A Horizon of Pleasures

ALTHOUGH GOLF HAS MANY PLEASURES, surely the first pleasures experienced are about feel. Golf is about the grip, the heft and swish of a club; about striking a ball and the first sight of its lofted flight. Its most elemental pleasures are feels associated with its required strokes, which range from the subtlest chips and pitches to delicate half-cuts and knocked-down hooks, from great blasts out of roughs and traps to high booming tee shots with fade for gentle landings or spinning hooks for long runs. These strokes account for a rich spectrum of bodily pleasures involving hands, ears, and eyes. The body experiences itself during the swing. There are keen bodily pleasures associated with the golf swing at every point: the rhythm of the footwork; the turn of the body; the extension, constriction, and unleashing of the muscles; the mounting power of the swing; and the fullness of the follow-through and its relaxation. We can inventory these many bodily pleasures of golf by describing an imaginary round. First of all, the player is up, out, and about. Henry Leach wrote in The Happy Golfer Here on the links are space and freedom such as are af orded to people, especially those of towns and cities, rarely in the present time. Confinement is a wearing oppression to the modern man. Through the medium of this sport, we may experience the sense of space and freedom, of something that comes near to infinity. Unconscious of this cause, a golfer on the links is uplifted to a simpler freer self. On the course, the golfer is variously stimulated, aroused, alert, and excited. A player’s cleats click rhythmically on the pavement and gravel path. This rhythm is joined to the jangling of clubs responding to the player’s gait. He moves out onto the soft, manicured grass of the tee and nervously sizes up the first hole. There is the bright sound of the bag being unzipped and a fumbling search for balls, which always feel surprisingly hard, and the brightly-colored, garishly mismatched tees. The glove feels tight to his hand and gives a sense of security. These preparatory acts are pleasurable and bring expectations of further pleasure once the round begins. Waiting Golf involves all different kinds of waiting. Waiting enhances the stimulation that pleasure requires. The player waits for the clearing of the first tee, then for the opening of the first fairway. The player begins his swing by making a few nervous anticipatory waggles as he seeks to set his concentration and establish the flow of his backswing. The swing actually forms itself out of these preliminary motions that anticipate it. There is the wait for the club to reach the top of its arc. At the top of the swing, there is a precious moment’s hesitation before starting down. Then there is the instant before impact, and then the player waits for the shot to rise up before him and take flight toward its target.
Waiting is necessary for pleasure. Yet at some point, intense waiting turns to pain and even agony. Nothing is as long as the wait for the putt that circles the cup to drop. Little eternities cluster in such waits. The player must often wait as he works his way around the course. He waits for the posting of scores and suffers out the long night before the tournament’s start. This agony defeats more than one player before he arrives on the first tee. And, for the contender, waiting stretches across seasons. In Second Shots, Bernard Darwin described how often the golfer cannot abide waiting. Very often, more especially when we are nearing the end of a match, we neglect the way of safety, not because we do not realise its value, but because we have not the strength of mind to prolong the agony. If we play safe there is still another trial in front of us in the shape of the final little pitch, and we are not brave enough to wait for it. We want to be out of our misery, and so, out of pure cowardice, we take the unjustifiable risk. If all goes well we try afterwards to pretend that we had another motive, that over-cautious tactics might have been defeated by a long steal of the enemy. We may even brazen it out successfully to a criticising friend, but we cannot deceive ourselves. Feelings & Sensations On the first tee, the player, alert with expectation, hopes for and dreads the first shot of the round. He grips his club and begins lightly swinging it back and forth, setting his hands, arms, shoulders, torso, legs, and feet in motion, a way of gently reminding his body what it knows of the game. The player sinks his tee into the soft ground and places his ball upon it. He steps back and takes a few more practice swings, all the while surveying the hole, imagining the shot he wants to hit. Then he sets up, digs in, waggles again, and the swish of the swing is followed by the crack of his shot, and the sight of the rising ball. Many of the pleasures a golf round occasions are intimate to the feel and the movement of the player’s body. There are the subtle instinctual pleasures of adjusting the body to its correct position at address, as if one is snuggling up with oneself. Making the varied strokes (hard and soft, full, three-quarters, and half) required by different shots makes use of the hands, wrists, arms, shoulders, hips, legs, and feet in instinctive and automatic coordination with one another. When the golfer strikes the ball, he experiences golf’s greatest pleasure. Squeezed within a fraction of a second, the player feels the ball on the club face. Within that instant, there is a variety of distinct pleasures associated with force, power, gracefulness, completion, and relief. There are a variety of ways of striking the ball. They rangeto suggest only a fewfrom the feel of crunching a drive, to swinging full and through a long-drawn or a high-faded fairway wood, to ripping a low long iron and striking down with a midiron, to a gently flopped sand shot and a delicately touched downhill chip. Each type of shot produces a distinct sensation, with its own sight, sound, and feel. The vividness of striking a ball explains why some golfers prefer to spend their time on the practice range, where there are no delays between shots. The distinct pleasure of hitting a single type of shot explains why many players tend to practice the shot they hit best. Older players are actually soothed by hitting a type of chip shot over and over again. (After an arguement with Aunt Milly, my Uncle Dale would go out in his back yard and practice chipping sand wedge shots in their daughter’s sandbox until his anger subsided. We used to say we could tell how well Dale and Milly were getting on by observing how much sand remained in Cindy’s sandbox.) As the player’s head comes up, completing his swing, he has the additional pleasure of seeing the shot just struck. A golf ball can move through space in a multitude of ways. It flies, lines, kites, soars, and bores; it bounces, hops, skips, rolls; it spins, sticks, bites, and backs up; it curves, swerves, wobbles, turns, swirls, and falls. Each of these motions captivates the human eye and awakens distinct feelings associated with the terror, sublimity, beauty, dignity, humor, and even farce that humans experience upon observing the movement of things. The first par-five hole of our imaginary round alone produces an array of sensations of eye, ear, body, and touch. On the second shot, there is the slashing sound of the long iron swing, which tears the ball out of the rough, and the accompanying sight of a ball hit on a line-drive trajectory. The third shot, a hundred-and-fifty-yard eight iron from the center of the fairway, produces the deep thud of the descending blow of the short iron swing as it digs into the turf and quickly elevates the ball. Carrying backspin, the ball hits the green. Then, seeming to momentarily defy the laws of motion, it stops, before beginning gently to accelerate backwards. On the next hole of our imaginary round, the player seeks to pick a ball out of a fairway trap without touching the sand. For an infinitesimal instant, the player feels as if he succeeded. The ball has been firmly struck. No sand has been taken. Yet, almost instantaneously, there is the sickening sound (a sound every player knows) of the ball nicking the lip of the trap as it exits. With his head up, he sees the ball slicing short and right of the green into a deep bunker that protects the front right corner of the green. He imagines, as if he could feel across a great distance, that his ball has sunk deeply into the sand and upon arriving at the trap discovers his instincts were correct. Seeking to recover, the player drives his wedge as deeply