Pitchmarks #30 - 28th January 2024 - "An Invincible Summer"

“Hole halved in lost balls”

“In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer. And that makes me happy. For it says that no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me, there's something stronger – something better, pushing right back”
Albert Camus

I must have first read Camus’ “L’Etranger” in school I suppose. And from that moment, his writing held a place in my heart. Even in translation from the French, his crisp message would strike a chord with me, and though he was in his youth a goalkeeper, I always thought he’d have made a companionable golfer. His fierce sense of justice, his dogged persistence. And an acute sense of the fundamental absurdity of life must surely make golf easier to bear. He’d have said “possible de supporter”, and perhaps the sentence should instead suggest that the fundamental absurdity of golf makes life possible to bear.

But I’ve not read Camus for probably two decades, so when contemplating just how many layers might be required to venture upon Hook Heath when the temperature is minus five, I was amused that the above quote floated in from somewhere. I’d been half-expecting one of the others to cancel, and though I always want to play golf, I couldn’t have blamed them. But no such bail-out occurred, and so as the sun rose in the crisp January sky, I resolved the dilemma of what to wear by wearing everything, and slipped across north-west Surrey for Woking, an old haunt.

It felt strange to be back in such familiar surroundings, only my second trip in a couple of years. The tranquillity of Jessie’s Pond - frozen solid today; the extraordinary dust of the car park. I walked into the compound to shake a few hands, and noticed more crates of freshly cut heather than I could count, stacked ready for transplanting; a somewhat menacing development for the handicap golfer. If they positioned these in plain view, perhaps beside the first tee, the intimidation factor alone would be worth an extra couple of shots. They’d need yet another reprint of the course handicap tables.

But the steady development of this golf course - focused lately on heather regeneration and the mantra of every greenkeeper, “drainage, drainage, drainage” - is simply the continuation of an evolution that began in the early stages of the last century. When local members John Low and Stuart Paton started polishing Tom Dunn’s 1893 layout, digging bunkers and reshaping green complexes, they were also refining this early notion of making the golfer think - of creating a strategic and not just physical test - and their legacy lives on across this stretch of precious Surrey heath.

As I stroll past the putting green - laid down as a tribute to Paton himself - I am not for the first time amused by the complete absence of contour in this facility. Had he been around to receive this great honour, he’d probably have dug a bunker in the centre of it, or buried something large at one end, in order that it felt congruent with the terrifying set of surfaces that await us. Or perhaps more likely, he’d have scorned any notion of practice, and instead immersed himself in that more authentic, Woking style of “training”, huddled in the tiny wooden bar with a glass and a bottle.

And so - of course - this is where I find my host, and before long we are four, getting to know each other and bracing ourselves for the expedition ahead. I’m thrilled to discover we share the same language and taste as we talk of golf’s many landscapes and stories. Richard shares stories of Moira and her Addington peacocks, and Graeme of the terrifying Muirfield secretaries of the past, and again I think of Paton - who Darwin called “The Mussolini of Woking”, as affectionately as such a title could ever be gifted - and of how such characters, dictators benevolent or otherwise, enrich golf for me.

And we speak of our love for Prestwick and Brora, and as usual I emerge with another list of places I need to see - all a few hundred inconvenient miles north of here, but surely no colder today. Nairn, Cullen. Another links whose name I can’t even remember, let alone spell. And I am delighted that these three seem as keen as I am on this beguiling game, for it is still four below outside - “it’s warming up”, says Aidan, smirking. But we shall play foursomes (of course; we’re not animals), and so our pace should keep us warm, and as we walk out into an icy blast, I delight in pointing not to the amusing and largely impenetrable “How to Mark a Scorecard” poster - which is worth its own post one day - but the cartoon in which the Secretary is asked about the course record and his reply is “two hours, twenty eight”. This is my sort of golf.

