“We tend to stay in our own lane…”
Instalment 1 of (at least) 2…”In search of a “normal” golfer…”
About two weeks ago, I was talking about golf with someone. At least, I think it was about two weeks back. It could have been almost any day in the last two decades, I suppose, given that I was talking about golf. And although I can’t remember who it was, it was definitely someone. I think.
For while it is true that I can be found talking to myself at times, and the subject then is almost exclusively golf - golf is “my lane”, after all - I think I would remember if I had said it to myself. Particularly as it seems to be, to me at least, an interesting theme. So let’s assume for now that I was talking to someone else, rather than myself, and that all suggestions that I am losing the plot are to some degree exaggerated.
So, talking golf with someone. And this someone, who I can’t really describe, but they must have had at least one feature - a mouth - suddenly said “we tend to stay in our own lanes”, and from that moment on, while those words percolated through my consciousness, I was blissfully unaware of anything beyond that point in the conversation. We’d (or possibly I’d; refer to previous paragraph) been talking about playing different types of golf - alternative formats of the game, and how they relate and transmit back to the “normal”, standard version.
It seems absurd to refer to a standard version of golf, or for that matter a “normal” golfer, as we all know that this sub-species is inherently abnormal. You would only need to take a seat beside the first tee, for example, to watch, in the course of the first hour, the most diverse exhibition of individuality on the planet, unfolding before your very eyes. One golfer rushes, to get it over with asap, presumably to surprise the ball; another spends an eternity gripping the club, with a ferocious intensity that turns their knuckles white and makes Sergio look positively decisive.
Another swings back so slowly that you wonder if they’re having second thoughts about the round before they’ve even started, only to launch at the ball with such violence that it takes your breath away, leaving your subsequent involuntary laughter starved of the oxygen required to stifle it, snuff it out. The ball, of course, dribbles away to the edge of the next teeing ground a few yards in front.
There is something about that first tee shot that grips the golfer, too, for better or worse. One lady will seem to stand a foot taller approaching the ball, assertive movements conveying a deep confidence and clarity of purpose that the stationary ball has no right to disobey, but it does nevertheless, weakly cutting away to land halfway through an acre of thick rough, never to be seen again.
The next effort is from a man who has paid handsomely for this association with golf, and with the Club, and in an act of enormous generosity for which he will never be thanked but rather blamed, has signed up his entire family for this maddening, lifelong misery. You can tell, as he selects a ball from a bulging pocket of expensive, pristine spheres, that his deliberation in choosing one is because he is looking closely at each to see if they look trustworthy. They are all virginal, of course, and therefore identical.
Eventually, a selected ball emerges, as does the shiny new driver that was finally delivered the day before, and the tee goes in the ground, and the ball balances on top, waiting for instruction from the clubface. And in that moment, on the first tee of every golf course on earth, day after week after month after year, he, like you and I, and a million other fools past and present, are stripped bare of our own story, our history, as we stand naked in the face of golf’s brutal home truths.
At that point, the playing field is for once truly level, laser levelled even, and no amount of money or coercion or power or fear can help this gentleman propel that gleaming ball from the brand new tee to the fresh cut fairway ahead. This character has held senior positions all round the globe, has more disposable income than seems possible, and is invited to dine with the great and the good of both golf and humanity as a whole. He is, by anyone’s definition including his own, hugely successful, but golf doesn’t care. He will never see that ball again; a wicked, low hook taking it deep into the realm of the woodpeckers, and the whole sorry spectacle will repeat in deafening silence as he rummages in the ball pocket once more.
I’m rambling again here (perhaps it was me I was talking to about lanes after all); apologies. The point of all this - which I had to scroll up to find - was that golf is such a fiercely personal game (should that be feud?) for each of us that a notion of some “normal” golfer or format isn’t easy to arrive at. But we can set some parameters, at least.
A “normal” golfer will carry, or perhaps push - for some unknown reason many people who could carry, don’t. They’re presumably the people who also take a three minute walk by taxi, watching the nearby pedestrians slip away from them as they linger in heavy traffic, trying to avoid talking to the cabbie. Perhaps they do so in order that they can talk to themselves, instead, about golf. Anyway, they carry or push a bag with exactly fourteen clubs in. Always fourteen; why would anyone carry less than the maximum number? This is what you are permitted, so fourteen it is. It may well be that they don’t realise you can have less in the bag, or perhaps it is so that they can be sure they have thrown enough money at their golfing problems.
They will play their own ball, typically, all the way round, or rather a succession of balls, but the next stroke, usually a recovery shot, will always be theirs. It will be a certain type of ball for many golfers as, linked in with the earlier man’s search for a ball he can trust, there is a degree of superstition for most players. You can’t expect to switch from a Srixon to a Titleist ball without consequence, or Vice (get it?) versa. The “normal” golfer will identify with - put their faith in, along with most of their worldly hopes and fears - a certain brand of ball despite an overwhelming catalogue of evidence that proves the ball cannot be relied upon at all.
In fact, the data rather suggests that their preferred ball brand is probably an imposter; a spy, sent to undermine from within like some awful, dimpled Trojan Horse. [I smiled the other day when I saw for the first time in years the label “Professional Weapon” on the sole of an old Bridgestone driver, a tool that lay just a few feet from some examples of Joe Powell’s legendary persimmon “Smoker”. Model names are, in my view, far from adequate in golfing equipment these days…who can get excited by a model S37 putter, or the new XV F2 irons. How about “Trojan Horse” as a name for a ball?]
TO BE CONTINUED…
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