The smooth, long, liquid sweep of a three wood smacking into the equator of a dimpled Titleist … It makes a potent but slightly foolish noise like the fart of a small, powerful nature god. The ball sails away in a beautiful hip or breast of a curve. And I am filled with joy.
At least that’s what I’m filled with when I manage to connect. Most of my strokes whiz by the tee the way a drunk passes a truck on a curve or dig into the turf in a manner that is more gardening than golf. But now and then I nail one, and each time I do it’s an epiphany. This is how the Australopithecus felt, one or two million years ago, when he first hit something with a stick. Puny hominoid muscles were amplified by the principles of mechanics so that a little monkey swat suddenly became a great manly engine of destruction able to bring enormous force to bear upon enemy predators, hunting prey, and the long fairway shots necessary to get on the green over the early Pleistocene’s tar pit hazards.
Hitting things with a stick is the cornerstone of civilization. Consider all the things that can be improved by hitting them with a stick: veal, the TV, Woody Allen. Having a dozen good sticks at hand, all of them well balanced and expertly made, is one reason I took up golf. I also wanted to show my support for the vice president. I now know for certain that Quayle is smarter than his critics. He’s smart enough to prefer golf to spelling. How many times has a friend called you on a Sunday morning and said, “It’s a beautiful day. Let’s go spell potato”?
I waited until I was almost forty-five to hit my first golf ball. When I was younger I thought golf was a pointless sport. Of course all sports are pointless unless you’re a professional athlete or a professional athlete’s agent, but complex rules and noisy competition mask the essential inanity of most athletics. Golf is so casual. You just go to the course, miss things, tramp around in the briars, use pungent language, and throw two thousand dollars’ worth of equipment in a pond. Unlike skydiving or rugby, golf gives you leisure to realize it’s pointless. There comes a time in life, however, when all the things that do have a point—career, marriage, exercising to stay fit—start turning, frankly, golflike. And that’s when you’re ready for golf.
The great thing about starting golf in your forties is that you can start golf in your forties. You can start other things in your forties but generally your wife makes you stop them, as Bill Clinton found out. Golf does not require tremendous strength or endurance. You can drive a little car around on the playing surface—something you can’t do on a tennis court. Although, the way I play tennis, it wouldn’t hurt.
Golf has gravitas. You play it with your pants on. There’s nothing sadder than seeing a short, winded, aging ofay—me—on a basketball court. Although watching our presidential candidates out for a morning jog is close. Picture George Washington and Abraham Lincoln puffing around in their underwear. We’d be a slave-owning southernmost province of Canada except that King George and Jeff Davis would have laughed themselves to death.
I’m already a fool, I don’t need to look the fool besides. I want my secretary to walk into my office and find me putting into an overturned highball glass. That’s stylish. I don’t happen to have an office. But I might get one and what would my secretary think if she walked in and found me batting grounders into the kneehole of my desk?
You can play golf first thing in the morning. I’ve noticed, for men my age, more and more of the important things happen at that hour of the day: golf, heart attacks, delivery of the Wall Street Journal, and—intermittently—erections.
You can smoke or drink on a golf course without interrupting the game, and you can take a leak—something you can’t do on a squash court and shouldn’t do in a swimming pool.
I wanted a sport with a lot of metaphors. I’m a journalist. We journalists like to draw upon the common fund of human experience when we express our many important ideas. And what’s more common or better funded than sports? Sports metaphors are the bricks of journalistic prose. Sports similes are the mortar. Sports analogies are the trowel, or maybe the hod carrier … You get the idea. “Tinker to Evers to Chance.” “Hang time.” “He shoots! He scores!” “‘Roid Rage.” Without sports metaphors American journalism would experience, as it were, sudden death.
But I was running out of valuable athletic clichés. Would beach volleyball say much about proposals for federal health care reform? Could I use mumblety-peg comparisons to explain the North American Free Trade Agreement negotiations? Golf, however, is ideal for these purposes. “Christian fundamentalists put a wicked slice in the Republican party platform.” “Somebody should replace the divot on the back of Al Gore’s head.” “Let’s go hit Congress with a stick.”
I also wanted a sport with a lot of equipment. All truly American sports are equipment intensive. Basketball was strictly for hoop-over-the-barn-door Hoosiers and Jersey City Y’s until two-hundred-dollar gym shoes were invented. And synchronized swimming will never make it to network prime time because how often do you need new nose plugs? I’m an altruistic guy, in my own Reaganomics way. Sports gear purchases are about all that’s keeping the fragile U.S. economy alive, and you’d have to get into America’s Cup yachting or cross-country airplane racing to find a sport that needs more gear than golf. I’ve bought the shoes, hats, socks, pants, shirts, umbrellas, windbreakers, and plus fours—all in colors that Nirvana fans wouldn’t dye their hair. Then there are the drivers, irons, putters, and the special clubs: parking-lot wedge, back-of-the-tree mashie, nearby highway niblick. MasterCard has installed a plaque on the wall of its headquarters to commemorate my taking up golf.
