Why I Play Golf: A Plan B Essay

A psychological experiment was once performed on horses. Each animal had been taught to stamp a hoof four times, say, when the trainer called out that number. The horses that got the number right were rewarded with a carrot or cube of sugar. But for experiment’s sake, the trainers periodically denied the horses their rewards even though they had stamped as instructed. Confused and vexed by the mystery of denial, the horses became obsessed with counting out numbers with their hooves and could be heard clobbering their stable floors throughout the night.

So it is with golf. Even when I first seriously took up the game in my late thirties and was pretty much without a clue concerning the wild variety of contortions involved in a swing, golf occasionally and mysteriously rewarded me with soaring, dead center drives, high approach shots that danced ever nearer the hole, and putts that craftily wandered across the green and found the four-and-a-half-inch cup as if the ball were a hound sniffing its way home. With seemingly the same swing, however, I could founder completely, the carrot or cube of sugar puzzlingly denied me. There would be times when my shot would be so wildly off-target that I could not follow its flight. If the golf ball had a voice it would have been shrieking. There’s a lot of What the heck? on a golf course.

With rented clubs and my mother caddying for him, my father played his one and only round of golf in the 1930s. She seemed to have enjoyed it, but he treated the subject of that afternoon with the stolid silence of soldiers who have witnessed the unspeakable in battle. He sensibly quit the game in disgust at that point.

Whereas I scored five eagles (two under par on a hole) in my first year of golf, a feat I have never since matched, and in the heroin of that rookie success I became addicted.

I hit my second hole-in-one between bouts of writing this. The hole was a 177-yard par-three on the Coyote Hills course designed by Payne Stewart. I hit a soft-as-butter four-iron that sent my Titleist on a gorgeous, unerring trajectory over water to the front of the green, where it bounced once and rolled so unhesitatingly toward the pin it seemed to have a one-track mind. My golf buddy shouted with excitement, “That could go in!” And then it did, falling into the hole like a fat man finding a front row theater seat.

Rick said to Ilsa, “We’ll always have Paris,” and that hole-in-one is my Casablanca moment. The highs in golf are hard to forget.

Mark Twain famously groused that golf was “a good walk spoiled,” but it has become the favorite obsession of a great many other writers as various as P. G. Wodehouse, Harper Lee, John Updike, Tim O’Brien, Agatha Christie, and Cormac McCarthy. The focus golf requires and the bonhomie among playing partners that shared humiliation instills helps lock out the problems of literary craft as the writer instead concentrates on idle chat, ribaldry, the intense rehearsal of golf lessons, and the proper strategy for the next shot. Even sleep fails to empty my mind in such a helpful and restorative way.

It is a Zen-like sport that dictates very little muscular exertion, but a great deal of imagination, discipline, fine-motor control, and seemingly endless practice. Some hackers are foolishly proud of the fact that they’ve never had a lesson, whereas golf instructor Hank Haney recently told reporters that he was on hand for lessons with Tiger Woods for over one hundred days one year. And he hits six hundred balls a day, finding a groove that the muscles otherwise forget like freshmen do the rules of grammar. It’s that hard to do well. So long as you get to position “A” at the strike, you can play the game with the low, scything swing of Lee Trevino or with the steep chops of amateurs who must be humming “I’m a lumberjack and I’m OK.” But even a fractional mistake in alignment, timing, or clubface angle can result in a forest adventure or a cool dip in the lake.

Well-hit balls travel such a long way: a football field is just a wedge for me; my typical seven-iron shots could fly over the homerun fence in every baseball field in the world; the ho-hum drive of a professional carries the stunned, one-and-a-half-ounce pill more than one-fifth of a mile. But John Daly too often demonstrates how being even a little off-kilter at impact can be ugly when multiplied by three hundred majestic yards.

But hundreds of golf club manufacturers are out there, laboring to correct our human frailties. I offer my humble thanks in the form of shocking cash outlays each year. They say a good carpenter never blames his tools, but Winston Churchill also griped that “Golf is a game whose aim is to hit a very small ball into a small hole with weapons singularly ill-designed for the purpose.” And thus for many of us, part of the allure of golf is the technological quest for the perfect equipment. Which means my lunch hours may be spent in a golf store waggling a six-iron to feel its heft, noting the mathematics of loft, lie, and bounce on some fancy new stroke-saver, trying out a gleaming new putter on a flat lawn of green carpet, or solemnly sorting through a used-club bin like young Arthur in search of Excalibur.

You don’t really play against an opponent in golf. You don’t even play the course. You play yourself. The game unites the physical to those fundamentals of education, psychology, stamina, poise, and restraint that are already familiar to writers, and locates the examination of our qualities under the skies, in a vastness of green and wilderness, with four seasons of weather as our sometimes serene, sometimes truculent companion. There can be bliss at the end of a good day of writing, but mostly it’s a grinding, flat-line activity that features the occupational hazards of anxiety, loneliness, punch-the-clock regularity, and sparingly parceled-out highs and lows. Whereas golf is a picaresque novel, its frequent tragedies enlisting the finest traits of the protagonist in countering the ills foisted upon him or her, but offering in compensation lucky bounces, surprising turns and encounters, flights of giddy, unearned success, and at least a few times each round wondrous moments of elation.