Playing Golf (With My Flesh Crawling)
I recently went out on the course of the Moundbuilders Country Club, which should not be there. And there, I saw the ugliest landscape I have ever seen, uglier than any loading dock, any slag heap; the putting green, hideously aerated this late in the season, staggered punctures in the earth; the latest wound on a landscape willfully trampled now for two hundred years.
Why then praise golf? The golf of Trumps and little Trumps? Gallons of water poured down the drain? Victories paid for with $500 clubs and $20,000 lessons? One of the many galling things about wealth inequality is that it does not always result in gaudy, hideous things; but may as easily purchase something of actual power, formed through the hoarding of tradition, expertise, and concentration; an articulated form of land with a power not exclusive to knowing the game it is made for.
I have a strange resentment of every sport based upon land that does not acknowledge the particularity of the land it sits on; the desire for an even playing field and a transferable set of statistics means a fundamental flatness that precludes the possibility of knowing any one place through the playing. To say it more simply: I think, wouldn’t it be better if these baseball fields had hills and dales, cattails and cacti to run around? If golf’s reliance on performance-optimized grass negates much of that value, it nonetheless works in a specificity beyond backdrop views alone. The gesture of putting a green on an island in the ocean, with a little strait to drive over, has a rakish, stupid charm, a family resemblance to throwing men up onto the moon.
Charm is the word – the insinuating magic that isn’t done with you when you’re done with it. As much as I like to read the landscape through hiking, the charm in the origin story of golf is the ability to evaluate the landscape through a different lens than its walkability (or, certainly, the ability to haul corn or coal out of it). The process of research that has created purebred landscapes for golf has the same charm as – well, the development of prebred dogs. And the central movement of golf – from the general to the specific, the large space to the small – has a charm that strangely overrides what might as easily be a sequence of unconnected skill shots and bagatelles, the possibility embodied by mini golf. It makes the technique of shooting nest within a larger worldview of approaching a landscape, the habit of a hawk, to circle high and plunge down to the point of a mouse. And that, in turn forms the structure of long holes fitted intestinally within the course.
Do I even need to say the last charm? It is the simple charm of being the hidden reverse of my own field, the thing that must not be spoken of. We would like nothing better than to claim every course for free access, for unrestricted play, to raise prairies on the fairway. And we do this by willfully looking through the charm that hums over it.