GOLF IS A MEAN AND CRUEL GAME

The forms of golf’s pains are as multiple and varied as its pleasures. They can be as immediate and indisputable as a topped, duckhooked, or banana-sliced drive; an iron shot that is skulled, chunked, or shanked; a double-hit pitch; or, a stabbed, scuffed, or pushed putt. Each of these shots is experienced as immediately awful to the hands, ugly to the eyes, and deserving of the disdain of others. Only rarely are the consequences of these shots any less bad than their sensation. And even when their outcome is favorable, the player still experiences them as an insult to his skill. The horizon of golf’s pains also includes a range of misfortunes or disasters. These pains, so immediately and strongly felt, play themselves out over a long period on the inner shores of the player’s spirit where they differentiate themselves into the many forms human hurt takes. Many of golf’s pains are as subtle as the human spirit itself. For instance, the golfer plays well; his shots fly high and straight; he wins the adulation of others; yet, inwardly, a voice painfully reminds him that he doesn’t play well enough to be as good as he wishes or to justify the time he invests in the game. Inwardly, he regrets his dedication to the game. Places of Pain Testifying to the place of pain in golf, individual shots, stretches of holes, and courses themselves are inextricably linked to disasters and to the destruction of individual players. On great courses, individual holes, bunkers, and other hazards are commonly named after the player they defeated. On the Royal St. George, with holes called “The Kitchen” and another “The Suez Canal,” there is a bunker called “Kite’s Grave,” where Tom Kite blew his two-stroke lead on the final day of the 1985 British Open by landing in one bunker and then playing into another. And there is a more famous indentation on the course called “Duncan’s Hollow.” Having played a wonderful underpar last round in the 1922 Open in the teeth of awful weather, Duncan still needed a par four on the eighteenth to tie Walter Hagen. Instead, Duncan, who was lying two just off the green in that small hollow, scuffed his mashie chip shot. He left it fifteen feet short of the cup. He then missed the putt and lost the tournament, though  finishing with a 69 and one of the greatest rounds ever played at the Royal St. George. Robert Hunter (whose Links was the first book published on golfcourse design in the United States) believed that St. Andrews is the most defiant of golf’s great courses. Despite the many defects he attributed to the courseits many parallel holes, shared fairways, and shared greenshe could not restrain expressing his respect for it: “St. Andrews should be the one and only course which stands above and scorns all criticism. There is something in the very terrain that outwits us… We never have a sufficient variety of shots or quite enough skill and accuracy to play St. Andrews as we should like to play it. That is,” he concluded, “what gives the old course its enduring vitality. It is the most captivating and unfair, the most tantalizing and bewitching of all courses.” The long par-four seventeenth, the Road Hole, is the most infamous of St. Andrews’s holes. It has broken as many hearts and stolen as many championships as any closing hole in all of golfdom. It was here that Tom Watson’s three-iron shot, from 195 yards, failed to hold the green and ended up next to the stone wall, costing him the 1984 British Open. Here, also, Tommy Nakajima lost the Open in 1978. He hit the green in regulation, but then putted off the green into the cavernous Road Bunker on the left side of the green. He took four shots to get out of it before he got his nine on the hole. In the process of his defeat, he renamed the bunker itself, now called “The Sands of Nakajima.” Nakajima and Watson were two recent victims of the Old Road Hole. In the 1885 Open, David Syton, an outstanding St. Andrews amateur, squandered a five-shot lead on the last round by going back and forth between bunker and road for an eleven. While the old course at St. Andrews is strewn with heartbreaks, golf critic Bernard Darwin believed that Prestwick has   been “the scene of more disasters that have passed into history than any other course. The Road Hole at St. Andrews [the seventeenth] may possibly hold the individual record, but surely Prestwick comes first in point of collective deviltry.” Darwin described how a half dozen of Prestwick’s holes had brought Britain’s greatest golfers (Braid, Hilton, Taylor, and Park) to their knees. At the end of his recitation of the litany of suffering caused by Scotland’s greatest field of woe, Darwin went on to confess that he thought his knowledge of Prestwick’s mischievous holes and bunkers was complete until he examined an old map of the course. He was “aghast” to discover that he had never heard of such disaster sites