Pitchmarks #80 - "Bumps and all"

On well-worn paths...

“The course is closed”, the update reads, and I breathe a sigh of relief. Not because I didn’t want to play this morning, or that I’d spent half the night worrying about thinning pitches, because I hadn’t. It was less than a third.

But it is hammering down, and in any case, the McKellar Journal has arrived, that occasional, gorgeous “golf companion” from the States. Reading about golf isn’t quite the same as playing, but I spend less time looking for balls, and it helps prime the enthusiasm for the next outing, if it ever stops raining.

By the time the kettle whistles its promise at me, I am beguiled by a one-pager, leaf number 23. George Waters’ piece on golf course paths has me hooked within the first two sentences. “I love walking down a well-worn footpath on a golf course”, he begins, and this grabs my attention. “The scruffier a path is, the more I seem to enjoy my journey along it” grabs my heart, and by the end of the page, I wish I’d written the whole damn thing.

His prose is concise, yet persuasive, and delightful to read, and read again. And again. He covers all angles, without ever preaching, and when he celebrates “the inherent imperfection in golf’s living landscape”, I want to start singing, but everyone else is still asleep. Thinning pitches, one assumes.

We all know places where they’ve tried too hard to improve, and in doing so spoiled the glorious, imperfect nature of what was there in the first place. And maybe we know a few other places where this trap has been avoided, for one reason or another, and what is left is a slightly tatty temple of the game as it once was, rugged and beautiful at the same time.

We also know that when we try too hard at golf, the magic slips away, and maybe the same applies to paths. “Golf is Not a Game of Perfect”, Bob Rotella told us, as if we needed telling. But in so many realms, we blunder on, wasting time and money and effort despite this understanding, and in doing so, we wreck the very thing we profess to love.

Just like George, I too love a battered path, and that I share each one with all of those who have gone before me, and all of those that are yet to come feels like some divine secret, to me. And the insects and invertebrates, and roots and pebbles…it all feels so authentic, and how we need more of that in our lives just now.

McKellar costs less than a glove, but George’s one-pager alone is worth a multiple of that to me. And who knows, if you asked him nicely, and blew it up, and put it on the noticeboard, you might save some deluded Committee £70 per square metre of rubber crumb one day. Or it might help one more person remember that we are lucky that our game is played outside - even when it is hammering down - and that we already have enough carpet in our lives.

His piece ends as compellingly as it started, and the last words send me right back to the start, half an inch taller and a good deal happier. “If we could all learn to enjoy the walk for what it is, bumps and all, the game would be better for it”, he says.

Sermon over. Hallelujah.

(Note: You can, if you wish, find more details on McKellar here. It’s a lovely thing…)