Pitchmarks #69 - 20th October 2024 - Bad Housing

I am revisiting some of Alistair Cooke’s writing on golf for a future project, and it is like being re-connected with my childhood, or perhaps re-united with a sweet, stray puppy. For someone who so cherished golf writing - “does anybody deny that ‘the gowf’ has produced the richest literature of any sport” - his own contribution, beginning shortly after he started playing in his mid-fifties, is more than worthy of inclusion besides those he cherished - Longhurst, Ward-Thomas, Wodehouse, etc.

In the editor’s note to my beloved copy of “The Marvellous Mania”, Collin Webb describes Cooke as writing “with the zeal of a convert”, in order to - in Cooke’s own words - “deter some other intending addict”. I am reminded in reading this of the “zeal” of a dear friend of mine, also only hooked in middle age, but seemingly unable to really concentrate on anything else ever since. Messages arrive from the ether about “having found something”, and in his own golf prose, there is the same shining urgency that beams from Cooke’s desperate golfing journals.

Within the first chapter - “History of the Scottish Torture” - Cooke is referencing the drug experts, who “define a true narcotic as one that produces a recurring chemical cycle of desire”, and in doing so perhaps excuses us from blame in this malady, for we are caught in the same vicious snare as Cooke was, and all the professional can do is make our fix a little cleaner. There are no twelve-step programmes for golfers, for perhaps no-one ever got out alive…

This notion of golf as an addiction, a compulsion, got me thinking. These days cigarettes come in a plain packet with some ghastly image of a collapsed lung or something on there, for we are visual learners and the simple warning facts of my youth weren’t enough for some. Perhaps when we next hand over some exorbitant sum for our latest sleeve of balls, the carton oughtn’t to be all shiny and deceitful; it ought to bear a monochrome image of a pitiful man bent double in anguish, his ball the other side of a hole into which his own shoelace could stretch. This game will bring you to your knees, the image should cry, and then shoot you.

In those magazines which no longer contain literature at all but just page upon page of gaudy adverts, the latest release of some glistening wedge should include with it a series of frames showing a demented lady losing count and all hope whilst thrashing sand from a bunker, emptying the hazard as she and the ball sink deeper into golf’s abyss. They will find “rock bottom” to be some form of permeable concrete.

I recall being surprised in an anti-drugs lecture at school when “bad housing” was mentioned as a likely, if not inevitable, outcome of reliance on opioids, and while this is not the place for further exploration of that topic, the golfing addict and widow alike ought to expect some domestic deterioration as a result of this disease. The shed’s stash of discarded and disloyal weapons will seem to procreate overnight, and a faint smell of damp grass will never quite leave the entrance hall. Stuffed in draws will be scorecards whose scrawled numbers could bring a primal scream to the lips of the owner, and it is likely that even the non-golfers will step painfully upon a broken tee on a daily, if not hourly, basis.

Our housing will suffer, but at least our paraphernalia is marginally less disturbing for the neighbours than foil or spent needles. We might be the object of pity, and rightly so, but rarely of fear, unless they are standing a little way to the right of target, or in the direct line of a delicate pitch from a tight (or perfect; let’s be honest here) lie.

David Foster Wallace spoke in his 2005 Kenyon commencement speech of the various forms of worship in modern life and their inevitable outcome - “If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough…worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly”. For “power…you will end up feeling weak and afraid”; for “intellect…you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out”. But Cooke saw that in the involuntary worship of golf, we would suffer all of these and more, as if cast into some never-ending game of Russian roulette, “for the golfer compresses into a few hours all the emotions he spreads over the rest of his life: hope, envy, betrayal, self-discipline, self-deceit, the Holy Grail in view, the Grail smartly whipped out of sight”.

Alistair Cooke’s genius as a political and cultural observer was in his ability to stay detached; to see both sides of an equation, and, as no less a fan than Jack Nicklaus wrote in his foreword to this collection, his “broadcasting and writing were scrupulously honest”. No one falls into an addictive cycle or bad housing without some short-term upside, however fleeting and mysterious it may be, and so we should counter these snippets of Cooke’s own wry view of the game with the flipside. “No man in his right mind would play golf”, he said, and whether we begin the quest in control of our faculties or not, it will drive us to the same wasteland eventually. But on the way there, there will be moments that transcend sport, and ordinary life.

Cooke loved the game, and I love the game, and love it even more as a result of the way he wrote about this passion. And presumably you love it too, or else why are you here? Golf drags us out into the fresh air, not to mention the rain and the sleet and the hail. We stand in the dunes or the forest and feel the wind in our hair, and the soundtrack is for a few precious hours not phone alerts and screeching tyres and dreary, miserable complaints but laughter and the elusive sound of a ball toppling from sight, while mewing buzzards circle and skylarks ascend to the heavens.

This sense of community, of friendships forged not on social class but on a shared chemical urge, and the pursuit of something unlikely but not quite impossible. Some deeper sense of being a part of, of belonging to, something larger and older and better than ourselves. It’s the same stuff David Foster Wallace was pointing out, only with sticks and balls. And if Cooke was right (of course he was!), and we are addicts, then how wonderful that the object of our worship is not so scarce; that we can throw up the balls and go out in search of our latest fix together, in small groups, without fear of overdose or incarceration.

It is good for us to feel vulnerable now and again, and golf gives us at least eighty micro-doses of that every time we lace up. We are part of what Cooke called “the only world-wide secret society that revels in the mutual display of human frailty”. Put me down as a Life Member of that society. I can put up with bad housing, and a shed full of old putters. I don’t require a cure.