as the “Grave of Willie Campbell,” the “Slough of Despond,” “Purgatory,” the “Precentor’s Desk,” “Tom’s Bunker,” and “Sandy Neuk,” all of which were already named on a map of the course’s original twelve holes. However, one does not need an esoteric demonology to name the main devils that exist at Prestwick, St. Andrews, and other great links courses. Instead, they have common nameswind, sand, contour, and undulation. Robert Hunter remarked, “The charm of the seaside courses of Great Britain lies in their multi-formity, their unconventionality, their infinite variety.” The consequences of his main argument are that, “good golf is the product of a good course, there can be no real golf without hazards, and unless these be varied, plentiful and adroitly placed there will be no great golfers.” Hazards, of course, mean pain and disaster. Stories of Pain In golf, as in life itself, players tend to forget disasters, remembering instead the good and glorious days. Players trick themselves into forgetting how much their pleasures of golf were purchased by pains. Even though everyone who knows the game knows stories of wasted lives, golf’s official memories (those supported by its associations’ museums and displays in clubhouses) are dedicated to recording victories rather than detailing the defeats and inventorying the disasters and the broken lives that went with them. One such tragic life was that of now long-forgotten Johny McDermott, the son of a Philadelphia mailman. At nineteen, he won the U.S. Open in 1911 and repeated in 1912. McDermott sacrificed his life to golf. He compensated for his small stature with awesome accuracy. As Gerard Astor wrote, McDermott practiced hitting irons onto a tarp he spread out on the fairway as his target. As his technique improved, he substituted a newspaper for the tarp. His intention was to be the world’s best player of the game. Set on teaching the Brits their own game, McDermott went to the 1912 British Open. He shot an astronomical 96 and failed even to qualify. McDermott returned to Hoylake for the 1913 Open. His final round 83 “ballooned his total to 315, good enough for a fifth place finish, best ever by an American, but eleven strokes off the pace set by J. H. Taylor.” After that, things went downhill for McDermott. He was plagued by financial reversals. His derogatory remarks about visiting British players got him chastised by the American golf community. His chance to revenge himself in the coveted Open in 1914 was lost, not by play, but when he missed a ferry on the way to the tournament and was disqualified. On the way home, his ship collided with another ship and he was forced to escape in a life boat. The fires that once burned so brightly in McDermott were extinguished. Thereafter, he entered into “a steep emotional decline and at only twenty-three years of age entered into a life of rest homes and sanitariums where he stayed until he died when he was eighty.”   McDermott was one of the countless many whose fortunes in golf ended, as they can in any competitive venture, in pain and defeat. Herbert Wind surveyed this pain with this truism: “Whenever there are winners, there must be losers.” “The unpredictability of the game,” he continued, “is one of its bittersweet charms, and in the end the breaks even up fairly well.” But then, as if to contradict his airy abstractions with real living examples, he went on to describe three playersMacdonald Smith, Leo Diegel, and Harry Cooperwho played some of the very best golf of the interwar years and for whom the breaks somehow didn’t even out fairly. They won tournaments galore and huge percentages of prize money and their exquisite shot-making equaled the best, yet their great successes became an occasion to speak of men, Wind wrote, “who are remembered not as winners but as losers. Season after season, one of the three was always on the brink of a victory in a national championship, but they always found a way to lose.” As is true of many contemporary players, their misfortune was that they were called to win everything in the game but its great championships. Golf fans often remember pain, hurt, disaster, and failure best. They called the great Sam Snead the player who couldn’t win the PGA. It took recent victories in major tournaments by Greg Norman and Tom Kite to free them from being defined as second-place finishers, though Norman’s more recent final round collapse at the 1996 Masters puts him in a special category in contemporary times. Golfers forget that there is more losing than winning in golf. Forgetting serves the hope we cherish and lets us get on with the folly of trying to move a ball flawlessly, shot after shot, around a course for the sake of the game and glory. The golfer, however miserable his game, is continually renewed by hope, as any new idea about the swing or type of club sends the worst hacker to the first tee full of expectations.
