The Delights of the Clubhouse

In the clubhouse another order of golfing pleasure begins. There golfers define, clarify, and readjust their round by rationalizations, exaggerations, and sometimes even outright lies. Here playing counts less and talking more. At our club we tell of the member who got, on the same day, a hole-in-one on the par-three fourth, two times in a row. A young girl at a nearby course got a hole-in-one the second time she ever played when her badly sliced tee shot bounced off a mower at the edge of the green and rolled into the hole. Gene Sarazen reported how one day he and another member of his foursome made successive holes-in-one on the same In the clubhouse another order of golfing pleasure begins. There golfers define, clarify, and readjust their round by rationalizations, exaggerations, and sometimes even outright lies. Here playing counts less and talking more. At our club we tell of the member who got, on the same day, a hole-in-one on the par-three fourth, two times in a row. A young girl at a nearby course got a hole-in-one the second time she ever played when her badly sliced tee shot bounced off a mower at the edge of the green and rolled into the hole. Gene Sarazen reported how one day he and another member of his foursome made successive holes-in-one on the same “A perfect shot fills the eye and is a thing of beauty.” Jerome Travis, The Fifth Estate 3 Delights & Ecstasies THE GOLFER SEEKS varied pleasures in his garden. It is there that he takes aim at distant targets and hurls balls across great spaces. He intends to play a succession of shots as if no flaw of mind, or swing, or difficulty of lie, hazard, or course, or ill-fortune could intervene. The golfer seeks what is not common to this earth, a realm where there is a near unmediated connection between intention, action, and result. Like the seeker of religious experience, the golfer pursues an ecstatic state, the blessed condition of being out of, free from, and beyond the ordinary world. (Extasis in Latin means terror. Its Greek roots, ek and histanai, literally connote being out of place; in Greek itself existanai means to drive one out of his senses.) The golfer seeks pleasures beyond those of distraction, stimulation, sociability, and satisfaction. From golf, he seeks more than the pleasures of competition and victory that are associated with all contests of speed, endurance, and strength. Rather, he seeks the ethereal pleasure of lofting a ball up into the sky and commanding its flight across space to its target. Free of hesitation and awkwardness, the golfer seeks to serve the vision of his inner eye. Aiming Luck brings the pleasure of fortunate shots to all golfers. Even the first round of a beginner can produce several lucky shots, even rare holes-in-one. A primitive delight comes from a shot ending up where it was intended to go, even if it gets there by an odd route, the result of a faulty blow, or by pure chance. A topped fairway iron running all the way to the green or a skulled iron shot going into the cup are shots that amuse the player because they defy fate; the results of these shots are sometimes better than the golfer’s beststruck shots. Advanced golfers delight in lucky shots as well, even when they reach such bizarre lengths as a hole-in-one being scored by a ricochet off an animal, house, or rock; in one incredible instance, a hole-in-one was scored when an out-of-bounds shot landed on a moving truck, whose driver stopped the truck near the green, found the ball, and deposited it in the hole. Like novices in other sports, beginning golfers play for luck. They find pleasure in winning. With winning comes the momentary exultation that they are better than somebody else and that the gods are smiling on them. Also, curious things happen on the course. For example, one player’s dentures fell out when he was examining his lie on a slope above a bunker. The dentures hit his ball, dislodged it, and sent it rolling into a sand trap. His false teeth cost him a twostroke penalty. However, for accomplished golfers, the greatest pleasures come with proper execution of the intended shot. Correctly executing the intended shot satisfies a rudimentary sense of power. Similarly, it is experienced by the person who successfully aims and throws a ball of paper into a distant wastebasket. Humans, be it David with his sling, Odysseus with his bow, or any pub dart player, take great pleasure in projecting an object accurately through space. A strike or bull’s eye makes them, in a way, lords of the earth for a moment. As the success of all players of games that have targets or goals testifies, humans take great delight in aiming. There is an elemental pleasure in taking sight at something and hurling an object towards it, such as throwing a stone at a flying bird, hitting a rabbit on the run with a sling shot, or pitching a ringer in horseshoes. There is almost endless fulfillment in aiming and shooting. Players of games will repeat the act of aiming and shooting over and over again, even when the likelihood of success is astronomically small. Proving that the human mind is not, as some have argued, the enemy of repetition, humans will wile away hours trying to throw balls through hoops, kick balls into nets, shoot arrows or bullets at targets, bat stones across distant fences, or flip and stick knives into trees. The fascination of aiming includes a range of human activities. Going to the depths of our animal nature, it is an activity we share with the hunting dragonfly, the spitting lizard, the striking snake, the attacking shark, or the diving hawk. As elemental as it is for all living things to have targets, aiming is also for us humans associated with acts of reasoning and judgment. For the golfer, there is particular fulfillment involved in calculating and judging the best path to the target. In some instances, the golfer’s aim is immediate, or nearly so, as it occurs with the first sight of lie and target. It is as if lie and target together determine the shot’s sole and just path. Reasoning, guessing, and judging are not required when a mere single glance joins the club, stance, and swing to the target. There is only one infallible path to the target and nothing interrupts the connection between target and mind. The shot is either made or isn’t made. On the contrary, a player’s first perceptions can be unclear, confused, and even contradictory. The player adjusts his sight, recalculates his distance, rethinks his lie, feels forced to choose one of two or three different pathways to his target, and he still remains with no compelling reason to choose any one of them. The golfer pauses in his club selection, adjusts and readjusts his stance, recalculates the distance, and considers what might go wrong with any one shot. Yet, he still remains without a vision to swing to. Aiming in this case is simply guess and approximation. Recently I chipped three balls at a fourth ball lying sixty to eighty feet away on the eighteenth green. The first was eight feet to the left; the second, one foot to the left; the third stopped next to and touched the ball. With each shot I had improved. Aiming in this case was a matter of calculation and adjustment. Yet, any golfer could cite countless times when his first shot, instantly seen and unhesitatingly hit, was superior to all his subsequent efforts. So aiming seems almost of two entirely different naturesone form of aiming is constructive, hypothetical, and experiential, the other is intuitive and unmeditated. Even the longest drive must have a target, even if the target is something as small as a patch of grass 265 yards from the tee on the left edge of the fairway, for without such a target both the player’s concentration and aim will be flawed. Indeed, the most cunning of golfers seek advantageous misses far more than perfect shots. They play golf knowing on which side of the fairway, the green, and the cup their shots, well or poorly hit, must end up. One of our club’s best golfers always told his partner, “Miss right!”
Good golfers feel their superiority to nature because they move themselves and objects as projections of their own will. Because they can move objects according to their plans, they conjure and implement complex chains of actions and, in the process, take delight in knowing themselves to be makers of events. Golfers engaged outwardly in the humble business of hitting a ball around a course can actually experience a kind of earthly transcendence.