It seems to me that much of life is about searching. Few of us are bold enough to call ourselves “seekers”, at least out loud, for that label carries with it a stigma that points at some mystical plateau even more confusing than the World Handicapping System (that’s meant to be a joke; anyone who has tried to administer a mixed tee competition, or perhaps submit a card from that part of the golfing “World” they call Scotland will know only too well that no such realm exists).
We seem to batter our way through life, searching for the next job, or house, or shiny new driver, in the vain hope that something outside of what we have now - some different, other thing - will provide us with an answer. I stand on the train to London, and the titles of the books being read all around me speak of their readers looking for an urgent fix, a transformation, an upgrade. All around me people scowl at volumes of self-help, or self-improvement, or some other genre that whispers of our dissatisfaction with the way things are - the way we are - and I am no different.
And when the holidays come, we search for some incredible place, a vacation paradise where we can again feel pampered and special, and come back full of an enhanced sense of meaning that quickly wears off in the daily grind. We’re used to being able to think through and find a solution, too - if something is not perfect, we try and force matters by working out ways to combat the effects of the imperfection, rather than slowing down to look at the cause itself. Always searching…
There’s nothing new in this, I realise. Layered on top of our internal conflicts, of the battle between our logical minds and the ancient software of our distant, ancestral past, the latter of which’s course is firmly set for caution, sits the modern, environmental diet. Of conflicting messages by the truckload, and of rapidly diminishing attention spans. No wonder we’re looking outside ourselves for the clues - the world seems to rush past our bewildered inner selves, gaining pace all the time.
So we invest in golf for a bit of peace and quiet, perhaps, but the same old patterns emerge there. Golf is like a mirror that reflects back at us our approach to the rest of our lives, and and the game asks us difficult questions for which we have very few answers. I think of a man regularly found on the range not so far from here, hitting ball after ball in search of something - some elusive alchemy - that he last saw in the late ‘90’s.
“It must be in there somewhere”, he thinks, but mother time and the mental collateral damage of a life in golf have taken their toll, and instead of finding the fairways, what remains of his own golfing narrative is more likely to take place in the gorse where his sweeping slice presumably ends up, given his apparent preoccupation with that area. Miles from the short grass. At his age, the blisters from these practice sessions may never heal, but, having seen long ago a glimpse of golf and life when they went well, he just can’t let it lie. Always searching…
We look for assistance in the physical sense - perhaps a course of lessons, as if that could reverse a lifetime of bad habits, or maybe we buy the latest glossy magazine, with a hundred or more swing tips that we will read and promptly forget, or rather, file away in our cluttered brains alongside everything else from this crazy life - another tiny nugget of disconnected nonsense to clog up our hard drives.
Or, if we’re in a more thoughtful mode, or have exhausted every single physical swing tip on planet earth, we might consider the mental side of golf, and thereby nudge ourselves a tiny bit closer to the secret. It was Bob Jones (he hated being called Bobby, about the only thing he did hate by all accounts) who said that golf is really played “on a five-and-a-half-inch course, the space between your ears”.
But even with that in mind, we fill the breathless seconds - as we sway gracelessly over the ball, lunging to and fro like some demented, concussed human pendulum - with too much thought, too much logic. When the ball does flush off the centre of the face for a change, it is either the law of averages kicking in, or the swing that made it happen was, for a change, more about a feeling than a defined instruction. Yet we forget these clues as quickly as they appear.
So what can we do about this? Einstein defined insanity as “doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results”, yet golf seems to require us to leave such wisdom at the first tee, or in the trolley shed. We take a lesson, from a teacher with years of experience, and promptly forget the simple prompt, or sometimes play with that marginally weaker grip (which feels so unnatural that she might as well have asked you to hit the ball with your legs rather arms) until the fourth tee, where one bad strike persuades your idiotic brain to revert to the old way, which has brought you endless misery and pain over the years. We’re searching, still, but unwilling to change much to get there. We want a shortcut; a quick fix.
To effect real, lasting change goes against all that our amygdala is programmed for, and in any case, if we did improve, this game of golf is never over, never mastered, so it is about the most futile of endeavours. So all but one in a thousand of us tread the same old paths we always have, landing in the same old bunkers, and the new equipment at which we throw money every year keeps the bunkers relevant as our natural ball striking and strength gradually deteriorates with “experience”. We continue to search, but can never really be bothered to look deep enough for the answers, which are most times hidden in plain sight all around us.
Feels like a lecture, this, and you might be wondering what angle I am coming from here. Well, I’m in the same boat as you - a fool who plays and loves golf despite everything that happens during it. I too am searching for the same, elusive concoction as you are, that moment when you string two or three together in a row, when the ball looks in from six feet away and still drops in, to the disgust of your oldest, fiercest friend.
I no longer throw money at the new things, nor read the tips in the magazines, but I am still searching. My primary vice, besides the larger one that is golf itself, is in tracking down the old clubs of my youth, as if they might trigger some sort of muscle memory of the shots I used to be able to hit. The ones I remember happening more often than they probably did, which in my dreams soar higher above the grass than any ball ever has, apart from the handful they left on the moon.
It feels like I am giving a second life to an old persimmon wood when I pick one up in an auction, and after all this searching, to find, say, an old set of blades brings a feeling akin to unearthing buried treasure for me. Of late, the focus has been more on putters, and as someone who caught the bug before Scotty Cameron took that particular strain of bling forward, the old PINGS - the ones my pocket money couldn’t stretch to back then - have a significant draw.
For a few pounds one day, I might pick up yet another B60 on eBay, and on a different morning an original Pal stares at me from a charity shop window. The shed is increasingly cramped with all these historical artefacts, and while none of them make me putt better, at least, in selecting a different one each time I play, I am trying something different. Einstein would approve, and I think he’d putt well with today’s A-blade purchase, too.
So I’m no golf teacher, and despite these decades of facing golf’s direct questioning, and this eternal searching that playing the game entails, I don’t have any answers. But I do have lots of Ansers…and another one arriving tomorrow…
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