Golf, Life, Place, and (of course) Metaphor

It's taking me a while to get used to my summer schedule--one afternoon class on Monday, then two morning and one afternoon gig on Thursday and Friday. Tuesday will be my on-campus day for administrative business, and Wednesday a mid-week buffer on which to prep for the end of the week. So it's not at all bad. No night classes for the first time in years, but two 8 am sections--which I also haven't had in years. I like morning classes, though. As long as I'm out of the door and on the road by 6:30, I don't hit much traffic, I get to see the sun rise, and I have time before class to settle in, have a cuppa, and get my "stuff" together.

All of this means that I'm not writing much. I'm hoping that on Saturdays and Wednesdays I'll have a couple of hours to devote to blogs and novels, but this weekend I've been distracted by lovely weather and, of course, the Open Championship: the best golf tournament there is.

Now, I don't play golf, but I love to watch it. Like baseball, golf is a metaphor for life. As I mentioned in last year's post on the subject, I used to show The Legend of Bagger Vance in my Humanities and Myth classes (it's based, in part, on the Bhagavad Gita), and my students generally loved it. I also used to link an essay about metaphor and designing golf courses to my Humanities resources, until it disappeared into the graveyard of old internet articles. I love the pace of golf, and the concentration and precision the game requires. Short attention spans won't do in golf, and especially not on links courses like Turnberry, where the Open is being played this year.

Like all Scottish links courses, Turnberry's a bear. The coastal weather can turn on a tuppence, and you have to have nerves of steel to play this course. And 59 year-old Tom Watson (although he began the final day with a bogey) is up there, in the final group because he was on top of the leader board when play ended yesterday. The pressure, even on a young guy, would be horrific, but Watson is hanging in there. Geezers rule!

I've often felt guilty for loving golf, because of the resources that go into maintaining them: water, fertilizer, weed killer, and such. But the focus in golf-course design and maintenance over the years has gradually shifted toward sustainability. One reason I prefer Links golf over the standard American groomed-course version is precisely because of the naturalness of the courses, but it does look like an effort is being made to address environmental issues.

Watching the championship is like watching Sunrise Earth. The coverage is full of drama and beautiful vistas of sea and sky, and the sand traps that can really be called "bunkers" on this course. There's even a series of commercial messages about the tournament, narrated by "Mother Nature." Few American courses can claim much history, but courses in the UK are rife with it. Turnberry was used as an air base in both world wars, and has the concrete scars to prove it. Still, it's magnificent, and rather amazing to see some of the best players in the world (including Tiger Woods, this year) defeated by combinations of luck, wind, weather, and the draw. This time around the patience and expertise acquired through decades of experience are coming in handy for Watson, but the young punks are beginning to surge, including Ross Fisher, whose wife can go into labor at any moment (in which case he's promised leave the course, no matter what his position), and the 16 year-old Italian amateur, Matteo Manassero.

Watson seems to be channeling the spirit of Old Tom Morris, one of the game's pioneers, who holds the record for the oldest person to win an Open Championship--in 1867, thirty years before my grandmother was born (she later married the grandson of Angus Campbell McDonald, the dour Scotsman who settled part of our family in the Owens River Valley), and I came along about 80 years after Morris's last victory. I make my connections where I can find 'em. Tom Watson won the Old Tom Morris award in 1992 for his contributions to the game. Alas, however, there seems to be no connection with William Morris. That would be way too cool.

It's early hours still, and the weather can come in and change things at any moment. So I probably won't be back at the computer until this afternoon, and then I'll be working on Monday's class. But if anyone wonders why a blog perportedly concerned with philosophical musings about place periodically wanders onto the golf course, it's because golf courses and the game played on them are so rich in a sense of "being there": in the moment, on the fairway, on the green, on the edge of a cliff that looks out on forever. This is how golf was meant to be played, and Scotland is where it came into its own. My ancestors probably played nearby, with old twigs and rubber balls. And with Tom Watson over there showing the young'ns how the game should be played, I don't think life gets a whole lot better than this.

Postscript: In the end, I weenied out, and cleaned the refrigerator instead of watching Tom Watson lose the playoff to Stewart Cink for the Championship. After two holes of teeing off into really bad rough, I didn't have the heart to see it through. But, as one of the commentators mentioned, Tom Watson's performance this week reminds us that golf is a game that can be enjoyed for a lifetime. The full range of ages from 16 to 59 showed us that energy and talent count for something, but so do skill and experience. The fact that Watson's loss was at the expense of Cink's dramatic, come-from-behind first win in a major tournament cushioned the blow. It was a terrific week, and Tom Watson's still one of the best things ever to happen to the game.