Golfers pour their whole soul into visions of what they intend to do with a single swipe of a club. And when things go wrong, they suffer bitter disappointments. They treat their illusions as near certain possibilities and their defeats as unlikely occurrences. A golfer can become a pitiful creature if his putting goes bad. A golfer’s wife on a flight from Scotland with my son and me confided that she found it easier to live with her par-shooting husband, a commodity broker, in bad times on the market than when his putting was bad. Some golf pains are simply bizarre. They can hardly be considered tragedies, even by the most avid golf fans. Disasters, as every student of tragedy has been taught, can be too redundant or grotesque to elicit anything other than hilarity. When players (professionals at that!) whiff a ball thrice, or make a 9, 10, 11, 12, or 13, there is insufficient nobility for the compassion tragedy requires. What else is it, if not a farce, when a young professional at the 1978 French Open shanked enough balls out of bounds on the par-five thirteenth to make a 21? Tommy Armour reported a 22 on a single hole in the 1927 Shawnee Open. None of these rival, according to Jerome Travis, this story from Pennsylvania, … From the tee of the Binnekill Water the woman underplayed her drive and the ball dropped into a stream lying between her and the green… [She] decided to go after her ball which was floating down stream. Her husband, who was following her around the course, went along to help. They stepped into a rowboat and headed toward the ball as it lazily drifted [downstream]… Leaning over the side of the rowboat, the persistent woman golfer slashed at the ball time and again with a niblick [nine-iron], while she and her husband kept count of the strokes. They were nearly a mile and a half away  from the tee when she at last managed to connect cleanly with the ball and send it out of the water… Nothing that might have happened would have daunted the woman at this stage of her battle with the elusive sphere. She tracked the ball down to its hiding place in the brush, pounded it out to a clearing and proceeded to play it back to the green. She reached the end of her journey eventually and triumphantly, holing out in exactly 166 strokes, the greatest number on record for a single hole. While a single poor shot can evoke real agony, terrible scores need not always cause great pain. At some point a sequence of painfully bad shots turns from tragedy to hilarity. Several instances from the British Open found in Golfer’s Miscellany make that clear. In the very first British Open at Prestwick in 1860, a competitor took a 21 on one hole. In the 1935 Open at Muirfield, a Scottish player started 7, 10, 5, 10, and took 65 shots to reach the ninth hole. He recorded another 10 at the eleventh and decided to retire at the twelfth, where he still lay in a bunker after having taken four shots without regaining the fairway. In the 1950 Open at Troon, a German amateur took a 15 on the short eighth, the famous Postage Stamp Hole. In a qualifying round in the 1965 British Open at Southport, a self-described American professional from Milwaukee shot 221 for 36 holes. He broke the record with a second round 113. At the tournament’s conclusion, he admitted he was “a little discouraged and sad.” He added that he had entered the tournament because he was “after the money.” Equally painful stories of golfers’ undoings are a result of forces beyond the golfers themselves. Few stories rival the tale of the straw hat of J. C. Snead in the Tournament Players Championship at Sawgrass in Florida. On the fourth hole, a wind gusting to fifty miles an hour blew Snead’s hat off his head and carried it forty yards up an embankment onto the green, where it ran into and moved his ball. Given a two-stroke penalty, Snead futilely protested, “I can’t putt with my hat.” Snead went on to three-putt the hole for good measure. If this incident was ludicrous, equally incongruous and painfully hilarious was what happened to Leonard Thompson in the 1978 Quad Cities Open. A tee fell from his caddie’s ear directly in the line of his rolling eagle putt, assuring Thompson’s miss and a twostroke penalty to boot. A fellow caddie told me how another caddie cost his member four penalty strokes on the same hole. The caddie failed to pull out the pin in time and it was hit by his player’s explosion shot. However, just as it was hit, out came the pin and the caddie stumbled backwards falling on another player’s ball, costing his member another two strokes. The member was furious. He sent the caddie in and blamed him for the loss of the match, even though he was six strokes behind at the time the penalties were incurred. The player’s pain won him only the mirth of others.