Pitchmarks Archive ADVENTure #10 - "How did you play?"

The delights of Broadstone

Beautiful Broadstone

One thing you tend to learn the hard way, particularly if you work in golf, is to not directly ask someone “how did you play?” You can usually see it in their eyes, or their stooped posture, or in the slightly aggressive way they deposit their golf bag in the car before slamming down the boot, as if they’d just dragged a still-warm corpse over the threshold, and can’t wait to get it - or them - out of sight.

If you do ask them, you invite one of two scenarios to eat into your precious time on this planet. Occasionally, they’ll speak of a round that went well, in which the bounces were favourable and more than their fair share of putts dropped; the sort of score that you are convinced is still possible but that never seems to happen to you.

And if they answer this way; that is to say, if they remain positive not only of the experience of being out in the fresh air, with friends, at leisure, but also of their actual performance, then you probably have two options yourself, which you mull over as they begin to run through this freakish occurrence in greater detail than you’d have imagined possible.

You can be pleased for them, and accept their version of things at face value, or you can feel an immense injustice stirring, and think them deluded for remembering only the good bits - which sound pretty lucky to you - and maybe quietly hate them for their apparent optimism, and patience. And for the indecent way in which they are willing to celebrate the small wins while glossing over the best part of a few dozen howling mistakes.

But if you ask that fatal question and it wasn’t one of those good days for them (and this will usually be the case), well then you are in grave danger, for “a problem shared is a problem halved”, and by running you through three hours of devastating misery in what feels to you like real time, this poor soul - exposed once again by golf as weak, and foolish - starts to regain a little colour in their cheeks, and their eyes begin to sparkle as they did before they golfed, and you can sense that they believe they might actually survive today’s torment, and make it through until tomorrow’s roll-up.

Meanwhile you absorb the blow-by-blow monologue through gritted ears, for ears have no headcovers; trying not to engage lest your subconscious find inspiration to plumb a greater depth of suffering in this wretched pursuit, but you know that their trials will somehow find a way into this evening’s nightmares, and Thursday’s medal, and that you should never, ever ask anyone “how did you play”, for the real, honest truth of that horror should belong to them, stay with them. You have enough on your plate.

So there we go. Don’t ask. And no one has asked me how I played the other day, but I’m like you, we all need an outlet, a way of coming to terms with stuff. So I will understand if you’d rather not hear about this, and I apologise in advance, but I just can’t keep carrying this around with me. It’s your turn to be an unpaid therapist. I’ve done my stint.

The other Monday, my alarm sounded when I needed it most, for in my slumber I was addressing a brutal pitch over a fathomless bunker, and the lie was not so much hardpan as worn macadam. But the gallery behind me weren’t only watching quietly, some were already started to shake with laughter, and as the sweat poured from my temples and the tiny wedge in my jelly-like hands twitched over the ball, this chiming noise seemed to flood the arena, and I realised that this particular edition of hell hadn’t arrived in reality. Yet.

Instead, another week would start in hope, in a four hour round trip to yet another of the epic golf courses in the south-east of England, an embarrassment of riches. I’d been to Broadstone just once before, but in mid-winter, and a return was overdue. So off we go, M and I, for another of our little journeys; this private, regular match that we’ve been waging against each other for nearly two decades.

A decent coffee and a few putts later, it is time to head for the first tee, and up in that nook, under some tall trees, there is a calm to match our moods as we gently pull the driver too and fro, loosening up. M has kindly brought me a couple of sleeves of balls to try, and I take care to position this opening missile on the peg. Another practice swing, and a half-smile as I gaze down the mown passage that invites us before the hole swings up and to the right. The sun is already high in the June sky, and we are surely bound for another glorious day ahead.

And then, from nowhere, the smooth metronome of the warm-up dissolves into a violent lunge, and this virginal sphere spins further and further right, disappearing halfway between the alluring short grass and the boundary of the property. I have in mind that there used to be a railway up there, but now it is just long grass and one very shiny golf ball. And I will never see that ball again, not in this life. But perhaps in another nightmare come the wee small hours.

