Pitchmarks #44 5th May 2024 - "One of the best"

Getting ready…

You’ve waited a very long time to get back to Royal Porthcawl, maybe fifteen years. As the day approaches, you start to get really excited, for though you have played it before - only once - your memory is such that you can barely remember the details, and as you never made notes and barely dreamed of writing about it back then, you’ve nothing to look back on.

You have some sense that you can see the sea from all over the course - that same cold body of water that you splashed in as a teenager, as unlikely to look cool on a surfboard as you are to look competent over a delicate pitch. But this excites you almost as much as the course; this chance to cross the Severn into South Wales a rare chance to bathe in nostalgia, your chosen lens for life.

You mention that you’re heading that way, and someone responds with “one of the best”, and your anticipation grows. And you pull up to the gates, and spy the pinkish roof, and the little blue hut by the fence, and then the links beyond. The wooden slats of the clubhouse walls, and the little brick pillars it sits upon. The gates can’t open fast enough; you want to sprint across the car park and have the gate mechanism seize behind you and maroon you in this paradise.

In the clubhouse, you start to remember little, charming details. The worn, green leather of the armchairs; the powerful scope for sighting seabirds and Devon shores alike. A Spy cartoon of some golfer hangs on the wall by the bar, and under this are those same words - “one of the best” - though you completely forget to ask the staff who this portly legend is. The Suggestion Book looks ancient; it has its own patina, and you wonder whether anyone has written in it since you were last here, or perhaps since Colt was here, for what could one suggest that could possibly make this place more magnificent than it already is? You peer out of the window, and shafts of golden light burst through the cloud as if it - the sun, the spring - was just waiting for your return, rather more patiently than you had.

You file into lunch, and it too is “one of the best”. The Dining Room mirrors the golf course - splendid but not flashy - and you indulge in a little extra cheese, for the flags are starting to flap outside, and you have a sense that your work will be cut out this afternoon. You stroke a few putts, stopping when one topples in from a country mile away, and take a few practice swings while you wait for the fairway to clear. Then you wonder why you waited for the fairway when it looks so very small from here, and wish that people and dogs would stop walking up the beach path for a few moments, for though the boundary is a long way left, that’s a trick you’ve performed before.

But you manage to make contact, and keep the ball in bounds after all, and somehow then bunt it up towards the green, where you learn that the greens are faster uphill than the practice green was downhill, and a bogey feels like a bonus. You struggle up the second, but then Rob skulls a pitch that you’d probably have picked up in terror, and you scale the fence and find his ball among the pebbles, and a TaylorMade to boot. Your existing ball stays within the property, but retires a few minutes later in a hell made of gorse, and you emerge with blood on your arms and legs, and a scratch on your neck. Battle scars.

So the TaylorMade gets its chance, fresh from the shore, but it can’t listen to orders either, and even though your game feels delicate, you keep going, and keep smiling, and every now and then you remember to just breathe and stare, and you are glad to be alive. You catch yourself talking to yourself, and feel all self- conscious, but then you glance at Rob and he’s doing it too, and David’s self-talk is getting gradually louder.

As you climb the wild fifth, an old farming wall reminds you of how close the edges are to Porthcawl’s golfers, and you miss a tiddler while thinking admiringly about the vicious run-off from which you just so bravely escaped. At the next, David finds not one but two bunkers, and takes three sandy shots in total, and you realise he’s been in half a dozen already. And another one catches him on the sixth, and at the seventh tee he starts describing them as “sentinels”, and though the hole is only playing about a hundred in this breeze, he seems resigned to going in one, so it is more a case of which one it will be. And there are seven, so his ball opts for the deepest one, and all is quiet apart from the regular slap of wedge on packed sand.

The wall by the fifth

At the eighth, you can’t help but notice another boundary not entirely beyond your capability, and the other side of it an ancient man is carefully lining up drives and heaving them away. In the action of bending over to tee up each ball, you can almost hear his bones creak, and you wonder whether this will be you one day, clinging on to this game as the feel of the sweetspot fades to a distant memory. And you catch this drive on the toe, so manage not to kill the man, and as you lurch at your second, all sense of rhythm betrays you, and that old TaylorMade finds a gorsy grave, too.

So you walk down the hill, shrugging off the hole as just another blob, and David goes in a bunker we didn’t even know existed. And from there, to another, and a few swipes later, he bends down and chucks the ball back towards his trolley, but the bunkers here are not only numerous, they’re devious too, so the contours almost divert his surrendering throw into a third pit of misery. You breathe a sigh of relief when it fails to drop in, for you’d have fallen to the ground laughing at the absurdity of this pursuit in such glorious surroundings. By this stage, David has lost count of the number of bunkers he’s inspected, and yet you are more or less even on points.

Whatever meagre total you had at the turn remains fairly unchanged through the back nine as what game you had falls apart. Snap-hooks and slices alternate, and when you follow the first great drive of the day with a tired, duffed wedge, you don’t know whether to laugh or cry, so you do both. Rob follows one drive of yours into yet another jungle, and you find his but not yours, and feel awful that you did, for his attempts at recovery are almost as comical as yours have been today. So you and he give up and walk up to the green, but David is not there yet and doesn’t get there in the end; another bunker. You wonder out loud whether David’s sand-iron by now has the manufacturer’s name worn off like Gary Player’s, and are relieved when he laughs rather than chasing you with it.

This land falls silent at our collective misery, but you realise you are still enjoying yourself, and the company of these fellow golfing fools. Everyone’s tiring, and the fabulous lunch is wearing off, but as you reach the penultimate green - you and Rob via another patch of terminal gorse, and David another ten or twelve bunkers - you exchange smiles with the group ahead, and you suggest that this place is “far too easy, really”, and they laugh. And then you share another ten putts with your playing partners, and spit out “blob” for what seems like the eighth time since the turn, and steady yourself for one last humiliation.

And your turn comes, and once more the boundary is staring at you, and you feel as if you are approaching the outer limits of what you can bear from golf. But you smash your drive down the right, somehow, and when you look up the sky is turning dark, and the sea is a blinding silver in the fading light. Across this natural, ravishing links, the moody curves of west Wales loom as the backdrop for another day spent more or less in rapture whilst playing terrible golf, “one of the best” as days go. And you listen to the skylark, and wish that you could sing like that, for when life is like this you surely would. And then you walk up and find your lovely drive in the sand, and David tries to be sympathetic, and you admire him for that, after all he’s been through.

And you watch Rob check the yardages for an approach that seems far enough for another two strokes, and he hammers it, and when you get near the green, you realise he’s hit it to about five feet, and that golf is gifting Rob that classic, final twist which is the addict’s fix. And he holes the putt, and the curlews call, and your trousers flap in the wind, and the sun beams down and you think you catch Rob summing up our day, and his wonderful finish, with the only words that can really describe this perverse obsession of ours.

He’s shaking his head, and will finish one off the prizes after any number of wasted strokes this afternoon, but no one with ever take that closing three away from him. “This f*cking game”, he mutters, with a smirk on his face, “this f*cking game”…

A ball in a bunker; almost certainly David’s