done for a very, very long time, I stare at the mountain between my ball and the flag and feel nothing but fear. Two poles not unlike Mondo’s are visible above me, and if lined up they are meant to indicate the perfect angle of attack, but from down here the fine turf approach and the gently fluttering flag silk might as well be on the other side of the Channel.
Off my ball flies, a smidgeon left of my intention, but with half a chance, and we clamber over the dune - itself a little over six metres proud, perhaps - and spot this trusty sphere bang on line but just a few feet short of the slope that would have carried it home. It is - at perhaps the twentieth attempt - the closest I have been to that apocryphal state of “green in regulation” at thirteen, and though my chip is not bad and the putt had a chance, I can’t make a four and leave feeling as if I almost got over the bar but caught my trailing fingers on it at the last moment.
Things like world records and great records don’t get made by mistake, so we should cherish and applaud Duplantis and Vangelis alike. But it occurs to me on the always reluctant drive home that we should also celebrate that the people who made Rye had the courage and imagination to even consider a hole that plays over ground like that, and that those who have followed them have permitted it to stay intact, for it is extreme and extraordinary in equal measure; a wonder of the golfing world. They don’t - and daren’t - build this sort of thing today…
And triumphs like this make me want to do good things, and take the odd leap of faith, and maybe even one day make a four on that marvellous, mysterious hole; a true “Conquest of Paradise”, or “Conquest in Paradise”, perhaps.
I made a five instead, but guess what? Tomorrow is Monday; I shall have another go…
Hopefully, if you click on the image below, you will get to watch the video, and perhaps enjoy it as much as I did. Alongside it, someone has written ‘I mean, I'm full of respect as that was some feat, but c'mon..."I know, I'm going to take a huge bendy cane, a long run towards a tiny hole in the ground and flip myself upside down over a thin horizontal target!"’
Don’t pretend our golfing ambitions are any less absurd…
Great weaving of stories. Get me that book 📕! Ah Rye.
Must get there one day Richard