The day continues in this vein, though the specifics of my golfing misery are at least varied. Most of the well-known forms of failure are present - thins, pulls, a top. Plenty of duffed chips, one or two flamboyant yips. There is not, as far as I recall, a shank among them, but I may be deceiving myself, for the way I was swinging it, I could have hit twenty of them in a row.

M is also having a difficult day with his own game, presumably infected by mine. His steady driving is off today, and on one tee I wonder if he might snap his driver, but instead he laughs - for there are points today where our choice is simply to laugh or cry - and we trudge off to look for our balls, 150 yards apart and with the fairway between us some promised land that we aren’t fit to tread on. I take a tiny degree of satisfaction in knowing that I will leave no divots in the short grass today, and that most of the areas where I do remove turf are probably more often the habitat of the rabbit rather than a golfer.

But we play a match, as always, and so while our golf is at times pitiful, there is still work to be done. We trade holes with hard-fought double-bogeys on the odd occasion we both finish a particular assignment, and the soundtrack of the day is rarely the slightly hollow sound of a ball landing on firm heathland turf, but instead the crackling of dry grass under my feet as I hunt for yet another new ball jettisoned into the back of beyond.

M’s gift of half a dozen pristine balls is enough to get me through the front nine, but I worry that it must look as if he gave me a wrapped birthday gift and I took one look at it and sliced it into the bin. Through this undulating landscape, the heather is strong though not yet in flower, and I see more of it today than in a normal golfing season, as these wretched balls seem obsessed by it.

I’m trying to just give you a flavour of the round, for I know you don’t need shot by shot commentary, and I couldn’t do that if I tried. There were just too many shots for any one memory to hold, and an innate self-defense mechanism seems to have blocked out the most traumatic episodes, though over each shot for the rest of my life there’ll be some remnant of every last ignominy lurking deep within, looking to surface when I need it least.

And yet? Despite the way I played, the sort of golf that makes me consider not only selling my clubs but trying to burn them - though I’d probably miss with the match and burn down half of Dorset instead; despite the result, M finding a few decent strokes on the back nine to close out the match 2 & 1 (I think he hit four in the end; more than enough to dispatch me); despite the worst golf I’ve played or perhaps ever seen, Broadstone is utterly glorious.

The bunkering is flashed up, heather-clad, framing beautiful carpets of turning-brown turf in the dry summer; the ball runs and bounds and leaps. The tees are each a majestic viewpoint of their own to this golfing eye, and as we traverse these rolling hills, the expansive routing feels like a journey. On one tee, we spot another across great valleys and it seems impossible that one golf course could stretch so far, and even less likely that my ball would be willing to travel with me across such distances. Which it isn’t, and I should have said “balls”, for by that point, there were very few left in this old bag. Thinking back on it, it would have been a release of some kind to run out of ammunition; like hearing an empty pistol’s hollow click, I could then at least have stopped trying, and surrendered, exhausted.

Some holes delight me - the simple fourth a great lesson in positioning; the mild contours of the land before and around the green enough to deter all but the finest shot. Or so we imagine, from our position more than twenty yards right. The par threes are sensational; variety in length, shape, challenge. There’s a strong wind wicking moisture from the grass today, and up on the plateau, it is insistent, blowing half-decent shots off course. One or two of mine actually finish off the course.

And then there’s the puzzling seventh, a heroic hole that stirs some feeling of victimhood, like it isn’t a fair hole, like it doesn’t belong. But I can almost hear Darwin tutting at me, for his love of adventure would relish such an exacting challenge, and he had the game to make it work. Broadstone is not a course for the faint-hearted, and my heart feels strong. But I have left my game behind today, perhaps at home, or perhaps back in the early nineties. Wherever it is, it isn’t here, when I could really do with it.

