Pitchmarks #37 - 17th March 2024 - "Petrichor"

“Do you know that smell that you get after rain, outside on the golf course? How would you describe that?”
Shane Derby’s unanswered question; The Firm & Fast Golf Podcast #26.

It is now nine months since the question, and still I grapple with it. It keeps me awake at night; it distracts me when I am meant to be working. I have even blamed it for a missed twelve inch putt, though the thousand mile stare of my foursomes partner suggested she wasn’t entirely convinced that the fault lay with Shane.

You’d think that, for someone who doesn’t really enjoy the sound of the own voice (read: hates it), the sudden silence engendered by the question would have been welcome, but it was crippling. It was a friendly challenge, a chance to wax lyrical, but it left me unable to say, or wax, anything. Mute, redundant. Defeated. The defeated feeling would return shortly afterwards when Shane and I got to play golf together.

As I pack a bag for Lancashire, a notification arrives gently reminding me of the unanswered question. It includes the word “petrichor”, whose meaning I have to look up, and a renewed urgency to shift this monkey from my back haunts my sleep and returns as I scrape the frosty windscreen a few minutes after five.

Somewhere in the chasm of time that has passed since that question landed, I’d made some notes about a possible answer, but I couldn’t even find them. I recall mumbling about hope, and thinking about how we golfers probably need to be hopeful, even foolishly optimistic, to survive. We step into the firing line time after time, and while few of us actually perish on the course, it may prove in time to be death by a thousand cuts. Or a thousand snappy hooks, in my case. Or missed putts…though the “gentleman” who forgot to concede the one I mentioned earlier must surely be approaching some justice of their own for that crime against the art of the gimme…

So another mission begins, cutting through the frozen Chiltern Hills and up towards the Midlands, then Preston, and I have time to think. As the light creeps up behind me, the fields slowly move from black to white to green, and I wonder if spring is approaching this fine morning. It has been a miserable winter down south, rain falling in torrents through the day and night; drains and gutters hammered. The golf courses have suffered, too - most as wet as they’ve ever been, and some badly damaged before the season even starts.

After a while longer, I pull into Royal Lytham - a place forever synonymous with car parks - and gently turn and remove the ignition key. Through the hedge in front of me bursts dappled sunlight, and the happy cries of playtime children in the adjacent school fill the air. I am early, but so excited to be here, and after an early challenge with the revolving door on the corner of the clubhouse, I spill into the lobby to be greeted by a friendly face and a roaring fire.

Under the vaulted ceilings of a modern bar, I bathe in the glorious silence of this room, whose vast windows gaze out over the links. Once again, the question drifts into my head, but it reminds me, as I ponder how weak my sense of smell is, that I’ve not taken an anti-histamine yet, and therefore cannot even smell the coffee in my hands. But I am not here to sit indoors, magnificent though this old clubhouse is, and so I head for the putting green - a vast billiard table in front of the Dormy House, and then the range.

I pound balls for a while, hoping to find some rhythm before Lytham’s tough opener, but every time I glance at the flags over which my irons hook, I shrink slightly at the way the silks are being battered by this south-easterly. The giant flagstaff behind me looks better suited to some enormous ship than a golf club, but today it bears no banner, and I assume, as another ball is hurried hard left in the air, that the missing flag is by now simply draped on a tree in Peel, or perhaps Lower Plumpton.

Soon my host Alison arrives, and she is kind and thoughtful, though she invites me to use the Championship tee on the first, which on recent form I could do without. But I push my one iron down there somewhere, and manage to make a three, despite my terror on the tee. I can’t pretend I had many more threes, or even pars, but we sweep around the empty course in next to no time, and after the last few months, this dose of the sun and the firm conditions of Lytham are heartwarming tonics.

The holes are just wonderful - tucked in alongside the railway, then looping back in and out before a surge towards the far end, and the magnificent ninth. From most tees, there are choices to be made in terms of the line, and Alison - whose handicap index reveals “a game with which I am not familiar”, to quote one of this course’s many great champions - tells me where to aim, and is patient when the ball betrays our plans. This masterpiece lies in the middle of suburbia, it seems; houses and church steeples everywhere, and I am glad to have not read the website’s blurb boasting “174 strategically positioned pot bunkers…lying in wait for errant shots” before we start.

With Alison’s help, I go in less than half of these, and am stunned by how smart they are - in appearance and position - and how the ground so often falls into them, along with my ball. A few are currently ponds, revealing a water table that the dry turf belies, and I am left to ponder how fiery, how dangerous this course must be at the height of summer. I take a few photos with my camera, and store a thousand more in my head, and hope that the world’s greatest tournament will come back here soon, for the course is simply too good to be ignored, or forgotten.

I am so engrossed in chat that I fail to look for where Seve’s famous drive at the sixteenth finished, though the way I drive today would make him feel like Faldo or Langer by comparison. I do look for the Bobby Jones plaque on seventeen, though, and while I marvel at the shot he must have hit - and the self-belief to take it on - that feeling only intensifies later when I see the mashie-niblick he used hanging on the wall. Maybe Jones was right - he mostly was as his career and life went on - and Nicklaus and the modern generations did play a different game, but peering over the dune across which his recovery shot flew, securing the first of his three Claret Jugs, I know which version is more impressive to me, not to mention graceful.

I can’t remember what I scored up the last, but try to hide from Alison that I am still, at heart, the eleven year old who first took up this game, and Peter Alliss reverberates around my head; “four for the Open”. But this place hasn’t finished with me yet, so I scamper off to explore the short course, and am almost equally beguiled by that. And somehow this simpler version of the game has more in common with me than any number of inland, manicured golf courses ever could.

Royal Lytham is in a splendid state even after the deluge of this winter, but on true links like this, where the soul of the game and the ghosts of Jones and Bobby Locke and Peter Thompson roam, course presentation is almost beside the point. For it is the bouncing run of the ball on the fairways and the persistent whip of the breeze on your trousers that reminds you that you are in the elements, and it seems a very long time since we’ve done that with the sun high above us.

Eventually, we go back indoors, and the log fire in the hearth is still roaring, so I linger to soak up the heritage. The list of winners and championships is delicious, and the photos and captions tell of a hundred dramas here, and I wonder what will come next for this great club, after all that has gone before. Visitors are invited to “walk the path of legends" on the website, and I feel an enormous gratitude to have done so today, albeit in a zigzag fashion. Seve-style, perhaps.

I smile at the portrait of Jones in the Dining Room, and the selection of Open winners’ clubs in the cabinet, and the black and white photo of Player and his caddie conducting an urgent search for his ball on that same hole on which Jones hit his famous recovery. And then as I climb back into my van, I notice another vehicle in the car park, and am reminded of Seve’s greatest moments here, and promise myself a return one day.

As I pull away from Lytham’s everyday car park, and head towards some place to lay my head, the question with which this day started comes back to me, and while “petrichor” still isn’t quite the right term for the change that I sense in the weather today - “a period of warm, dry weather” is at best a distant memory - it has brought me a little closer to an answer.

With my blunt olfactory sensor, the smell of grass after rain is more like an energy than an odour. It feels optimistic, like things are getting better, and that this change is tied up with freedom. Freedom to be outside, freedom to roam. Freedom to dream. And in the scraping away of that southern frost, and today’s adventure in the delicate sun, I wonder if spring is on the way, and what tomorrow will bring.

With thanks to Alison, Royal Lytham Golf Club, and Shane Derby. Golf has the best people.