Stymied Advent Calendar 2022: #13 "No one has satisfactorily said why"
Golfing Letters from America, revisited…
Since December 2021, I have sent out 91 of these Stymies. The first one reached two people; the latest was sent to (somehow) over 650 of you. People are either very bored, or they share the same fascination with this daft game that I have sought to rekindle in this last year or so. Or perhaps a mix of those two factors.
In order to get some of the earlier ones in front of a few more eyes, I will be sharing a selection of re-issued Stymies daily until Christmas Eve; a Stymied Advent Calendar. If you have enjoyed reading them, please share them and encourage others to subscribe. Thank you very much indeed!
18th February 2022: “Nobody has satisfactorily said why”
The voice of Alistair Cooke, presenting his weekly Letter from America via BBC Radio, was an integral part of the soundtrack of my childhood. Somehow his calm, hypnotic delivery would emerge from an ancient, battered Roberts wireless in the kitchen, and for fifteen minutes we would cease making any sounds of our own, and instead listen to the latest transatlantic update from this storytelling genius.
I recall precious few boundaries in those years growing up, apart from various white “out of bounds” markers that I would come to know all too well, but for those few minutes, at a certain time each Sunday, my parents and I would just listen, and learn.
Much of what he tackled was (and still is) beyond me, his focus often on national or foreign policy matters, but other weeks he would provide commentary on popular culture and, occasionally, sport. At Christmas 2007, three years after Cooke passed away, my father gave me a copy of “The Marvellous Mania”, his collected writings on golf, and a recent re-read of these wonderful essays has been revelatory, and long overdue.
Each word jumps off the page at me not in my own voice, but in Cooke’s trademark style, and you can almost sense the twinkle in his eye as he delivers each phrase, for despite only picking up a club at fifty-five, the game consumed him for the remaining forty years of his life - a self-confessed duffer, but hopelessly in love with the sport. He notes early on that “the golfer compresses into a few hours all the emotions he spreads over the rest of his life: hope, envy, betrayal, self-discipline, self-deceit…” - all factors that weave consistently through the non-golfing parts of Cooke’s six decades chronicling the political landscape of the twentieth century and beyond.
Elsewhere he suggests that we perhaps ought not to see golf as a microcosm of life, but the other way round. He was utterly hooked, playing from that fateful first afternoon in the mid-sixties until shortly before his death, and claims to only be writing about the game in the hope that it might “deter some other intending addict”.
Like the best golf books, The Marvellous Mania covers many aspects of the game. In the same way as he had access to the international leaders of his era, Cooke was also lucky enough, via his broadcasting connections and personal contacts, to have plenty of first-hand experience of the giants of the game, spending time with all of the greats. In here are essays that chart the shift of power from Palmer to Nicklaus, and the rivalry between Nicklaus and Player, and a charming piece on Walter Hagen, complete with many of the catchphrases that sum up that walking bundle of flamboyance, with his two-tone crocodile brogues.
My favourite among these remains not Hagen’s epitaph, to “take time to smell the flowers”, but instead his retort to the late night suggestion that his opponent had “been in bed for two hours”, to which his answer could only be “he may be in bed, but he’s not asleep”. Hagen would intimidate opponents on and off the golf course, but this and other interesting observations of these legends pale by comparison with the portrait Cooke paints of “The Gentleman from Georgia”, Bobby Jones, who he came to know well, and regarded as one of only four people he’d met “who radiated simple goodness”.
Jones was at the other end of the modesty spectrum to Hagen, and perhaps to most golfing superstars since, but when his friend Cooke describes him, in 1999, as “an impeccably courteous and decent man…who happened to play the great game with more magic and more grace than anyone before or since”, it is hard to disagree, or see how that designation might ever change. How the modern game could do with a few more of this ilk, playing in the true spirit of golf.
Incidentally, Cooke reveals that he never heard Jones utter the suggested, famous punchline, in reference to the terrible muscle-wasting disease that cut short his golf and life, “you know, we play it as it lies”, but, in the same way that Hagen’s sound bites seemed to encapsulate him, this line, genuine or not, seems to capture the approach of Jones to this golfing life, where friendship and moral courage are the primary concerns. What he would have made of the professional game of today, this lifelong amateur, who can tell, but reading of Cooke’s great admiration for the man, I feel as if the world, and particularly this little golfing corner of it, are far poorer places for the loss of the pair of them.
In amongst this discussion of the elite game lie some priceless memories of the version of golf that us lesser mortals, Cooke included, know best. The routine games, between players whose form swings between the average and the awful, where technique is at times unwatchable, and success a laughable concept - hidden away like many a stray ball in the deep rough, never to be unearthed.
Cooke speaks of the golfer as a “special kind of moral realist who nips the normal romantic and idealistic yearnings in the bud by proving once or twice a week that life is unconquerable but endurable.” He reads all the textbooks on techniques, which he admits displace the political biographies in his study, and also the golf magazines with their endless “fundamental secrets”, but, after taking up this daft pastime so late in life he has the common sense to take all this with a pinch of salt, for he knows that golf permits little more than an occasional glimpse of triumph for most of us.
Regular fours at his beloved San Francisco Golf Club, where he and friends battle with an intensity similar to that seen there before - in the last legal duel, the site of which is marked down the hill behind the short seventh - are recorded with timeless affection, and away from the rolling hills of Tillinghurst’s great masterpiece, he speaks with equal fondness of other, notable spots in the world of golf.
