Modernization's Corruption of Golf

Steel killed the first thing. Hickory was a living material—cut from a tree, varying piece by piece, asking the player to know his own clubs the way a violinist knows his instrument; no two drivers were quite the same and the swing was a negotiation with the wood in your hands. Replacing it with a tube of extruded steel turned the club into an appliance and the stroke into a repeatable industrial process. Graphite finished the job. The modern driver is engineered to forgive, which is to say engineered to require nothing of its owner, and the loss of any requirement is the loss of the relationship.

The cart was worse. Golf is a walk—that is what it is, ontologically, before anything else: four hours in undulating country with a small set of tools, interrupted at intervals by problems of judgment. To climb into a battery-powered buggy with cupholders and a sound system and crawl down a paved track between holes is not to play golf at lower intensity; it is to play a different game in the same costume. The damage runs in three directions. It has destroyed the conversation that walking thirty-six with one companion produces, since the cart makes you a passenger in your own round. It has destroyed course design, since architects now route for cart paths and seventy-five-yard transitions, producing the housing-development sprawl that defines most American golf. And it has destroyed the players' bodies, since the cart spares you the only honest exercise the game ever offered.

Then there is television. The professional tour exists as a spectacle for sponsors, and its requirements have flowed back upstream and rewritten what the rest of us understand golf to be. The pristine emerald fairway mowed at a tenth of an inch and watered into a uniform paste, free of any natural irregularity, is a television product, not a links. "Lift, clean, and place," the absurd convention that a player may relocate his ball to a favorable lie, is a television product. The 7,500-yard course, the twelve-foot Stimp green, the perfectly raked bunker, the spectator-amphitheater eighteenth, the synthetic polos, the giant brimmed visors, the corporate logos, and the four-and-a-half-hour weekend round behind the foursome that thinks it is playing on television—all of it is the television product running backwards into amateur life. Professionalism set the standard, and the standard has been crushing ordinary players ever since: once "real golf" came to mean what the best players in the world do on perfect courses, the weekend player inherited expectations—of conditions, of scoring, of seriousness—that have nothing to do with walking nine holes after work.

The residential course applies the same logic to the land itself. When the course became an amenity for selling houses, the golf stopped being the point: the routing answers to lot lines and street frontage rather than to the ground, out-of-bounds stakes guard backyards down both sides of every fairway, and the holes are designed to be looked at from a deck rather than played with any joy. It is real estate with a flag in it, and for thirty years it was most of what America built.

The arms race in the ball is the same logic at the equipment end. Each new titanium head, multilayer urethane ball, perimeter-weighted iron, and adjustable hosel makes the easy parts easier without touching the hard ones, which means the gap between the best and the rest narrows in nothing except the impressiveness of the numbers. Courses must lengthen by a thousand yards a generation to compensate. The strategic architecture of Tillinghast and Ross is rendered obsolete because no professional needs to think about a fairway bunker he can simply carry. So Merion is rebuilt and Augusta is stretched and the classical proportions are mutilated because the equipment will not be regulated and the equipment will not be regulated because the manufacturers pay the broadcast.

And the Bluetooth speaker, trivial as it seems, completes the pattern by colonizing the one thing the apparatus had not yet reached: the quiet. Golf's silence is not an absence but a medium—the walk, the wind, the conversation or the deliberate lack of it—and a playlist carried onto the course drags the noise of everywhere else onto the last ground that offered an escape from it, turning a shared contemplative space into someone else's party.

Beneath all of this lies a single error: the conviction that the point of a game is to make it easier, fairer, faster, more uniform, more comfortable, and more televisable—rather than that the point of a game is precisely what makes it a game in the first place, which is the gratuitous embrace of arbitrary difficulty in a beautiful place for no purpose beyond the playing. The hickory-and-feathery players at Musselburgh in 1816, walking in tweed across rabbit-cropped turf into the wind off the Forth, with no scoreboard, no gallery, no irrigation, no broadcast deal, no Stimpmeter, no cart, no logo, and no pretensions—they were playing the game. We are mostly playing its televised effigy.