Pitchmarks #61 - 25th August 2024 - "I Can't Quite Remember"

“Painting is just another way of keeping a diary”
Pablo Picasso

I suspect I wear a distant air every August, drifting off like some high slice on the breeze. But this summer it is two decades since something wonderful happened to me, and America is on my mind this morning.

Some moments stick in our heads forever, and I remember as if it were yesterday a phone call from a very long number, whilst drinking tea in the mess room. I’d spent the morning strimming ditch banks, and here was a strange voice telling me I could go and explore the Land of Opportunity. The Grand Tour Scholarship, it was called, and a grander tour of golf’s famous landmarks I couldn’t imagine.

By the time I climbed aboard the plane, the ditches were finished and I was left to pinch myself throughout this first Trans-Atlantic passage. For three weeks, Bryan (a student of golf architecture) and I (the turf student) got to live every golfer’s dream, visiting and often playing some of the finest, most revered courses on the planet. Five thousand miles in a white Pontiac rental; twenty-five courses and nine States. The trip of a lifetime…

But while a few details linger, others have faded as if bleached in the sun (which always shined on Tour, by the way). A battered yellow folder in the loft contains some tickets and passes, along with a few maps and other bits and pieces, but the practice of writing - of approaching life with some intention to look for material to write about - wasn’t yet forged in me. Lately, I have been reading Natalie Goldberg’s books, and she talks about the creative urge as a way of bringing to life the day-to-day; “writing is a willingness to see”. And in that record, a stand in the war against our memory’s waning grasp.

But I didn’t have Natalie then, so in the back of my mind I am piecing together only fragments and splinters, inspired by an extraordinary collection of Club pencils. These appear to be without purpose for a golfer not interested in scoring, but they cannot go to the charity shop for they’re all I really have left of this adventure, after all this time. Those, and a ghostly shadow of some feeling of awe at the sights that came and went that summer.

A while back I read the daily travelogues of another soul immersed in golf, and was left with not only a deep appreciation of his gift to that lucky audience, but a sense that The Grand Tour was still in me somehow, waiting to get out. I passed through a sort of grief for those days that will never return, along with the lessons they offered, and then - as usual - Natalie has the answer. In “The Long Quiet Highway”, she talks about her writing classes, and the “prompts” (though she prefers “topics”) through which she gets her students’ hands moving.

They’re just springboards, really, a way to travel from the blank page to “started”, but as she writes of the sudden energy when the class is given just a couple of words - “I remember”, and the freedom to add whatever they want to that beginning, something clicks for me. “Create your own opening”, she adds, “whatever gets you moving”. “I remember” or “I don’t remember”; anything that can make the ink flow will do.

So, a generation after all those sights and sounds, and after all that has happened since, I grab a start from young Natalie, and feel my pulse quicken as my heart drifts back to California and beyond, imagining that which “I can’t quite remember”. Bear with me…

“I can’t quite remember” the lush rolling fairways of San Francisco, or the view peering down at “The Duel”. And “I can’t quite remember” the polished timber case in which the recovered pistols are housed, from that last legal shootout somewhere down behind what became the seventh green. “I can’t quite remember” the velcro-like resistance to a wedge, when swept through the stubborn Kikuya of vibrant Riviera. And “I can’t quite remember” the weight of those gorgeous white, timber flagsticks at Bel Air, one of which I left with dimples imprinted from a rare, straight two iron. Maybe it was the sixteenth hole, though I am clutching at straws. If the ball had shown the common decency to drop straight in, I’d remember the number clearly.

“I can’t quite remember” the cavern over which an approach to the eighth at Pebble Beach must fly, nor the wind in my hair on the tee of the tiny seventh. The deafening sound of the elephant seals off the right of the sixteenth at Cypress Point “I can’t quite remember”, nor the simple, green and white elegance of that course’s wonderful central movement…the short-four eighth and ninth as fine a pair of back-to-back holes as any in our galaxy.

“I can’t quite remember” the name of the Superintendent’s dog in the thin, fresh air of Denver’s Cherry Hills, nor what the Palmer plaque there says, exactly. But I know I felt like I was walking in the footsteps of the greats, and we were in a way. The greats of the professional game, of course - places where Jones and Hogan and Nicklaus and Watson won and lost many a duel of their own - but also the greats of the craft that enables such golfing mastery, the people of who dreamed of and built these temples. MacKenzie and Hollins, Tillinghast. Fowler, polished by Thomas. Flynn.

We moved inland, so the pencils tell me, and “I can’t quite remember” Sanctuary or Castle Pines. “I can’t quite remember” Forest Highlands, either, or Troon, or Desert Highlands, but little details remain…giant, ancient Saguaro trees with balls lodged in them, and lizards basking in the bunker faces. We covered some landscapes in between these pitstops, too - “I can’t quite remember” the relentless glory of Monument Valley’s sandstone buttes, or the terrifying face of the Hoover Dam, or the fathomless pit of The (very) Grand Canyon (though I do remember wondering what the carry was…).

But one place seemed as meaningful a place to go as any of these icons, and it wasn’t even on the itinerary. “I can’t quite remember” just how far off-course we went to find the sign that said “Sand Hills Golf Club”, but I know I’ve never quite been the same since it came into view. The middle of nowhere lies a little south of there, and then we found Mullen, Nebraska, and from there it was only a vast distance remaining. And we passed the sign and carried on up the drive for another eternity, and spent the rest of the day in heaven as far as I recall.

“I can’t quite remember” the individual holes, but in any case it seemed to me as if they were part of some sublime, rolling fugue rather than standalone parts. The whole thing shone from start to finish, and “I can’t quite remember” some sense that - despite all the magnificence that we’d seen thus far - this represented a changing of the gears for design, a milestone sunk inside this eternal horizon. It was as if in sensing the final eighteen among the hundred holes in this barren wilderness, Coore and Crenshaw had concocted some tincture for a new way of doing things. A fresh realm that took in all that had gone before, and moved it forwards. A transmission of the lineage, as Natalie might put it, in another context.

“I can’t quite remember” how I felt that evening, but I suspect that the brilliance of Sand Hills was humbling, and that any foolish notion I had of maybe finding my future in architecture was stymied by this windswept Rembrandt. I know I feel like that sometimes reading other people’s writing, particularly Bernard Darwin, who seems to speak directly to me. Why try and do something yourself when others can do it like that?

But somewhere beyond this world of rank and comparison, of competition and rating - somewhere even beyond Mullen, Nebraska - is a place of abundance, where there is room for an openness and an honesty that are rare but precious. “I can’t quite remember” it, but I glimpsed it in the Sand Hills, and in the dunes of St Patrick’s, and now I find it in the wisdom of Natalie Goldberg, and I will never again travel without a notepad.

“Writing is a communal act, even if you write alone”, she says, and there are few places as lonely as the blank page. But with a “topic” and a pencil (I knew they’d come in handy), strange things happen, and this “communal act” seems to build its own community; relationships forged with no care for social class or geography. Friendships that share mostly golf, that mystical pursuit.

“Writing is a fine thing, a path to meet yourself”, and we might say the same of our game. “I can’t quite remember” my Grand Tour Scholarship, but “I can’t quite forget” it, either.

With two decades of gratitude to Bettina Schrickel, for setting up that scholarship for a number of years, and the sponsors. And to Bryan, wherever you are. It was a blast!