Image credits: The photo of the lighthouse at Turnberry is clipped from a picture of Alistair Nicol teeing off--apparently created by Nicol himself; Tom Watson at the 2008 Open Championship by Ian Tilbook; and Old Tom Morris his ownself, uploaded by StefanB. All from Wikimedia Commons.

Golf, Life, and Metaphor

An overhead shot of the Royal Birkdale golf course in Southport, England, looks like a post-glacial landscape: swales and valleys amid gorse-covered dunes. It's a veritable topographical map of the game of golf, and an emblem for the true nature of the game. The photo is of Annika Sorenstam at the approach to the 10th green, during the 2005 Women's Open (the only shot of the course I could obtain legally).

The 2008 Open Championship is also being played on this dramatic stretch of British coast, where the English sand meets the Irish Sea, and it promises to be every bit as exciting as previous tournaments where I like best to watch the game.

"Exciting? Golf? Well, maybe, but Tiger's not there this year, so what's the big deal?" scoff the scoffers.

I'm afraid I'm a bit of a purist, and although I'll watch golf played anywhere, I've been known to refer to the way it's played on municipal golf courses around here in pejorative terms ("sissy golf" is one of the more polite). Maybe it's the Scot in me, but I prefer the wild, rugged, coastal links courses in Great Britain to any of the manicured pretty-boy courses in the U.S.

The wind and rain blow, the clouds lower, the bunkers are real traps, not baby beaches, and the water hazards can pitch a leader out of the top ten in a few strokes. In today's third round, the wind is the main factor, making it difficult for players to mark their balls on some of the greens. The sun's gorgeous, but shots of the sea give you a pretty good idea of just how tough things are going to be later in the day. K. J. Choi leads at the moment, and he's the only player under par.

So why am I yapping away about a game that I don't play (I think I've actually held a golf club in my hand once or twice) in a blog that purports to explore things philosophical? Because golf, like baseball, is metaphor writ large. In fact, I've sometimes shown The Legend of Bagger Vance in humanities classes, because of what it tells us about the nature and scope of myth itself. Based on the book by Steven Pressfield (who based it on the Bhagavad Gita, one of the sacred Hindu scriptures), the film (directed by Robert Redford) pits man against himself as he strives for meaning in lfe. As Bagger Vance (played by Will Smith) says about golf, "it's the only game in which you can call a penalty on yourself."

Golf, especially on a links course, provides lessons in a variety of skills I'd love to see my students develop: tenacity, concentration, patience, physical and mental stamina, fine-tuned technique, and adaptability. Grace in competition is a hallmark of the great players (Tiger Woods, of course, comes immediately to mind), but the real competition is between the player and his or her own mind. Young and old can compete in it; among today's leaders are K. J. Choi (38) and Greg Norman (53), along with Rocco Mediate (46) and Camilo Villegas (26) in the final two pairings for the third round. It's as much a mental game as a physical one, and a tournament can be won by both skill and will.

I was highly amused the other day to notice that the story line in the comic strip Judge Parker (choose July 18 and 19 on the link) is beginning to focus on golf, and that one of the characters is touting Harvey Pennick's treatise on life and golf, his Little Red Book. I've given it to duffers more than once, and it, like Bagger Vance, has as much to say about being human as about playing golf.

But golf is also about landscape, and especially on links courses, it's about nature's interaction with human design. To me, it's silly to see green grass in the middle of the desert (as in Las Vegas or Palm Springs), but the courses in Britain symbolize the human experience of adapting to the land. At the margins of the groomed fairways and greens lie the natural scrub, heather, gorse, beach grass, and other vegetation into which the course has been carved. The bunkers are cut into the underlying sand, and dug deeply to present a real challenge to the player whose ball wanders off the green or lands in one from the fairway. The weather in Britain also changes so rapidly that the character of play can be altered in a few minutes. As I type, the clouds are moving in from the sea, and the jackets are coming on in the gallery.

Golf can, in fact, be played under almost any conditions. The tougher the course and the weather, the hardier the folk it attracts. In More News From Nowhere, my characters play a form of desert golf, and folks apparently even play golf in Greenland (see above) in circumstances that must surely test one's grit.

I've never understood people who find precision-based games like golf to be tedious and/or boring. The character and skill of the players, and the battles of wills that often ensue, are plenty exciting for me, and watching the Open Championship gives me a chance to see talented human beings matching their wits against nature. Sports, for many, are tantamount to religious experiences, and it's easier for me to see this in Britain in July than at almost any other time of year--except, perhaps, during the World Series.

Photos: Annika Sorenstam at the approach to the 10th green at Royal Birkdale during the 2005 Women's British Open Pro-Am (modified), by Cath Mudford. Golf in Greenland (modified), by Graphicos. Both from Wikimedia Commons.