Pitchmarks #27 - 7th January 2024 - "Slow Down"

“You're only here for a short visit. Don't hurry, don't worry. And be sure to smell the flowers along the way” Walter Hagen

Both shopping and wrapping complete, we stuff two stockings full of odds and ends, cram a few chocolate coins in the top, and another few in our mouths, and prepare for slumber. It is Christmas Eve, and I am reminded of quiet festive days in the distant universe of my old childhood, where the shuffle of Lego bricks was the background rhythm to the choral songs on the radio.

A little later, golf came into my life, and so, amidst the excitement of the present opening, and before the pouring of the gravy, I would somehow immerse myself in the slowness - the presence - of practice, before family Scrabble consumed the afternoon. Nostalgia is for me a dangerous weapon; it points to a very centred time, but I can’t quite trust those rose-tinted spectacles.

Before retiring to bed, I read a note from a golfing friend - a gifted writer himself - and his kind suggestion that I “might slow down the pace a little” in my own writing sticks with me as I drift away. I wonder if I do “write as you play, quickly and instinctively”, and whether that is at the expense of detail, and more importantly connection - connection with the subject, with the reader, even with myself, whoever that is.

His final line is to “smell the flowers”, from Hagen’s quote above, and any mention of that great showman makes me smile. A century ago, they were also talking about the ball, but at least they had characters like Hagen playing, and Darwin observing. Today’s professionals are wealthier by an unimaginable factor, but that side of the game seems so much poorer in every other way, or at least to my palate.

I can be a little delicate about my writing, still vulnerable perhaps, and so it takes me a little while to absorb it, but this notion of slowing down, of smelling the flowers, is exactly what I need to hear. Those Christmas Days of yore now seem blissfully simple, as did every childhood Sunday, while modern life feels like some high-octane race down a fathomless well of distraction.

In the silent morning, on the other side of sleep but before the stockings are dismantled, I think about how most of what I’ve learned and forgotten in golf, and in every other chamber of life, points towards simplicity. Golf appears to be the only paradigm in which we prize less, not more, though I have long since given up keeping score. These days I play for the joy of hunting the sweet spot, and for the fresh air and the company, which are often more reliable.

Geoff Ogilvy said of Hogan that he wasn’t so interested in trophies and medals; he “just loved hitting great golf shots”, and I know deep down that this is why his scores were so low…like all the greats - in golf, in writing, even in Scrabble - Hogan knew how to do one thing at a time. One shot, one sentence, one triple-letter score.

A week later a New Year arrives, and I am still mulling over this feedback, and trying to make sense of it. My dear friend started playing at 50, and has a wild-eyed urgency in his golf that suggests he is making up for lost time, rather than slowing down himself. Messages will arrive from nowhere, claiming some new secret has been found; other times - less frequent, these - a report will come in of a dire outing, and in between the words I can smell devastation.

Michael is a fellow golf-addict; we see it in each other’s eyes. And there is something of this urgency in my golf, having neglected the game for far too long, and a parallel exists in my writing. But as one calendar ends and another begins, I am keen to harness his guidance, and slow right down, and writing about this urge brings forth a challenge for the year ahead.

Back in the hazy slideshow of youth, it was practice that brought me the most joy in golf, not so much the playing, or the marking of - or, if you are looking for honesty, the tearing up of - a card. I would practice around the house - putts and chips along the carpets - and around the house - from the front garden right around to the concrete slab where a redundant hole for the washing line was just over 1.68 inches wide. With an old ball - the British ball - I’d hole a few more putts, of course.

Further afield I would spin round and round the local pitch and putt, sometimes skipping the first and last if it looked as if “the parky” was in his hut. Or if that twelve hole paradise was busy, I’d play from one set of rugby posts to another, and back again. Over and over, ad infinitum. But though most days would involve hundreds of strokes, I realise now that the vast majority were isolated examples; individual expressions of my desire to hit just one of those great golf shots, of which Hogan hit a million.

Each swing, each contact, each beautiful divot searching for the magic of club on ball; ball on sky. And so before that first day of January slipped away, I crept up to the range, and lined up a small community of practice balls, some of which might as well have been mine, dragged from the tufts of ryegrass at the base of those eighties rugby posts. In between the modern spheres, all sparkling covers and perfect dimples, were some relics. A DDH Marathon, a battered Pinnacle 384. One faded Tour 90, the creamy balata cover wearing the smiling wound of a thinned pitch somewhere down the years.

In order to feel a little less alien over the ball by the time 2025 arrives, I’d sort of decided to hit 10,000 balls, but while the overall goal seemed like it would make Hogan look lazy, my calculator was trying to persuade me that, in a Leap Year, this would only equate to a little over 27 shots a day - every day. This felt almost manageable, though inconvenient, and I liked the idea of hitting them slowly, one at a time. Each swing the first and last chance to hit only that shot, an immersion in every precious challenge, and a way to build focus.

And so today, I am not going to gloss over a round or a whole trip without much in the way of detail. I’m going to slow down, and drill in, and tell you what happened to the first of that legion of balls, the opening tee shot of my New Year’s Resolution.

This one was an old Kasco, and as I nudged it into the centre of the mat, and stepped back to imagine it soaring above the trees, sweeping across the grey clouds, then thumping into the yardage sign at which I took dead aim, I drew in some cold air. I wanted to feel athletic but balanced over the ball; for the swing to be at once powerful and graceful.

This beautifully simple forged blade should sweep the ball from its perch with an effortless ease, squeezing it against those grooves before sending it on its way, and when the glorious vibration of that energy transfer had passed, I wanted to look up and hold my breath, waiting to see if it would hit the target as I once awaited the clatter of ball on rugby post. Throughout, I would wear the half-smile of the mystics; bound by this magical play in some elusive sliver of the present. Unburdened by scores or tallies.

I stepped up to this opening blow, and shuffled my feet until I felt comfortable. And the club came back, and I saw my left shoulder slide under my chin. All was quiet, except the gentlest of rustles from my jacket, and then the club started to travel back, only the grace I’d imagined had been lost in an urgent lunge of muscle memory. Somehow the club found the ball, and as my gaze lifted, I wore a smile, but it was of a different sort. For that Kasco turned out not to be one of the spheres I could trust, and that swing was very different to the one I’d been waiting for, hoping for.

As the clouds hurried across the wide open space above this field, that ball cut viciously towards the fence, maintaining just enough height in its defiant escape bid to clear the net. Once beyond the property, it spent a while ricocheting through the bordering trees for all to hear like some klaxon of my miserable start, before dropping to its terminal resting place, retired at last.

One down, 9,999 to go, but it still felt like the crossing of a threshold, that panicky lurch. It was stepping through a gate back to the simplicity, the purity of practice. It was the slowing down that Michael spoke of, for each lifetime of golf is nothing but a collection of individual strokes, from the great to the ghastly. And each essay nothing more than a collection of little sentences, hoping for connection, searching for sweet spots.

It couldn’t have been much worse, at least without the involvement of the dreaded hosel. But it was clear from that very first shot that there was room for improvement to grow into, and things could only get better from here…

“What a shame to waste those great shots on the practice tee” Walter Hagen