Hole after hole I stand on the tee and gaze across this hypnotic watercolour of green and brown, under a gorgeous sky, and imagine my ball - the latest one - piercing that deep blue as it tracks towards the flapping silk beneath it. And hole after hole I take my stance only to feel like a stranger in that position, and have no idea how to go about getting it over with. The clubs feel alien, my swing some random generator of shapes. I sense M looking the other way for some of my strokes, and I catch myself wishing I could, too. For self-preservation.

And all the while the sun beams down, casting shadows of this torture on to the ground around me, so not only do I have to attempt another lunge at this beast of a ball, but I must also watch the horror unfold through peripheral vision, the silhouette as close to Johnny Miller’s graceful arc as the dancing of Ian Curtis was to the waltz. And all I want to do is shake hands, and get home safely, and curl up in a foetal position, for this is all too much to bear.

You get the idea. It was one of those days, and it hurt then and it still hurts now, a few weeks later. The collateral damage is still unfolding in my dreams and during wakefulness; a sense of futility being slowly processed and, hopefully, discarded like oh-so-many nice golf balls. And I apologise for putting you through all this, for you didn’t even ask how I played, but I feel a little better as a result of letting it all come out.

But I’m afraid the story isn’t quite complete, for something strange happened back on the seventeenth, as I tried to ward off or delay the inevitable defeat, one that if M had brought his A game (maybe even his D game), could have happened half a dozen holes earlier. The penultimate ball in my dwindling supply snapped left from the tee as I collapsed through impact, running under several trees to finish in the centre of the second fairway, and I endured the understanding smiles of the three ladies walking the other way only because I might not get through the eighteenth with only one piece of ammunition. So I smiled back, and chipped it under the trees to the correct fairway, and scurried back before anyone else could see my shame.

And then, with M already on the right edge of the green, what must have been about my ninetieth swish of a club today produced something different. The tiny, mythical sweetspot at the centre of these old blades - which I wasn’t good enough to use back in the day, but don’t feel fit to even own today - pinched the ball from the fine turf and sent it up to the heavens and back down to the flag, where it settled three inches behind that elusive aluminium cup. No warning, no real reason for it. Just there and then, an ordinary, everyday miracle.

And of course M got up and down, and we shook hands, and of course the snap-hook returned on the very next stroke, but it didn’t matter, for I walked up the last and drove all the way home with the ghost of that seven iron reverberating through my soul. It had been, without a smidgen of doubt, the worst golf I could remember and yet…and yet, the day was a triumph, another fine memory despite all of the torture.

For almost everything that could go wrong, did go wrong, but in a split-second near the end of the round, golf spun its web across me once more, weaved its magic on me, and so, if you ask me now what Broadstone was like I shall drift into a reverie, and once again see not the clinging heather or the ghastly shadows of this stranger’s golf swing, but the ball hanging above the flag amidst all this fabulous heathland. And I shall say that it was worth every inch of the trip, and that you must go and see it for yourself.

For if one can have a day of shots like that and still come away smiling, then Broadstone - and all of its 125 years of fine history - must be built of the very essence of this game. It is wonderful, and I will return. But I’ll take a few more balls next time…

Re-reading these is interesting to me, and valuable. I notice how the tone changes in certain pieces, and at a distance of almost 18 months from this one, I wonder what triggered this style rather than that of other pieces. I notice (and this, like many golfing lessons I learn but forget, is something I ought to keep more of an eye out for) that my sentences can be far too long at times. Perhaps that’s another example I’ve laid down there. And this post is pretty long, overall. Maybe in order for my writing to improve, I need subtraction. Clarity of purpose, and a bit more time trimming. Maybe the same goes for my golf…too many thoughts, too many distractions. That shot I hit on the 17th at Broadstone wasn’t hampered by self-analysis or fear…by that stage, I’d stopped caring. And perhaps therein lies something worth exploring…