Pitchmarks #51 - 23rd June 2024 - "Happy Birthday!"

Today marks a year since my little golf blog - which originally appeared as Stymied in late 2021 - relaunched as pitchmarks after a short hiatus. I’d taken a break in order to pull together some of the earlier posts and a couple of other essays for Grass Routes, the publication of which has been the most magical journey.

But as that work drew to a close and the time came to recommence that strange process of sending these musings out into the world - baring my soul every Sunday morning with the same hopeful vulnerability with which I sent my old golf ball flying through Carne’s blind alleys only yesterday - I remember feeling nervous, and foolish. Again, a familiar sensation for the amateur golfer.

The previous fifty-one missives have taken me through so many avenues of this mystifying game, and though with every passing week I feel more distant from the circus of the professional game, I also feel like I am getting closer to the core of why I continue to play golf. It makes me a better person, and with every little failure, I have a chance to decide how to react; how to move on. It’s a Stoic education, with sticks and balls.

Hemingway once wrote, in A Farewell to Arms, that “the world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places”, and I hope that this proves to be the case for the many broken places of my golf game, and so too for Rory, a week on from that bloody end. We all have these highs and lows in life, and golf somehow gives us a safe place to work through them, with nothing more to lose than a few odd strokes.

And that’s only if we’re counting - you might imagine that this post which marks a year of pitchmarks might be titled #52, and so would I, until I realise that I sent out two #27’s at the turn of the year. I was never that strong with numbers. Maybe one was a provisional. Or maybe a mulligan, for that’s more like the sort of golf I play, free of pencils and scorecards and slope ratings. The only slope reading I took from Carne was that it was very slopey indeed, and utterly magnificent.

And so - starved of writing time this week by another blessed golfing trip to some unearthly paradise, with a like-minded soul and an old set of battered clubs for company - I hope you will forgive me for this unplanned, self-indulgent birthday card to my own little sermons, and continue to brew yourself a coffee to tune in to pitchmarks every Sunday, for I’m going to carry on, as I can’t seem to stop.

To correct my pitchmarks scorecard, #52 will follow straight on; a piece I wrote some time ago for the Shivas Irons Society - the closest thing I have to a home club. Please find the link to it here, or below this in your inbox!

Thank you, sincerely, for tuning in!