Christmas Day brings with it another type of gift, the type that resides only in my memory, growing ever more rose tinted as the years drift past. I can’t pick out which year is which, but I can still find the themes of those mornings, blending into one overall picture, a vignette of forgetfulness gradually creeping in from each corner.
Our plastic tree stood tall, holding the decorations that would not change for a couple of decades. Next to it, and in front of the roaring fire, that thick green rug would be hidden under a variety of boxes and shapes, all trying to poke through the same old woolen blanket that sits across my lap this morning.
Mum in a chair, distracted by the many remaining details to be ironed out before lunch; Dad on the sofa, watching carefully as I pulled out the presents, one at a time. Radio 3 would be tickling away on the old grey Roberts set behind us, and two brown tabby cats would stroll in and around the action, stimulated by a sharp awareness of a turkey roasting somewhere in the house.
A few presents are still available for my recollection - a LEGO Inter-City train, whose red and yellow doors were forever getting lost; one year a set of Mizuno TP-9’s, my urgency to tear off the clear plastic face protectors floating back across the decades. In another house, two decades later, a copy of Alistair Cooke’s “The Marvellous Mania”, a book that remains beside me now, and reminds me of that golfing childhood, of the late eighties, and of Dad, whose writing enhances the title page.
Most of the rest of those parcels, whose bulky shapes so intrigued me through the blanket, have now passed beyond my memory, but the beauty of any gift lies in the potential for connection they bring. A kindness, an understanding. A thoughtful gift is a gift for both parties, and through the remembrance of these few cherished presents, strong emotions are stirred of people and places forever left behind.
One year, and I can’t be sure which year it was, another gift was bestowed, one that could never be hidden among the pile, nor forgotten. I know I watched Sandy win the Open at Royal St George’s in 1985, and then the drama of Seve and Norman and Jack at Augusta the following spring, like some Shakespearean epic. Both of those got played out a few hundred times over the park, with just a few old clubs and my imagination for company, so it must have been somewhere around the mid-eighties, an intoxicating time for European golf.
Football training had been cancelled, along with the school team, and my parents had somehow thought of a golf lesson as a short-term option for this energetic child. Whether the lesson came before or after a trip to the local pitch and putt is lost in the sands of time, but, like Christmas Day itself, such places bring into sharp focus tiny details of those experiences; sensory tags that enable me to cling on to them.
The sound of the lock clicking on the studio door as I stepped into that room full of dusty nets each Saturday morning. The gentle whispering of the leaves on the tall Aspen that guards the eighth green, all of forty-five yards away from my scuffed but loyal balata on the tee. The smell of a new glove, the quickening of breath as a ball was spotted in the scrub that bordered the edges of that lush, green paradise.
Somehow my parents - both non-golfers - gave me a gift that will last me a lifetime. Golf back then was hardly fashionable - think Faldo/Pringle sweaters and long, tassled brogues - but perhaps golf never will be. It’s more than just a game, this; more than just a sport. Maybe it doesn’t ever need to be popular, or ubiquitous. Maybe it’s just, for those who’ve stumbled upon or been given that same precious gift my parents gave me, a different way of life.
On the surface it’s a nice way to get out of the house or the office, to remember what it’s like to walk with friends in the fresh air, under vast skies. But look a little deeper and it seems to be a path down which to pursue mastery. Not mastery of the ball, of course, for it will never concede control to us for more than the occasional fluke, but of ourselves. An ideal framework through which to seek excellence.
On Christmas Day 2007, I’d have opened that hardback, and read that first line - “They have been playing golf for eight hundred years and no one has satisfactorily said why”, and heard it not in my own voice, but in Cooke’s languid delivery, another of those sensory tags kicking in. And he’s right in a way, as usual. But on this Christmas Day, looking back in celebration of one of the greatest blessings of my life, I feel like having a stab at responding to his observation myself. Each of us have our own private motives for behaviour, but for me, a few decades on from those initial steps into the shady mysteries of golf, there seem to be many reasons why this is not so much a choice as a compulsion. A necessity.
I play golf for those hours in the centre of nature, sharing the space with the trees and the grasses, the birds and the bees. For the gentle contours of the landscapes and the delicate patterns of the clouds. For the golden streaks of sunlight pushing through the woodland; for the sound of the rain on my hat. Golf grounds me in the infinite beauty of the natural world; the antidote to a life lived in concrete towns and speeding metal boxes.
I play golf for the variety of the stage, too. Wild, rugged links; the breathtaking views and fine flowers of chalk downland; the simple glory of the heath. No other game has such extraordinary real estate, but I can also love golfing on the carpet, or in the garden. I have golfed on beaches and up mountains; through woodlands and parks.
I play golf to interact with the artistry of the masters, whose holes and routings and vistas confound and delight me time after time. Simpson, and Colt, and Fowler and Abercromby, all long gone but now immortal in the glorious curves they left behind. Golf architecture the most interactive of art forms.
I play golf to rekindle that simple joy that beams from the eyes of children; for the bliss of the great shot, lurking amid the others as if it’s roulette we play, rather than golf. For the insights our failures bring us hole-by-hole, and for the exquisite, enchanting knowledge that an occasional long putt will drop - must drop - long before it threatens that silent aluminium pocket of dreams.
I play golf for the bounces, good and bad; to relinquish for a while that human urgency to control everything, to dominate nature. To be at the mercy of the golfing gods and of our own fragile temperament. And in this, at the hands of this brutal, beautiful game, lies a Stoic education like no other. Golf makes me a better person.
I play golf for the people, for it seems to attract mostly the sort of people I like best. A golfer has a sense of humility, a courteous nature. The game will stop egos in their tracks and drag us all down to the same level, and in that shared suffering there is something that builds community, empathy. Most of all, golfers seem to have a sharp sense of humour, no doubt developed as a result of the game’s fundamental absurdity. Often it’s a case of “laugh or cry”.
We face immeasurable odds in each staggering lurch at the ball, and yet once in a while the universe gifts us a straight one, and our hearts sing and the laughter echoes through the course as the ball soars above it all. Many of the people I’ve loved most in this life have walked the same fairways; the ones who are no longer with us I remember at their best, scowling or smiling at this short putt or that duffed chip, or nursing their wounds in a tumbler, from the comfort of the 19th.
I play golf for the silence, too…for the moments between shots when a random glance might catch sight of a passing skein of geese, or of the intricate, frosted web of some hidden spider. For the tranquility that sometimes appears, as the wider world peels away and it is just me and the turf and the stick and the ball. And then, it is not only the stuff of life that is absent - furloughed, perhaps - but time itself. I am back in the moment, just as I was when this finest of gifts was first bestowed all those years ago. Past and future fade away, and there is nothing else to attend to but this very next stroke. Golf points me towards the realm of the mystics, to a deeper life.
Golf was, is, and will always be for me The Best Christmas Present, and my gratitude towards my parents, my golf teacher, and all of the people I’ve met through this celestial pursuit knows no bounds. It’s Christmas Day, and there are this year’s physical boxes and cards to be opened, but before that all starts, there’s just enough time for a quick loop. There’s always enough time for a quick loop.
Thank you for reading, and have a Merry Christmas!
So apparently I’m not the only one who is continually trying to answer the “why” question when it comes to this absurd but, at least when it comes to my journey through life, absolutely essential game. Thank you, Richard, for not only taking a stab at it but coming the closest of anyone I’ve encountered of hitting the mark. A gift to kindred spirits.
Thoughtful, enjoyable, and wonderfully written. I haven’t been able to play for months but your fabulous essays have been a regular reminder of all that is great about the game. Best wishes for 2023.