Welcome to the latest edition of pitchmarks, delivered every Sunday. This is your chance to pause for a few minutes, turn down the noise and immerse yourself in golf. Make yourself a decent coffee (or something stronger) and relax. Such interludes are rare in the modern world; I hope you enjoy both the change of pace and the content.
“The only journey is the one within”
Rainer Maria Rilke
Sometimes a theme for these Sunday rambles is blindingly obvious, hollering at me from the details of the week. Other times, the blank page instead stares back at me, daring me to try and find connections where there seem to be none.
This morning, a glorious blend of these two scenarios appears in reverse, though I start as helpless as I felt yesterday on a bare lie with heather-clad bunkers between me and my destination. Nothing there, no grass, no connections. No yarn to spin.
And then it arrives from nowhere, as most good things do. From the ether, as if it has been whispered in my ear. This week has all been about the notion of a journey, and once I manage to see this, it all starts to flow. The pitch is no longer impossible, to extend the analogy, though I’m afraid the one yesterday barely made it to the bunker. My pitching is a journey, too, but I have no measuring device to gauge where the end of it lies.
So where does the journey fit in? Well, it was time to write up a recent visit back to Royal Wimbledon Golf Club, a route whose details I know so well, though I have travelled it in so many years it now seems a terrifying indicator of the speed with which life slides past, when I’m not paying attention. Read more on that particular journey here, and then please come back!
So on Tuesday, I walked another familiar path, the one that runs beside the Basingstoke Canal, and it brings me out just a drive and a pitch from the gates of another dear patch of land, on which lies New Zealand Golf Club. And when I am done soaking up all that is precious to me about “The ‘Nal”, as my daughter called it on those first toddler walks, I reflect on the journeys of my playing partners in today’s drizzle, which clears the course for our afternoon together.
First to arrive is Shane, whose first journey to the heathlands began in the early morning at Dublin airport, and, internet friends for a year or more, we get to shake hands and tease each other in person, and I marvel at what a sport this is, that brings together folk from all over, tied by our love for some strange glue that lurks in between the clubs and balls and tees and greens of this ancient game.
And then in walks Simon, who has reversed the same journey that keeps me sane every few months, torn away from an office perched on the side of Cleeve Hill for an afternoon. I hand him a copy of “Grass Routes”, which is the chapter of this life that I’m working through, and of course it falls open on the pages in which I try (in vain) to describe what those pilgrimages to his doorstep have meant to me, and we take it as a sign, for we are wide open for connections in this realm we call golf.
So we stroll and chat and listen, and hit shots that become good, bad or ugly without warning, and by the end we are soaked through but smiling ear to ear, and this latest little journey, and observing their first glimpse of the charm of this landscape, perhaps Tom Simpson’s subtlest masterpiece, makes my heart sing and perhaps theirs, too.
And when it is time to pick up our drenched carry bags and depart, the “'Nal” path home feels slightly different, as if I’ve been nudged back on to the fairway of my own journey by our conversations. By the time I cross the threshold of the shortest golfing commute I’ve known, all that is left to do is make notes on another priceless lesson golf has dealt me.
The calendar is examined, the notebook scrawled in. New horizons planned, new journeys under construction. A few decades ago, golf changed me - gave me some portal to a deeper, calmer adolescence, and now, in the last year or two, I’ve plumbed that same opening from a different starting position; rediscovered much of what really matters to me and left behind some of what doesn’t.
And when my eyelids close and another fine day slips behind me, my eyes start to flicker and away I am carried to the rolling links of sleep, to golfing dreams. And in the early morning, when the alarm brings me back, I yearn to recall every dream lest it get away, just as in my notebook and this little blog I try to capture something of each little waking journey. For I don’t want them to drift away, these courses, friends and days.
“Follow your bliss and the universe will open doors where there were only walls”, said Joseph Campbell, in “The Hero’s Journey”, and so I do. Next stop St George’s Hill, and then Woking…
READING, LISTENING, WATCHING
To prepare for Shane’s arrival, I could be found Listening (and then re-Listening, for it was so good!) to his latest Firm & Fast Podcast, with Canadian architect Jeff Mingay. This could be my favourite episode yet, of this series that promises “the golfing road less travelled”, and I emerge not only wiser but intrigued by the subject, A.V. Macan, another of that fascinating cast of actors who seem to inhabit the golf architecture graveyard, the “Old Dead Guys”. And Jeff is superb; his view on so much of golf aligned with mine.
Shortly afterwards, I am Reading Jeff’s article on the recent U.S. Open, and the discussion that followed a few low rounds on Thursday, and his clarity of thought and expression seem to echo that of the great George Thomas, across whose North Course design the world’s great players worked back in June. It is hard to pick out a single passage from this, just as it is hard to select a favourite hole from that magnificent course, for they are all so good. But this one seems to stick with me…“It is much more difficult to create courses that consistently intrigue golfers of all abilities. This is the ideal in golf architecture, and exactly what Thomas prescribed at LACC”.
The final pointer from Shane & Jeff is a reminder of a book I devoured long ago, but have not re-visited for years, and so the next journey is to the loft, where I brush a little dust from Tom Doak’s “Anatomy of a Golf Course”, and carefully slot it into the packing for Reading in the summer holidays. I recall being stunned by the complexity of the design process even for this master of minimalist architecture, and once again kick myself for not yet having seen one of Doak’s courses in person.
Another journey starts to form in my mind, to the north-west of Ireland, and St Patrick’s via a dozen other fabled links, but for the time being I will have to make do with Tom’s own description of how routings start to emerge in the creator’s mind, his own artistic journey. An essential book for anyone interested in this fine art we follow.
And given the theme of the journey, there is no decision to be made on what I am Watching this week, for this short film whets the appetite for visiting Askernish (mentioned in the podcast linked in last week’s pitchmarks) even further - how could anyone not be beguiled by the romance of a journey like this?
And finally, before you (hopefully) tie up your spikes and head on your own golfing journey this Sunday, one more tiny slice of Reading. For I found John Updike’s “Golf Dreams” in a charity shop the other day, a book I read years ago, and immediately begin with the eponymous chapter. A few snippets follow, in the hope that you will go and explore this marvellous collection yourself…
“It is a feature of dream golf that the shot never decreases in difficulty but instead from instant to instant melts, as it were, into deeper hardship…[but] are these nightmares any worse than the “real” drive that skips off the toe of the club…or the magical impotence of an utter whiff?…the golfer is so habituated to humiliation that his dreaming mind never offers any protest of implausibility…dream golf is simply golf played on another course. We chip from glass tables onto moving stairways; we swing in a straightjacket, through masses of cobweb, and awake not with any sense of unjust hazard but only with a regret that the round can never be completed…”
Go and find yourself a copy, or wait a week or two and borrow mine.
Thank you for your time!
I picked up a copy of the John Updike book last year after reading James Dodsons ‘The Range Bucket List’ which had a story about him meeting and playing with John.