Pitchmarks Archive ADVENTure #14 - "The Rituals of Rye…"

Another shot to savour, Rye Golf Club; image courtesy of the author

“We are what we repeatedly do”
Aristotle

We all know how important routines are, in theory. You do the same things, time after time, and these routines become habits, and over time the habits become who you are. That’s the theory, but of course we are only human, and so before such habits have worked their magic, we are distracted by something else, and wind up back where we started - back on the tee, re-loading, in golfing terms.

We all know this pattern only too well - New Year’s Resolutions that barely survive the week of “The Putter*”; years of half-hearted striving for a more respectable handicap or a more reliable driving game. It oughtn’t to be so difficult, for my driving could hardly be less reliable…they call this “low hanging fruit”…

But there is one place where this notion of routines - of ritual - comes into sharp focus for me. And it starts the night before, when laying out my kit. I’ll need jacket & tie of course, and a good few golf balls. And I’ll choose ones that are in half-decent condition, for we’ll be sharing them on the course, hitting them alternately. Another glorious ritual. And I go to sleep and dream of Rye and when I wake up a few more rituals - black coffee and a little nostalgic writing - and while both make me feel more awake, I might as well still be dreaming, for my days don’t get - couldn’t get - much better than this.

The van knows the way - the route another ritual, sliding across the North Downs to angle right towards the Sussex coast, and that thrilling sea air. Left before the village of Rye, swinging around the fields until the buildings appear - the red-bricked Professional’s Shop and the iconic white clubhouse, perched above a car park that is rustic at best. And I love this, for who really cares about car parks. Perhaps we still play such a great golf course and walk in such distinguished footsteps because no one cares about the car park rather than despite it - this seems to be an early indicator that the rituals of Rye are focused on golf and lunch, and in such clear devotion to these elements, it protects something so very special. The ordering of sandwiches is not among the rituals here…

So the rituals continue, and we pull on our jackets and straighten our ties, and in the bar most people seem to know each other, and if they don’t, they’re delighted to meet. For Rye is a proper club, in the sense that it is populated by like-minded people - members and guests alike - and these rituals that we follow bring us closer together. Lunch tickets are bought and we shuffle into the Dining Room, where Penny relieves us of our slips of paper, as she has done for more years than it would be polite to work out. And we take our own plates back, another ritual to remember for the occasional visitor, and when we’re done, we contemplate coffee and Kümmel (though if I begin on the rituals of Kümmel at Rye, we’ll never get to the tee).

The balls are thrown up, and even in the relative shelter of the opening tee, the wind affects them, but our pairs are determined, and perhaps Rye’s master ritual - the art of foursomes - begins. Nowhere else in golf is there such a delicate, beautiful reliance on one’s partner. We are not to apologise in foursomes - a forbidden realm - but we sacrifice our own pride in favour of keeping it in play for the team, though of course we all fail now and then. And we laugh, and try to transmit our apologies silently in a look, and we race around. We begin the third before we’ve finished the second - another classic Rye ritual - for this will save us a minute or more, though it confuses the uninitiated.

And the course is sensational, as it always is - all waving marram grass and firm, fast fairways. The flag silks flap in the breeze and jangling harbour sounds float across the links like some avant-garde orchestral movement. We battle over and around Rye’s central dune for most of the afternoon, and marvel at the timeless routing and effortless style. And by the end of it all, we’re still in touch on the final tee, though the result is of little consequence by comparison with the company. Inevitably, it is my wayward drive that brings a shaking of hands, this ritual - restored after Covid - a couple of hundred yards earlier and further right than it might have been, but though they won the match, we all won the day.

The rituals of golf when played like this ensure it. We give putts when it feels right, and take care to observe the honour, for pace of play is never an issue here. We don’t need Ready Golf, for the rituals of Rye dictate that we’re always Ready. And we respect each other, and care for the course, though it is so firm that we struggle to find pitchmarks even when our shots do find the green. We linger awhile for tea on the patio, and chat, but soon the dream is over, and we retrace our steps across crunching gravel and north through the fading light towards home.

This is my reflection time, the drive, and it occurs to me that I have probably observed this ritual - immersed myself in the glory of Rye - a couple of dozen times by now. And I am yet to have a bad day - perhaps even a bad moment, though the slappy cut from the eighteenth is an irritation - so when I arrive home, I drop a friend a note to remind him of his spiritual home, and when the sun peers through his windows on the other side of the planet, he responds, and his love for the rituals of Rye leap off the page and moisten my eyes.

“Rye is the sum of all of its parts; its history and its essence are not contrived, they are organic and passed on from generation to generation. It’s a privilege to be a member there”, he writes, and I sit and absorb this for longer than it took to play the fourth the previous afternoon. This state of being that we call Rye is passed on from one round to another, one generation to the next, and it is in the bones of these rituals - and the others that Rye quietly ignores - that its unique recipe, as mysterious as that of the home-brewed Kümmel, is preserved.

I am yet to meet anyone wearing that striped tie who didn’t declare their membership an enormous privilege, but it is equally one of the great privileges of my life to walk across these links now and then, as a visitor. The rituals of Rye seem to make me a better person, so if Aristotle was right, and “we are what we repeatedly do”, then I should plot my way back sometime soon, and let this precious place once again carry out its sorcery on me.

And anyway, I left my jacket & tie in the locker room, so that’s one element of the packing ritual already ticked…

Footnote:
* As many readers will know, The President’s Putter is the annual meeting of the Oxford & Cambridge Golfing Society, held at Rye in the first full week of January come rain or shine, since 1920. If ever an event deserved to be described as a ritual, this is it.

Each year, the champion gets to contribute their winning golf ball to the famous putters hanging in the bar, the first of which was donated to the society by John Low. These not only depict another ritual of Rye, one in which many giants of the amateur game - the likes of Roger Wethered, Michael Attenborough and Gerald Micklem - triumphed, but a potted history of the development of the golf ball, with some interesting spheres donated. Low was famously concerned about ball technology a century ago; perhaps he’d have been cheered that in this particular outpost, such “advancements” remain of only partial benefit in the wind off the Channel…

The Putter has also been the source of some rich narrative, from Alistair Cooke to Herb Warren Wind, and, of course, the gentleman whose red leather armchair (inherited from his grandfather Charles, I believe) is a few feet away from that first Putter and whose name is synonymous with Rye. I find it a delightful fact that the ball hanging in the 1924 slot was handed in by Bernard Darwin. I feel a mid-winter camping trip to the coast coming on…

Oh my…I haven’t read this one for quite a while, nor stepped out onto that gravel car park, and into the breeze coming off Camber Sands. I did go back and linger on the fringes of “The Putter”, as threatened in the Footnote above. And it was wonderful…

And I picked up my blazer, so that cunning excuse to once more let the van show me the way to Rye has expired. But I’ve left a good part of my heart out on the links there, along with a few nice golf balls. And not many days go by when I don’t yearn to stand beside old Bernardo’s chair and gaze across the rumpled turf blanket of heaven. There is nowhere quite like Rye…