Actually, I was forced to become a golfer. As a middle-aged affluent Republican, it was beginning to look strange that I didn’t play. People were casting aspersions on my sex life. What with not being out on the golf course at the crack of dawn and not being soused at the nineteenth hole until all hours of the night—I might have one. Where I live in New Hampshire, if that kind of thing gets around, you can be drummed out of the local GOP and lose your Magic George Bush Decoder Ring.
Thus I prevailed upon a friend of mine to take me to his country club. There—once it was established that I’m only half Irish and that, although my name technically ends in a vowel, it’s silent—I was graciously allowed to play as a guest. This is another thing I like about golf, the exclusiveness. Of course most country clubs exclude the wrong kinds of people, such as me. But I hold out the hope that somewhere there’s a club that bans first wives, people in twelve-step programs, Sting, the editorial board of the Washington Post, and Ross Perot.
I played nine holes, and I must admit, for a complete tyro, I wasn’t bad. I’ll now proceed to tell you about every stroke on every hole. And that’s one more swell thing about golf, it provides ammunition for the social bore. Who doesn’t love cornering others with tales of action and adventure starring the self? But racquetball, for instance, has limits in this regard: “I hit it. She hit it. I hit it. She hit it really hard.” And so on. Golf, on the other hand, is picaresque. A good golf bore can produce a regular Odyssey of tedium. And golf allows banal sports chitchat to be elevated to the plane of theoretical physics. An absolute lunkhead—the guy from work who files “The First National Bank” under T for “The” and thinks John Donne is a toilet cleaner—turns into Stephen Hawking on the subject of golf. Note this passage from Jack Nicklaus’s Golf My Way:
When the club’s face looks to the right of the direction in which the head is traveling, the ball spins around an equator tilted from left to right and thus curves to the right during flight.
I’ll do you a favor and not tell you about every stroke. Or any stroke at all. Though I got off some very nice drives. True, they didn’t land on the correct fairway, but that was due to wind. And I will stand mute on the subject of technique except to say I learned that many chip shots are best played with a sharp kick from the toe of a golf shoe. And if you cut a hole in your pants pocket you can drop a ball down your trouser leg and “discover” that your shot landed remarkably close to the green. And putting, for a person of my socioeconomic background, is best done by envisioning the cup as being behind a little windmill or inside the mouth of a cement whale. I also found out that all the important lessons of life are contained in the three rules for achieving a perfect golf swing:
1. Keep your head down.
2. Follow through.
3. Be born with money.
There’s a fine camaraderie on a golf course—lumbering around with your fellow Republicans, encompassed by a massive waste of space and cash, bearing witness to prolific use of lawn chemicals, and countenancing an exploitative wage scale for the maintenance employees. Golf is the only sport known to have inspired an indignant left-wing poem. It was written by one Sarah Norcliffe Cleghorn in 1915.
The golf links lie so near the mill
That almost every day
The laboring children can look out
And see the men at play.
Just show me an indignant left-wing poem about softball or bungee jumping. And our local mill has been converted to a shopping mall, so the kids are still there.
Golf is also the only sport God is known to play. God and Saint Peter are out on Sunday morning. On the first hole God drives into a water hazard. The waters part and God chips onto the green. On the second hole God takes a tremendous whack and the ball lands ten feet from the pin. There’s an earthquake, one side of the green rises up, and the ball rolls into the cup. On the third hole God lands in a sand trap. He creates life. Single-cell organisms develop into fish and then amphibians. Amphibians crawl out of the ocean and evolve into reptiles, birds, and furry little mammals. One of those furry little mammals runs into the sand trap, grabs God’s ball in its mouth, scurries over, and drops it in the hole.
Saint Peter looks at God and says, “You wanna play golf or you wanna fuck around?”
And golf courses are beautiful. Many people think mature men have no appreciation for beauty except in immature women. This isn’t true, and, anyway, we’d rather be playing golf. A golf course is a perfect example of Republican male aesthetics—no fussy little flowers, no stupid ornamental shrubs, no exorbitant demands for alimony, just acre upon acre of lush green grass that somebody else has to mow.
Truth, beauty, and even poetry are to be found in golf. Every man, when he steps up to the tee, feels, as Keats has it …
Like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star’d at the Pacific—and all his men
Look’d at each other with a wild surmise—
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
That is, the men were silent. Cortez was saying, “I can get on in two, easy. A three-wood drive, a five-iron from the fairway, then a two-putt max. But if I hook it, shit, I’m in the drink.”