Recovering Golf's Original Orientation

For two centuries the game has been engineered away from itself. The featherie gave way to the gutty and the gutty to the rubber core; hickory gave way to steel and steel to graphite; the common pasture gave way to the irrigated, cart-pathed, four-and-a-half-hour resort course with its Stimp meter and its sponsor boards. Each change solved a problem—but rarely the player's. The problems being solved belonged to manufacturers, broadcasters, developers, and tour officials, none of whom plays the affected round, and the game was the thing adjusted to fit their solutions. The cumulative result is a version of golf progressively thinned: faster to sell, easier to televise, more expensive to play, and a little further every decade from the walk on interesting ground that was the whole point. There is, therefore, somewhere to walk back toward.

The path back is not a retreat. It is a recovery of disposition that uses the modern apparatus selectively rather than being used by it. Three centuries of accumulated infrastructure—clubs, balls, courses, organizations, a global community of players—cannot be wished away, and most of it should not be. The Haskell ball is a real improvement over the featherie if your goal is for ordinary people to play the game at all. The railways made it possible for a working-class Bostonian to caddie his way into the U.S. Open. Television gave us the Ouimet narrative, the Jones grand slam, the Watson-Nicklaus duel at Turnberry. The point is not to undo the history but to recover the orientation it has obscured.

The orientation is this: golf is a walk on interesting ground in good company, organized around a few arbitrary problems involving a small stick and a small ball, and the player's relationship to the ground and the company is what makes the activity worth a life. Everything that thickens that relationship belongs. Everything that thins it does not. The criterion is intimate rather than ideological. A persimmon driver and a graphite driver can both belong if both are chosen by a player who knows why he chose. A cart can belong to a player whose knees no longer allow walking, and is a betrayal in the hands of one whose knees are fine. Television can belong as a way of learning the game from masters one would never otherwise see, and it does not belong as the template the local muni tries to imitate. The question in every case is whether the technology or the convention deepens the encounter or substitutes for it.

So the practical path has a shape. Walk. This is the single act that does the most work. A walked round is a different activity from a ridden one, restoring conversation, attention to the ground underfoot, the rhythm of effort and recovery between shots, and the body's slow learning of the course. Carry a bag of seven or eight clubs rather than fourteen. The reduction forces invention—the half-shot, the bumped seven-iron from forty yards, the punched three-quarter wedge—and invention is where skill lives. Play match play with a friend more often than stroke play against the field. The match restores the small dramas the early game was built from and makes the round a conversation between two people rather than an arithmetic operation against par.

Choose courses that have been read into the land rather than imposed on it. The minimalist architects of the last thirty years—Coore and Crenshaw at Sand Hills and Bandon Trails, Doak at Pacific Dunes and Ballyneal, Hanse at Streamsong Black, DeVries at Kingsley—have been doing the work of putting the original constraints back in: firm and fast turf, ground-game options, walking-only routings, native vegetation, greens that demand thought rather than calibration. Mike Keiser's whole project at Bandon is a deliberate argument that the modern player will pay extravagantly for an experience the modern industry had decided was obsolete. Support that argument with your greens fees, and the rest will follow. Architects build what gets paid for.

Restore the muni. Public golf in America is the inheritance Van Cortlandt and Bethpage and Cobbs Creek left to anyone who wants the game, and it is the part of the inheritance most at risk. The closures since 2006 have fallen disproportionately on the mid-tier publics that taught most American golfers how to play. Adopt one. Play its weekday twilight rate, befriend its pro, work its tournaments, vote for its funding, bring a child or a stranger. Cobbs Creek in Philadelphia is undergoing a multi-year restoration led by Gil Hanse precisely because a group of local players refused to let it die. There is one of those near most of us.

Play with the dead. Read Bernard Darwin, Herbert Warren Wind, Henry Longhurst, Pat Ward-Thomas, John Updike on golf, Dan Jenkins at his best, Lorne Rubenstein, Tom Coyne. Watch the old footage. Walk St Andrews if you ever get the chance, and Musselburgh and North Berwick and Prestwick and Brora and the dozen other minor links in the same orbit; an American player can fly to Scotland and play seven of the oldest courses in the world in a week for the cost of one round at a U.S. resort. The point of the pilgrimage is not nostalgia. It is calibration. Standing on the first tee at the Old Course with the town behind you and the Eden estuary ahead and a sense of every player who has stood there since the fifteenth century resolves a great deal of confusion about what the game is for.

Tolerate slowness in your own play and refuse it in the pace of the round. A four-hour round of walked golf is faster than a four-and-a-half-hour round of cart golf because the walking player is moving between shots while the riding player is sitting. Ready golf, played as a courtesy to one's companions and the group behind, restores the rhythm. A round should feel like a long conversation, not a traffic jam.

Hold equipment lightly. Buy what you will use until it breaks, learn it the way the Musselburgh players learned their hedgerow cudgels, and resist the marketing cycle that wants a new bag every three years. The single greatest expansion of your skill is available for free: practice the short game, since seventy percent of strokes happen within a hundred yards of the green and almost no amateur practices there. A player who can pitch and chip and putt beats a player who can drive it forty yards farther, every time, at the level any of us play.

Keep faith with the small contemplative tradition that runs alongside the competitive one. Golf is one of very few activities a modern adult can do that satisfies the conditions for what the contemplatives call recollection—extended attention, in silence, in a landscape, with the body and the mind engaged together on a problem of no consequence. Bobby Jones called it "a game whose great moments are accompanied by little public exclamation." That is its peculiar gift, and the gift is intact, available, and free in every walked round on every walking course on any morning anyone chooses. The path back is just that. Walk out. Carry your bag. Play the ball as it lies. Notice the ground. Talk to your companion or be quiet with him. Lose or win the match. Shake hands on the eighteenth. Buy him a drink. That is the whole thing. It always was.