Pitchmarks #83 - "You need to know this"

An explanation for the non-golfers in our lives…

My brain is frozen this morning. Nothing there, no theme, no spark. It’s Saturday, and I want to write Sunday’s blog and let it sit for a while, but the muse has gone away.

So I reach for Natalie Goldberg’s “Writing Down the Bones” deck of prompt cards, and pull one out at random. I rarely use them, but they are almost as wonderful as Natalie and her writing, and they - she - is yet to let me down. It says:

“You need to know this” Tell me. What?
Go, ten minutes

Straight away, I know what I want to write. I want to talk about what this game of golf means to me, what it’s done for me. To give the non-golfer some clue of what the hell we’re all doing, hacking around fields after errant missiles, self-flagellation in slacks.

Because it’s my portal into “me”, this habit. It’s my drug of choice; the one that pitches me time and time again into the present. The rest of life pulls us one way then the other, and from above you’d see my Pinnacle do the same, but on this endless, helpless struggle, round by round, blow by blow, I am crawling towards some sort of confused acceptance.

Acceptance of how things will be, and of my own limitations and paltry ambitions, and of our frailty in the face of things like time and decay. I have learned more about myself and others on the golf course than I could in any number of lectures, and out here the punishing truths are metered out with such frequency that we learn them as if by rote in the end. “You need to know this”, oh blessed non-golfer. We suffer. But we wouldn’t have it any other way, give or take a few shots.

And then there’s the places. These landscapes are so varied, so glorious. The rugged links, the downland views. The pine forests, the parklands. Each is a precious dose of nature, home to me and my ball and my friends, but also to a universe of creatures, going about their business as we go about ours. This time outdoors is precious.

And every time is different out there, for we are in the hands of the weather, and we are changed ourselves day by day. Heraclitus said that “no man steps into the same river twice”, and of course he was right. So I shall cling on to this the next time I chunk it into the ditch on the sixth. And pretend it’s never happened before.

But mostly, it’s the people. “You need to know this”, as I wish that you’d join is. For life is full of all sorts of folk, but somehow golf seems to stick to the best of them. I have golfing friends who I’d never meet in a million years on the basis of geography, or social class, or any other factor you care to imagine. They’d be strangers without this peculiar glue, this common thread, our obscene addiction. It is an arena where those of us who wish to plumb the mysteries of our lives may dwell, and though none of us will ever master this game, none of us should ever care too much about that. Or think too much about that.

We should be thinking, instead, “when is my next tee-time?” and “how will I play?”. And that’s what we are thinking, and it is because golf - like Natalie - has never let us down.

So, there we are, dear, puzzled non-golfer. I don’t expect you to understand, but I thought “you need to know this”. Ten minutes. Done. I’m off to practice.

Photograph of the closing hole at Minchinhampton Old Course, at dusk. For no other reason that I love Minch Old, and I love the image. Courtesy of Simon Pope