Pitchmarks #99 - “Rule Number 6”

One morning in January…

Was that the sound of a drumming woodpecker, or the regular ricochet of my cursed ball…?

I’ve mentioned “The Art of Possibility” several times before, but though I don’t believe either Ben or Ros Zander play this game, much of the stuff they talk about in that marvellous book is of value to the golfer, and none more so than “Rule Number 6”.

“Don’t take yourself so seriously”, it states, and straight away I am amused by the absence of any mention of preceding Rules, for the playful, irreverent nature of the authors is evident in this initial tactic: there are no Rules 1-5. But some days a sense of humour is more or less essential for survival, and these are often golfing days for me, if not the Zanders.

A thick layer of ice on the windscreen warns me that this will be proper winter golf long before I arrive, but there will be no cancellations, as the four of us are heading to New Zealand, so things like the score, and the ground conditions, and the biting northerly wind are mere details beside the more important priorities of friendship and story-telling. And laughter, it quickly becomes apparent.

We are not in a hurry to don several layers of clothing, so take the opportunity to show Chip - on his first visit - around some of the delightful elements of this old clubhouse. We peer at a few of Samuel “Mure” Fergusson’s R&A medals in the bar, and at the Spy cartoon of that powerful amateur which hangs above them. And I recall and recount that lovely old excerpt from the Minute Book, whereby the Board of the day note with appropriate reverence Mure’s passing in late 1928, followed almost immediately by an acknowledgement of the fact that a large consignment of port will now not be required, and must be returned to the vintner. An ability to not take anything too seriously, least of all the golf, seems to be essential round here.

There’s little hurry - “technically, the ladies have the tee from 10.00am”, Aubyn informs us, “but we’ve no idea if any will turn up”. And of course the fairer sex is the more sensible version of a human, so as the next leg of our delaying tactics tours the Dining Room, we spot today’s sole female striding down the first with her husband in tow, both dressed as if heading for Antarctica. They are playing only the first loop of five holes, so all urgency is dispelled at this knowledge.

Aubyn informs us that the vast oil painting of Fergusson that hangs above the all-important pudding counter was amended at some point to fit the ornate frame from which his confident sneer still dominates the space, and that an informal hunt has been going on for “Mure’s legs” - which were detached and rolled up at the time - for a few decades now. The otherwise empty Dining Room once again echoes laughter at this knowledge, but I can’t help thinking that, if Mure were here in person rather than portrait, none of us would dare to laugh, and his glaring eyes have spooked me, so I decide not to suggest a possible link between the regular consignments of port and Mure’s legless status.

As we change our shoes, Chip and Nick are charmed by the old notice that “deplores” slower formats of golf such as Greensomes & 4-balls, labelling them as forms of “Golf Masochism”, but - with only two other people on the golf course - we decide to deploy the former format anyway. No one can be bothered to try and work out pairings or handicaps, so the two standing closest together form a team, and we grapple with the frozen turf to insert our tee pegs, a process that takes longer than Mure would have needed to complete the first. And then our drives somehow split the fairway, and land and skip and run, Nick’s ball in particular finally coming to rest an absurd distance from the shattered peg from which it flew.

It is downhill from here, the first hole, and our golf goes steadily downhill from this auspicious start, but none of that matters for the pattern of intermittent laughter that punctuates our frustration is the perfect balm for a game as maddening as this. We spend two minutes, fifty-eight seconds searching for my ball behind the first green, in the strip of heather into which it barely trickled, and Aubyn is quick to explain that we are - in hunting through the heather in this way - showing Chip “the authentic New Zealand experience”, and not for the last time.

At the second, Nick hits another splendid drive, though this one draws slightly in the air unlike the bullet down the first, and though it comes to rest inside the left edge of the fairway, he notes that “the draw has crept in, so it won’t be long before normal service is resumed”, and I am all empathy, though delighted at the prospect of having someone else to speak to whilst looking for my own snap-hooks all morning. Perhaps daunted that Nick is complaining even when his ball finds the fairway, Chip carves his slightly right, and the gentle silence of the pine forest is momentarily punctured by the sound of urethane on timber, a not-unfamiliar chord in these parts.

As we stroll up the fairway, Aubyn and I wonder if the presence of a woodpecker as the club logo could be in response to the regular and rhythmic collision of these two factors rather than a drumming beak. We laugh once more, and again when my second hits another ancient trunk, before coming to rest in a frozen bunker, and I am delighted when we all agree a pact to ignore the Rules of Golf in the face of this latest setback. As long as we observe Rule Number 6…

At the dangerous seventh, Nick somehow hits it to a few feet, and though Trevor - the gentleman in the Hut - pretends to not notice this outrageous blow though he’s not missed a duffed shot for about two decades, Nick steels himself to make a rare two, restoring parity in the conflict. Shortly afterwards, we notice that the ditches in the eighth carry are rather generously GUR, and I am still chuckling at Nick’s observation that “if you go in there, you have more than enough problems to deal with as it is” when I spot my ball in one, having failed to make the carry after all. So I take the free drop, find the fairway and then thin it through the damned green. My fingers are killing me, but so are my sides, for I’ve done nothing but laugh to this point.

And so it goes on. We learn that the famous peacocks that used to strut on Addington’s roof were surprisingly camouflaged when up a tree, and that you might not notice them at all “until they sh*t on you from a great height”, as Nick put it, “like my Chairman”. We also learn that in the good old days, the Addington Captain’s duties would include setting light to an enormous bonfire on Guy Fawkes’ Night, then sprinting for cover as the flames tore through the practice ground and up into the sky. Upon his election as Captain, Nick’s children were delighted at the prospect of their daddy as the latest “Captain Inferno”, then devastated when health & safety brought that terrifying ritual to an abrupt end shortly before his turn would have arrived.

By the time we reach the final green, Nick has a putt to halve the match, and declares that if he fails to hole it, he will fast for a month. But the Hewitt draw is imminent, and a Match Dinner, too, so missing is never an option and as the ball rolls right in the centre, it is the only result that we all would have wanted from such a morning’s work. We are, three hours later, back where we started, but a great deal richer from the more or less perpetual comedy of (very) amateur golf.

So, another glorious day in search of golf’s elusive treasures is almost over, but when Chip sends me a note later, I dig out something to share with him - the first thing I wrote in public - and I realise that I had specifically mentioned Rule Number 6 before. That it has taken this long to return to the topic as a prerequisite for a morning’s golf seems tragic. If I were in charge, I’d have it written on the scorecards.