Pitchmarks #54 - 7th July 2024 - "A Heist at Huntercombe"
“Nobody gets justice. People only get good luck or bad luck”
Orson Welles
Our four diaries line up, like the planets for some golfing eclipse, and we head for Huntercombe as the sun spills over the horizon. For three of us, this is a return to this wonderful course; for the fourth, a debut. The three Woking members I’m with ought to know a thing or two about strategic golf and spectacular greens, so Willie Park Jnr’s marvel near Henley is a natural choice for a day-trip - a course where Park’s flair was permitted to shine forth.
As we chat in the bar with Marcus, Huntercombe’s genial Secretary, a name leaps off the old Captains’ board behind us - J.S. Paton, whom Darwin affectionately called “The Mussolini of Woking” - and I struggle to focus on the conversation, drifting off down another rabbit-hole of historical uncertainty. That Paton was integral here at just about the time he and John Low started tinkering with Hook Heath’s masterpiece seems meaningful, for few inland courses have such courage and character in the slopes of their putting greens.
I drift back into the room, and we sit in chairs that positively embrace us, and crunch through this world’s finest crispy bacon baps as we gaze out across the landscape. The bluebells are gone by now, but our view is of fine, cut turf, which is starting to blend a little brown in its palette. An early starter’s ball comes bounding up the last, and we can hardly wait to begin today’s adventure.
Somehow, we prise ourselves out of those green and red leather armchairs and head for the tee, excited. Park was working on another masterpiece - Sunningdale’s Old - at the same time as Huntercombe, but it feels as if he worked with less restraint here. These greens, and holes, and views are far from the leftovers of that phase of Park’s career, though; they feel more like his authentic voice to me - left free to express himself out here in the fields.
Balls are tossed in the air, and foursomes chosen, and we start to move across the course in two’s, captivated by the condition of the turf. The gentle beginnings of the first melt into the subtle angles of the second, and at the third we peer into the mysterious workings of Park’s mind; the ground dry enough to expose the contours of the approach, which requires such precision. J and I cannot muster anything straight at this stage, so A & M take another hole long before we reach the green.
At the fourth, we eventually hole out, and try to capture the sheer cheek of this extraordinary green with our cameras, but there’s no lens that can collect its finery; no other way to “get” Huntercombe than to play it. J and I have lost count of the number of times we’ve struck timber by the fifth, but whatever number it was has another two on top through the sixth. Both times, the ball ricochets out and back into play, and the quizzical glances of A & M from the centre of that fairway are noted, and enjoyed.
The fabulous seventh is a masterpiece of architectural skill - the flat land transformed by the mown nobbles out left and the course’s first two bunkers on the right - and it is short enough that J & I avoid trees altogether on this hole, which makes for a pleasant change. But at the next, a shameful lunge sends my tee-shot sailing into more deciduous danger, though a strange, metallic sound rings out, rather than the hollow thump we’ve become accustomed to.
On this occasion, our ball (though “our” implies J did something more than simply provide the missile - it was my tee-shot!) is not seen miraculously bouncing out into the fairway, as if chucked back out by some heavily biased leprechaun. But we do find it, and realise that the sound we heard was of a road sign saving us from certain out of bounds. It is a ridiculous stroke of luck, and though “no apologies” is the primary code of the format, this particular foursome might as well wear caps that say “sorry”, for we apologise to each other after most strokes, and to the oppo as bounce after blessed bounce goes our way. We scramble along, and somehow J’s putt from several miles short of the green’s vicious slope climbs up to within a foot, and we win a hole we ought to have conceded on the tee. “Daylight robbery” mutters M, as he walks to the ninth, but even that doesn’t cover the injustice of it all. Perhaps across the pond, it’d be labelled “grand larceny”…
On the eleventh, J’s drive manages to clear the woodland, and comes to rest not on the adjacent ninth, but in the middle of the eighth, from where I duff it into a holly bush. But we keep going, and A carves his drive from the twelfth into one of the few areas where trees cannot help, and the ball disappears into waves of vibrant rapeseed. All I need to do is keep the ball off the farmland, and I do this via a smothered pull that a passing greenkeeper assumes is lost from the previous hole, and pockets. M’s reload finds the fairway to keep the pressure on, so when we are reunited with our ball at roughly 2 minutes 58, and hit another two trees between us, it is getting edgy, but we hold on, and are somehow still in the match with seven to go. I hole a decent putt for our seven, but could have missed it and stolen the hole, for we stroke there.
A violent snap-hook into the jungle from the fourteenth medal box brings forth an equally violent rebound into play, and for what feels like the thousandth time, I am embarrassed by the complete absence of justice for our steady opponents. It seems inconceivable that we return to parity on the sixteenth, but we do, and when both M & J drive near the green at the next, the match - which we have no right to still be in - is on the line.
A’s chip, from a downslope within a foot of another of Huntercombe’s rare bunkers, is both brilliant and sickening, and the evil pitch I face is somehow even more ghastly with their ball sitting only a few feet away in two. I contemplate conceding the hole, for I expect either a tired chunk or a potentially lethal thin, and wonder whether I should apologise before the shot this time, or not even attempt it.
The colossal hollow over which lies the flag might as well be the Grand Canyon, and I want to curl up and cry, but the group behind are strolling onto the tee, and my delays are starting to raise eyebrows. I feel like a bride with last-minute jitters outside the church - unable to go through with it - and more or less close my eyes, half-expecting this to be the moment when golf tells me it’s not the game for me after all.
An eternity later, this old lump of copper thumps into the ground, and the ball pops up past my nose, and floats like a feather to the top plateau of the green. And J somehow holes it, and M misses, and in all four sets of eyes there is an understanding that golf is fundamentally unfair; an abominable game. Dan Jenkins called one book “The Dogged Victims of Inexorable Fate” (after a line from Bobby Jones) , and I can only imagine they must have dreamed about this very match, for A & M are both innocent and helpless today. M has been keeping track of the score in the points column of a scorecard, and asks what the opposite of a plus sign looks like, and it occurs to me that, the way they have played, he ought to have never needed to ask.
After eight disastrous tee-shots of various styles, I finally locate a fairway down the last, and J keeps our second in bounds, and when we shake hands, it is a victory of the sort that should never happen again, for it defies logic, and any sense of justice in the world. A & M ought to have won an hour ago, but this absurd outcome is soon put behind us in favour of Friday’s fish & chips, and another delightful Huntercombe touch - the choc-ice. Somehow the simplicity and the lack of pretension in this delicious sweet parcel sums up the whole place to me.
But as the result slides away from us into the past, a wider injustice occurs to me. For there are vast swathes of the population who will never know how wonderfully social this game of ours is; how splendid the places we go. How sweet it is to - once in a while, a very long while - hit a pitch that makes you lie down and gaze at the clouds, ecstatic. Or to face bounces that belong in a nightmare yet still come out laughing, for once again, there are four winners out here, in the sun at Huntercombe. That some people I love never get under golf’s gentle grip seems the greatest injustice of all, for on days like this on courses like this, this golf of ours lights up the world. Regardless of the score.
Which was two up. Sorry…
Lovely day ⛳️
The green complexes at Huntercombe are some of the most natural that I have played. A truly wonderful place.