We throw up the balls and they each land with a hollow thud and four different bounces, which gives us a flavour of the lottery ahead, and off we go, laughing and groaning at broadly equal intervals. It’s just as well we’re not interested in operating a card, for the first is won when my ball is mysteriously lost from the tee; the second when the same fate falls to the oppo. At the third, we each take more strokes than we can count and then discover that both sides have played an interloping ball. We’ll call that a half. And so it goes on.

Now and then, one of us will fire a missile right at the flag, and it will land as if dropped from an aeroplane onto the concrete runway below, and no trace of a pitchmark will be found. Sometimes, no trace of the ball, either - several of the bounces gain more height than the shots themselves. Golf is an absurd activity at the best of times; even Camus and his Left Bank pals would be tested today. But we don’t need to keep score - or shots taken or balls lost - for we can feel how the match is developing.

We battle up the wretched ninth - another lost ball and another half-dozen missed putts - and discuss this blight on the Woking landscape, but before my treatise on the lost Tom Simpson holes can really gain momentum, another discussion breaks out, in which the other three try to sense - perhaps smell - a scoreline. I feel as if the suffering I have imposed on the other Richard ought to mean that we shake hands on the tenth, but the golfing relationship of the opposition could be equally frosty, were it not for the fact that none of us give a damn, and so we agree on “all square at the turn”, and to me this smells like we’ve won the jackpot.

This feeling lasts only a few seconds, as the other side somehow hit their tee shot to about fifteen feet, the ball narrowly avoiding the hole on the way. A hole in one today could cost up to twenty pounds in drinks if one insisted on everyone in the club having two, but in our reply, we needn’t worry about such expenditure, for Richard’s seven iron threatens not even the bunkers, let alone the green or the hole. After all I have put him through, I am glad of this rare miscue, for it makes me feel a little better.

Later, we exchange emails from the relative warmth of our homes, and Richard notes that the “Strategic Guidelines” booklet that cost him almost as much as an ace might includes “no mention of the merits of blocking a mishit seven iron high above the bunker complex on the right, from which the only response was to deliver undiluted genius melded to perfect execution”.

It’s the first and almost certainly last time I will be called a golfing genius, but the predicament is definitely absurd, and the recovery good, I’ll admit. What this ability to extract myself from such positions says about my long game, I will leave to you to judge, but it’s worth stating that when learning the game, I didn’t play much foursomes. We halve the hole, and if reaching the turn at “about level” felt like a bonus, not losing the tenth feels like we got away with murder.

I’m not sure I can remember too much else about the last few holes - we decide to honour another fine Woking tradition and retire to the bar after fourteen, to thaw out with further bouts of laughter and reflection - but I do recall our collective delight and amusement in this arctic version of golf today. At the best of times, the contour and pace in Woking’s greens perplex the strongest of souls, and more than once I think of Camus’ “Myth of Sisyphus”, in which he rekindles the Greek myth of the disgraced king, condemned to endless push his boulder up a cruel hill for all eternity.

If Camus had played golf in the heathlands, instead of muttering to himself between some goalposts, then surely the cruel hill would have been Woking’s ninth, but such suffering doesn’t seem to matter today, for on an afternoon when every bounce is a random one; where every iron shot hurts, not only the thinned ones, I have even less interest in performance or score than usual.

People come and go here, at “The Temple of Golf”, and the flag goes up and down about as often as the sun, but something of what Camus might have called “the indomitable spirit” persists despite the ravages of time. As we say our goodbyes, and I walk alone down that corridor, lined in gold leaf with names like Paton and Low, and Wethered and Micklem, and that of the man who brought it all alive for me a thousand times over - Darwin - I feel blessed to have passed this way one more time, if only for a freezing afternoon.

For we four left not only a pocketful of golf balls on the course, but the remnants of a hundred hearty laughs, echoing through the pines, ringing across the frigid heath. And once again I am reminded that this game is enriched by the people who play it, and this club enhanced by the people who love it. I vow to play some more awful golf with these three again, and to never trust a scorecard or a thermometer.

“My life was lucky so that I met, I loved (and disappointed) only outstanding people”
Albert Camus

The Principal’s Nose tribute on the 4th; may we now call these two nostrils “Low” and “Paton”?