Pitchmarks #52 - 23rd June 2024 - "A Pathetic Mismatch"

On golf's spiritual path

“If you take a deep dive into golf, it doesn’t take you long [to realise] that you’re the problem”
Geoff Ogilvy

December brought with it a brutal cold snap, bitter winds drifting in from the north. A dusting of snow, fairways frozen solid for days, water pipes cracked, golfing dates cancelled. And so some spare time appears, and, stuck indoors, I try to catch up, to put this window to good use.

I start to re-read “Golf in the Kingdom”, which intrigued me when I first read it probably two decades earlier, as the prospect of forging a deeper connection to our inner lives through golf has grown yet more interesting with time.

The next day a message arrives from two strangers on the other side of the Atlantic - kindred spirits, it seems, serendipity at work again - and as the cold rain batters my window during our first video call, I feel a tinge of envy at the soft winter sun in their Californian backdrop. But their kindness, and our shared enthusiasm for golf and writing, and for this very book in my hands - the one that brought us together - provides a different type of warmth to my day.

I make a few notes, and follow up with a thank you, and by return receive some more suggestions of areas to explore. So the following evening, I am for a change not “just washing the dishes”, as Thich Nhat Hahn used to say, but instead doing so while listening to a podcast that these new friends had recommended.

It is my first experience of the Firepit Collective’s “Need a 4th?!”, with Alan Shipnuck, Geoff Ogilvy and Michael Bamberger, and within a minute I am utterly hooked. The conversation flows as the hosts introduce Michael Murphy, the author of “Golf in the Kingdom”, and I have to dry my hands several times to rewind certain sections so I can hear again this sage voice reflect on the writing of his masterpiece, and on the continued, charmed influence of Shivas Irons some fifty years on.

The end comes too soon, as it often does when playing this daft game that ties all this together, and, with the plates all neatly stacked, I look for other domestic chores, in order to listen over again. There are so many elements which strike a chord with me in this episode - Ogilvy’s love of “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”, for example - that it seems as if the recording has been made only for me, eerie coincidences in almost every sentence.

Murphy’s observation that the book, and golf, “attracted to me…synchronicities and coincidences and memories” seems to encapsulate what happens when we peer under the hood of golf, and listening to Ogilvy’s take on the depths of the game as played at the top level is extraordinary.

I could write a book on this podcast alone, but Murphy perhaps did that for us half a century ago, and his version would take some beating. But, as sometimes happens at the strangest times, a single line of dialogue leaps out at me, an expression that will plant a seed and take me off down some new rabbit hole of thoughts and connections.

Murphy is recounting his experience playing with Ken Venturi, later a US Open champion, and describes the contest as not really a “match”, but “a pathetic mismatch”. These three words rumble around the back of my consciousness for a few days, and then they find a perch. For in this short phrase, casually dismissed, this great mystic of the golfing realm has provided me with a concise understanding of what it means to me to play golf, to take golf on.

For golf is perhaps the hardest game of all, and closer to the spiritual path than any other pastime. Golf is a game where the odds are stacked against us so convincingly that it must take an insatiable hope to even dream of glory; yet in the occasional, fleeting magnificence of a holed long putt, or of a straight drive, golf gives us just enough of this “light at the end of the tunnel” feeling to carry on. Golf will beat us virtually every time we play and yet we still hurry to pull on our spikes and get after it.

On a bad day, the extent of one’s misery on the golf course can seem limitless; maybe even eternal. The feeble duffed chip; the shame of the timid short putt. The naked terror that follows the first shank. The cold; the rain; the sting of a thinned five iron that seems to vibrate pain through every cell of our body. The awful bounce; the crisp, hollow sound of a sliced ball meeting a tree echoing through the silence for all to hear like some prayer bell of the golfing realm.

Golf’s extraordinary written Rules, like some legal textbook; the unwritten codes of conduct and dress. Sock length and colour; the handicap system. The membership process. To the outsider, golf’s complex baggage must seem like some unbreakable Zen koan, but even for those of within the grasp of this brutal calling, it’s not much clearer.

Golf is hardly accessible, it would seem, and yet, gleaming at the centre of all this clutter, like the sublime jewel of consciousness that “Golf in the Kingdom” points at, is some promise of a different realm, and so we stick with it, through thick and thin, and endure and embrace “a pathetic mismatch” until our final breath.

And then it dawns on me - another mysterious thought drifting in from the ether; the same channeling that Murphy and Ogilvy speak of - that perhaps it is precisely this mystical side of golf that draws us in, those of us meant to follow this calling, just as the ascetics are drawn to their mountain caves and the monks to the cold wooden floor of the temple. In the same way as many beat a path to the Esalen Institute, Murphy’s other great legacy, we golfers are drawn to whatever it is that rests beneath the surface of the game…another dimension, a deeper immersion. Perhaps we’re all working towards to same end; climbing the same, old mountain via different routes.

For golf can be and will be our teacher, of many of the gifts of more conventional spiritual paths. Humility in spades, and patience. A direct, extensive study of suffering. But also gratitude, and empathy, and on certain days in certain places, what feels like a divine connection with the ground beneath our feet, with the planet we stand upon. Golf can be for each of us our own path of “Mastery”, as Murphy’s friend George Leonard would have called it. A pilgrimage in search of our true selves, cloaked in the disguise of a simple game, “a pathetic mismatch”.

And if we don’t quite get there - if our hopes don’t work out the way we’d like, either on the scorecard or in some other dimension - well then we might find instead just a little more equanimity, or a satisfaction in the process itself. We might rest awhile in, and come to love, Leonard’s plateau, a natural pause in some celestial progression towards the “total consciousness” that the Dalai Lama promised Bill Murray, for the Caddyshack fans out there.

We might not in this life plunge through golf’s tiny portal into some lasting, blissful state of nirvana, but we can fall back on the occasional flush of a ball squeezing against a sweet spot, and perhaps in that split second find just a fragment of the presence that the great teachers, Shivas Irons among them, point towards.

When the ball soars above the target, its journey away from and back to the earth reminiscent of “The Odyssey”, or of “The Hero’s Journey” of another Esalen legend, Joseph Campbell. In the delicate, fragile innocence of these sacred moments, we might sense time stand still for us, anchored only in the here and now, and maybe let our guard down long enough for golf to show us the way, the path we were always meant to walk. If these are the terms of engagement, I will accept “a pathetic mismatch”.

[This 2023 essay was originally written for and published by the Shivas Irons Society, with grateful thanks to Ben Kline and John Francis]