“Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes, including you”
- Anne Lamott
I played at Broadstone a couple of weeks ago. It was, as I’d expected, excellent - my first experience of this routing through gorgeous, rolling heathland, with plenty of architectural and agronomic points of interest along the way. But, amidst a jumble of recollections of the day, spent in the convivial company of three equally addicted golf nuts, one image stands out in my mind.
Playing the fourteenth, I dragged my second a tad, landing perhaps three or four yards left of the perfect spot, given the way the subtle green contours push everything right. As we made our way up to the putting surface, I could see my ball had caught the far corner of the large, greenside bunker, and the top half of it was winking out at me from a classic plugged lie.
Part of the joy of this game for me is in the language we golfers share - a lexicon of short terms that mean, to the insider, so much more than the non-golfer could ever imagine. Many of these are a single, ancient term - “stymie”, “mulligan”, “dormie” and - dare I even mention it - “shank”. Others are a pair of words - “dog licence”, “provisional ball”, and the one I am slowly working towards here - “fried egg”.
Peering down at this textbook example of a buried lie from my precarious stance in the freshly laid heather turf that frames this restored bunker, I could only smile. For while it looked beautiful, with more than half the ball beneath the surface of the coarse, white sand, extraction from here was going to be difficult, and even if I could get it out of this cosy nest and over the nearby lip, the surround and green contours were all working against both me and the ball. It was a tight spot.
But, having grown up splashing out of unraked bunkers on the local pitch and putt, I am not a subscriber to the commonly heard view that lies in bunkers should be perfect. I stood in the middle of the fairway, with a preferred lie, and I pulled my shot left, towards the only greenside bunker, so the only person I could possibly blame here is the one looking down at the result, perplexed.
These sandy hollows, the modern equivalent of the sand scrapes of the original links, are meant to be hazards, so if you manage to put your ball in there, a hazardous lie is to be expected. Perhaps even deserved, though the fried egg is probably at the far end of the punishment scale. If golfers are complaining about bad lies in bunkers, or that the consistency or depth of the sand is marginally different from one bunker to the next, it’s a fairly strong sign that the general condition of the course is good.
It also suggests that the person wielding the complaint remains in a fairly comfortable position towards the narrower peak of Maslow’s hierarchy, so we can listen, and perhaps nod or smile understandingly, but such bitter injustice is unlikely to be fatal, and sooner or later, they will have to get on with it. Or take a lesson, perhaps. It’s not rocket science, this.
We all find ourselves in a “stuck state” from time to time, whether heavily plugged in a greenside bunker or stymied by a particular theroetical dilemma at work. Robert Pirsig coined the term “gumption trap”, a predicament from where - when tending to the maintenance of a motorcycle or anything else - progress will not be made without a shift in understanding. His advice to the amateur mechanic, staring frustrated at the technical equivalent of my wicked lie at Broadstone, is to get out of the workshop, put on a fresh pot of coffee, gain some perspective.
There will be a way out, but often it takes a bit of distance, and time, to find out what that is. If we can’t move the thing forward, we might have to go sideways…find a way to work around the issue. Clearly, with a two-ball on the fourteenth tee, preparing a hot beverage was not going to be an option for me on this occasion, but it hasn’t stopped me dwelling on this notion of being stuck, and the memory of my ball sitting deep in the crater of its own making seemed to lead to other thoughts about how golf helps us frame, and perhaps even go about, our lives.
These days we are bombarded with information, and choice, and it can be overwhelming at times to know what to do in any given situation. Even when we do act, it is often with a nagging sense of uncertainty about whether we’ve chosen the right course of action, or concern over how others will percieve what we’ve done, and this mental baggage can tie us up in knots where no knots ought really to exist. For if we do what every decent foursomes partner promises to do as they approach the first tee - try our best every time it is our turn - then the result and the reaction really shouldn’t matter so much. But still this endless choice undermines us.
And that’s where something as clear as a plugged lie in a bunker is helpful, for it shuts down all the other options. There is only one way to get that ball out of the fried egg (unless you are filming a Hamlet ad), and that is to square the face, and commit fully to the shot. Anything less than that doesn’t stand a chance of success, and how refreshing it is to play it from a state of certainty about the operation, if not the result. The path has been chosen for you, and now - clear of all the usual doubts and deliberations - you know what you have to do. So while such situations terrify most golfers, I felt a strange privilege that this awful lie, beneath a difficult stance, was the best lesson golf could teach me that day on this gorgeous course in deepest Dorset. How rare, this simplicity.
Amidst all the noise, and the endless alerts and notifications, and the day to day swing between dopamine hits and adrenaline that is modern life, my ball had found a quiet corner of a greenside bunker, and all of the rest of the fluff faded away, stripped bare, back to the essentials. My fried egg had unplugged me from past and future, from good and bad - from everything except this great challenge ahead.
The club went back, and through, and clumps of sand floated up against the dark green background of the putting surface, and somehow, the ball popped out just right, and found the collar, and then the green, and rolled on and on until it lay within the range of a gimme. An everyday miracle, by my admittedly humble standards.
I had successfully unplugged the ball, and had to ask a friend (thanks Dunc) to send me the above photo of a fried egg, as at Broadstone my phone was intentionally left in the locker room, and my means of recording the evidence thereby absent. And this is for me a large part of the appeal of golf in these hectic times - the chance to unplug ourselves, to just go and play, leaving all the noise behind, and to then return to real life battered and bruised but also refreshed.
I always feel replenished by this silly old game, and the friendships and stories it creates, and stand just a fraction of an inch taller as a result of the very occasional great (or lucky!) shot. As usual, Anne Lamott, who knows all about Pirsig’s gumption trap in the context of writing but is far too sensible to golf, was spot on.
We spend too much time plugged; sport, and in particular golf, can offer an antidote…
Thank you for reading this, and if you are subscribed, or have helped spread the word about these musings via email or social media, I am hugely grateful. If not, please do!!!
You can find a link to some other pieces here, and please also consider following my twitter feed here. Thank you, sincerely!
Love your writing Richard. Please keep posting its brilliant