Pitchmarks #75 - 29th December 2024 - "///natural.connection.joy"

I find myself with a few spare minutes before I am due at Royal Porthcawl, and slip off the main road to find a clifftop car park near Southerndown. A path leads me down to the beach, and as the tide gently retreats, I sit quietly and listen to the babble of water slipping across ancient limestone, worn smooth by the caress of geological time.

Moments such as this - detached from the frantic delusions of modern life - are precious, and if golf, and the journeys to and from her, do nothing else, they afford me these glimpses of a more soulful way to be. I wander past the Glamorgan Heritage Coast Centre, and consider how much of my own heritage is tied up in this part of the world. My parents were both English, and I was born a Man of Kent, but the two decades I spent growing up in Wales - or at least growing taller - involved walking around these very landscapes with a wedge and a few battle-weary balatas.

Climbing back towards the van, I pause for a few moments on several benches, each bearing a memorial plaque, and imagine the lives of those loved ones remembered. Then I notice that on the back of each sits a small disc, denoting an exact location in the event of an emergency. ///what3words is an example of technology that makes our lives simpler in a way, or perhaps safer. One reads ///slicer.distorts.furniture and my train of thought returns to golf, and I think of one or two of my own adventures, moving furniture to enable a crafty escape from Woking’s Wisteria-clad terrace, though it was more often a thin that put me there, rather than a slice.

I remember clambering up onto the roof during lockdown, using the world’s least sturdy wooden ladder, and collecting a surprising number of nice golf balls, and experiencing raw terror before a nervy descent. Perhaps that roof ought to have small discs with the emergency location code on, though these days it takes a global pandemic to get someone up there. I check the spot against which the feet of my ladder wobbled, and discover its unique position is ///often.flies.impact, which seems as appropriate to this spot, an integral part of that course in more ways than one.

The breeze starts to build as I gaze out to sea, and I consider ///what3words I might use to sum up what these sort of trips - and the process of digesting and writing about them - mean to me. It’s an idea that’s been lurking in the dark recesses of my mind for a while now, waiting for a chance to emerge onto this page, into the light. And I settle on ///natural.connection.joy, and am quietly delighted that the union of three jumbled batches of letters can bring me such a happy smile. Golf is just a portal through which I spy a different way to live, and I love it for that.

natural because the courses that seem to be “in the landscape, not on the landscape” are the ones I am drawn to, and where I think golf should persist. They remind me of a simpler life, less burdened by data and details and technology, and I pine for that like I pine for the innocence of a young boy pitching fearlessly around the turf corridors of South Wales. connection because this pursuit connects me to that boy, and to my late father and ailing mother, who gave me the chance to discover this glorious idiocy more than thirty years ago.

And there’s connection to my future here, too, and to some wonderful friends, dead and alive, and to this precious natural stage upon which we fleetingly tread. And all of this brings me joy, and I just want to spread it around as widely as I spread my drives later on - left, right, and - occasionally, joyfully - centre.

The time comes to head on, and I pass through Porthcawl’s gates for the first time in two decades, and note a definite shift in the wind velocity upon opening the van door. Near the timber clubhouse is a large and complex matrix, and in front of it are a couple of elderly golfers, emitting the sort of troubled groan that was formerly reserved for tiny missed putts. They smile through their bemused frustration, and it occurs to me that if any 3words in the world could sum up the opposite of what golf means to me, they are ///world.handicapping.system. I quit “A” Level Maths one afternoon a few miles east of here for a reason; now I am supposed to study these giant wallcharts in order to work out what the hell I am doing.

You’re not here to listen to me banging on about how this sort of thing wrings the joy from this game for me; some of you might even feel the same, and partly be tuning in to get away from what golf has become. So I mustn’t dwell on the idea that, having somewhat simplified the Rules of Golf (a set of instructions Alistair Cooke likened to the “propositions of Euclid”), the powers that be have made the handicapping system unintelligible to even those administering it. This system - which means we can play on more or less equal terms with young and old, good and bad - was surely one of golf’s most valuable features, and yet brows are furrowed at the very mention of it.

Nor must I dwell on my sadness at the dozens of lifers thrown into a helpless, frustrated confusion by these changes, after an entire life of playing the game perfectly well the old way. Or the subtle uplift in questions about how it actually works, presumably a reflection of a culture in which we demand to understand everything, as if logic is behind the whole world, and all magic has been left behind. To delve into the mechanisms behind these algorithms seems a fool’s errand to me, but it’s as if we’re on the scent of something mysteriously out of reach. Or perhaps that scent is simply of bullsh*t, and we can smell it a drive and a wedge away.

No, instead I must stay positive, and spend my time delighting in another way of playing the game. One which is natural, and based upon connection, and tangled up in joy. A game in which if we must play a match, it will be “Sunningdale Rules”, where we play level but if one side goes two up, they get a shot until the gap drops back to one. And it always seems to end down the last. Or perhaps we use the “Dallmeyer principle”, whereby the trigger point for shots is three up, and we look over our shoulder on the back nine in case “The Colonel” (Col. Dallmeyer, who devised the system) is approaching. It’s worked perfectly well for the Honourable Company for quite some time now…

I think of the old story of another club calling the Swinley office, and asking to check a member’s handicap, and of Pierce’s blunt reply - “if he’s a member here, he’s a gentleman, and his handicap will be whatever he tells you”, and of the day a New Zealand member walked in and politely asked for his handicap to be cut, lest the opposition think he’d played slightly too well in the match. He was early back to the clubhouse, having lost on the fifteenth, but still the miracle of a couple of half-decent shots left him feeling not delighted but embarrassed. His index was cut; the miracles never returned. But his integrity - the glue of this game - remained intact.

And just recently, when pairing the golf app on the phone of one of the game’s most delightful humans, I spot that his handicap isn’t showing, and inquire after his home club, and he - despite holding a significant role in the elite game for thirty-odd years - informs me that his last known handicap was when he “left Crieff in 1971”, and I reach for a pen and a scrap of paper, and am thrilled at discovering this kindred spirit. I think the last time I won anything was the Junior Invitation in 1986, my handicap more or less dates from then, and I am strangely proud of the way golf continues to charm me in spite of that.

I want to play places where the handicaps are decided over a claret-rich lunch when the snow lies deep outside, or where in a cartoon, the course record is measured in time. Where the 3words I pay homage to are never ///world.handicapping.system, but always, and increasingly, ///natural.connection.joy. And if you’re looking for me, that’s where I’ll be. They’re my co-ordinates. Rant over. Play well!

* I thought I should just check whether ///natural.connection.joy is an actual place, but the closest I found was perhaps subject to a typo - ///natural.convection.joy, in New South Wales…funny. Several of the courses in South Wales somehow encapsulate everything that I love about this game, summed up in those 3words, but lovely though New South Wales probably is, I prefer the old one.