A match unfolds at Brancaster where both sides feel compelled to carry on battling through gale force winds and lashing rain, for each pair think the other side wish to continue despite being, as he puts it, “waterlogged, from the toenails to the scalp”. Another time he travels down to Rye to watch the President’s Putter, an event he suspects is purely scheduled to prove that golf can be played anywhere, anytime. “If they can do it in Rye in January, they can do it at the South Pole, which in some sharp ways Rye resembles”.
The first morning of the event, he reports the town being “obliterated in a fog denser than anything in Dickens”, to the point where it is not easy to see one’s breakfast on the hotel table, and he wrongly assumes that the competition tee-times will be delayed, but Gerald Micklem, “the Genghis Khan of British amateur golf”, puts him straight and he heads into the “great grey nothingness outside…which might very well have been the edge of the world”, to try to observe and report on the invisible games unfolding around him.
Cooke’s grasp of the delicious absurdity of the game in all its guises seeps through the fine paper of this treasured first edition, leaving at least one smile or belly laugh from every page devoured, and though he comes to know and play with the great and the good of the game, on many of the finest trails in the world, it is clear that, having existed over half a century before taking up golf, he would be happy to play with just about anyone, just about anywhere.
The roots of the word amateur point to a person who does something purely for love, and Cooke’s late onset passion for golf is evident in every sentence, though he mixes this with subtle humour, often self-deprecatory, to avoid getting too serious about it all. When the source of his razor sharp wit falls elsewhere, it is always done with a softness that suggests that perhaps he, as well as Jones, should be remembered as “impeccably courteous and decent”.
On the subject of the Rules, he is surely teasing those past Presidents of the USGA, with whom he shares regular afternoons in the California sun, when he says “for a game whose aim is to get a little ball in a hole in as few strokes as possible, the book of rules would seem to offer, at first glance, less excitement than the propositions of Euclid”. His love for the game seems to override the issues that might cause a lesser person irritation, or frustration; instead, he sees such complexities as essential constituents of golf’s overall flavour, and appeal.
Speaking of rules, it would be remiss to not make specific mention of the chapter “Marching Orders”, a list of the preparation and terms of engagement necessary for the members of SFGC to host an annual “Day of British Golf” (and Cooke, as an Englishman, can get away with writing this; I wonder if he were involved in the concept itself). While I have used plenty of quotations from “A Marvellous Mania” above (and probably below, time will tell), I hope that anyone who has not had the great fortune to read it will pick up a copy for this chapter alone. I will therefore limit the excerpt from this table of prescriptions, lovingly compiled and playfully descriptive of what the American visitor might make of the typical golfing experience on this side of the pond, to a single favourite: “Score cards need not be carried. Each player is put on his honour to announce his final score, however surprising the figure may be to the opposing team”.
Alistair Cooke also spent much time with some of the great golfing journalists of those decades, when golf news still made the newspapers outside of major championship weeks, and when the standard of golf writing was suitably refined for this most cerebral of games. Pat Ward-Thomas, Henry Longhurst, even Herb Warren Wind were regular company for him, and while his golfing journey started just a few years after Bernard Darwin died, presumably amidst another of those impenetrable fogs on the Sussex coast, Cooke savoured his work when daylight or the distractions of his day job as a foreign correspondent forced a club from his hands.
But, in reluctantly putting down this book - along with all the happy memories it provokes - there is a tinge of sadness that Cooke waited so long to let the mania set in. For his work on golf sits alongside any of those other writers he respected so, and it feels as if there is far too little of it left for this to be a just universe. Maybe somewhere another dimension exists where he played instead as a child, and we could have eighty years of reflections to savour, rather than only half of that. For the man was a genius, and his intellect and wit are wasted on Watergate and the Cold War.
In “The Written Record”, published in 1980, Cooke notes that “nobody has yet written a (Sudden) Death in the Afternoon to compare with Hemingway’s bone-clear exposition of how a bull is fought”, and the real shame here is that, in the remaining twenty-four years of his life, Cooke was too busy with huge microphones and with his regular four to write it himself, for his command of the language, and the codes and customs that underpin this great love of his made him the ideal candidate for a fine golfing story. But at least he left us this, and thank goodness he did get the bug, however late.
I was once asked in an employment interview who I’d pick for a dream foursome - the industry equivalent of the dinner party question - and I think my answer included Couples, for that wonderfully languid style, and never ending smile, and either Jack or Tiger - I can never remember which. But the fourth name I gave ought really to have been the first, for I can’t think of many things more wonderful than to tie up my laces next to Cooke, perhaps besides the teak cabinet with those old duelling pistols in, and listen to that wonderful voice sing for three hours as we weave and chop our way between the tees and greens of San Francisco. Maybe in another life.
Some people just don’t “get” golf, and that’s fine, but I for one am so glad that this stranger, who used to hypnotise our family’s Sunday mornings via the World Service, “got” there in the end. It’s as if it isn’t just a game, this golf, but a state of mind, and he understood it, and could explain it, so very well.
One final quote to finish, and it’s the sentence that opens this book. Fifteen words that seem to masterfully sum up the whole golfing experience, and if he had simply stopped there, he’d have written more of value about this game than the rest of us ever will. I love that the publisher put this chapter first…it makes it even more likely that when we reach the end, our lives and games enriched by sharing our love of golf with this gentle man, we simply rewind to that first page, just as we head back to the first tee each week, and start all over again.
“They have been playing golf for eight hundred years and nobody has satisfactorily said why”