Golf’s New World Order, Part 6: Why we watch, why we go, why we play
In the sixth part of this series, I try to offer a deeper understanding of some of the most fundamental things about the game: why we go, why we watch, and why we pick up a club in the first place.
Welcome to the sixth part of this series. Thank you for reading these essays. Working on them has helped me to understand a little more about what’s going on right now in the world of golf—and in the wider world too. The writing has given me some new insights and perspectives. I hope that reading them has done something similar for you.
In Part 1, I went through the history of the PGA Tour’s business model, the troubled present, and what the new business of the LIV Tour might look like. Part 2 considered the geopolitical moment, in particular the possible decline of the United States as the dominant global superpower and the aspirations of Saudi Arabia to use its oil riches to rise the international political ladder. Part 3 was all about the practice of sportswashing, which is the label often attached to the Saudis’ strategic investments in golf and other sports. Part 4 considered how a century of developments in psychological science might tell us something of the motivations of the players who have left the established Tours to sign with LIV. In Part 5, in trying to understand what the future of pro golf might be, I widened the lens to look at the history of other sports, most notably cricket, boxing and mixed martial arts.
In Part 6, I try to flesh out some of the most fundamental things about the game: why we attend golf events, why we watch on our screens, and why we pick up a club to play in the first place.
Places of illumination and hell
Michael Murphy is 91 now.
On the evidence of some recent interviews that have appeared on YouTube, he appears to be still going strong.
Murphy is the founder of the Esalen Institute, a now 60-year-old retreat centre dedicated to spiritual enlightenment, personal growth and a general exploration of human potential.
He’s also, more to the point here, the author of Golf in the Kingdom, a sort-of-novel, sort-of-sports-psychology-manual, sort-of-spiritual-text published in 1972.
Whether the book, which has sold over a million copies and been translated into at least nine languages, is a transcendental insight into golf’s Zen possibilities or, as one unimpressed Amazon reviewer put it, “sixties style psycho-babble and hippie mysticism”, is a debate where the only guarantee is that it will be without resolution.
What matters here is that Murphy, spiritual guru or psycho-babbler, tapped into something that resonates with a decidedly significant percentage of those who ever held a club in their hands.
At one point in the story Shivas Irons, the mercurial protagonist in Golf in the Kingdom, says:
You’re making a great mistake if you think the game is meant for the shots. The game is meant for walking.
For if you can enjoy the walking you can probably enjoy the other times in your life when you’re “in between”. And that’s most of the time, wouldn’t you say?
The novel is, in literary terms, a “roman-a-clef”: a type of fiction preferred by Hemingway and F Scott Fitzgerald and Kerouac, an imagined construct built on events that actually happened.
In the 1950s, then in his mid-20s, Murphy travelled to India and spent 18 months in an ashram, or spiritual community, in Pondicherry, where he pondered life’s deeper questions.
On his journey there, he stopped off in Scotland and spent some time in St Andrews, the home of golf, where the 150th Open Championship takes place in 2022. Fifteen years after his trip, Golf in the Kingdom was born, and a half a century further down the line, it still draws fans to its combination of golf and godliness.
An article in Golf magazine described it astutely:
Murphy spent the 1960s expanding his mind — through meditation, hallucinogens, the study of ancient texts, and commingling with mystics and shamans. When he came out the other side, the story of GITK emerged from deep within his learned and agile mind. The slender volume — just over 200 pages — includes cameos from Saint John of the Cross, Plotinus, Pythagoras, Parmenides, Plato, the Koran, The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, the Bhagavad Gita, Pharaoh Ikhnaton, Pablo Picasso, Matthias Grünewald, Joan of Arc, Jean-Paul Sartre, Goethe, Meister Eckhart, Alan Shepherd and Sandy Koufax, to say nothing of Ben Hogan, Bobby Jones and Sam Snead. For some readers it is simply too much philosophical woo-woo. But for golf’s soul surfers, GITK is holy scripture.
Much later, in an interview with the “Golf Smarter” podcast, Murphy described it like this:
The book opened up a doorway for me into what I’d been studying all my life, namely the mystical side of our ordinary life, and the possibilities that keep opening to us of amazing new adventures and transformations but that we turn away from.
Sport has a lot of similarities to yoga or martial arts, when it’s passionately pursued. Any sport does. It requires a tremendous commitment of body and soul and a coordination of your mind with your performance.
For Murphy, golf is an experience that, like all the best things life can give us, combines illumination and ecstasy and pain.
Golf courses are really the world’s largest gardens. They are places of illumination, and hell, and pleasure, and occasional ecstasy.
Whether we know it or not, and most of us only have a dim awareness that we might never find the space or the words to articulate, it is this combination of the solid and the soulful that draws so many of us to yoga, or Brazilian jiu-jitsu, or fly-fishing.
And yes, maybe more than all the others, to golf.
To confront chaos
Why do we play?
At the most mundane level we play for a social outlet, to join people at similar stages in life or career or both, and to satisfy the fundamental human need for connection.
We play for competitiveness too, a competitiveness that extends in three different directions at once. We play against our playing partners, either for the medal at the end or the beer tab in the 19th or simply the bragging rights that are yours right until next time you tee it up. But we play also against our environment, against the world around us, against the course: we navigate the man-made sand-traps or water hazards just the same as the natural humps and hollows and roll-offs and tree-stumps. And maybe most of all we play against ourselves, against the idea we have of ourselves, against both the self-torture that erupts unbidden from the mind after a fluffed shot and the fleeting and equally undeserving thought, when we flush a five-iron from 170 yards and watch it roll to a stop five feet from the hole, that finally you’ve cracked it.
We play for movement. The title of John Feinstein’s bestselling book, A Good Walk Spoiled, indicated the torment that the game of golf can inflict, but it also pointed to one of its absolute upsides: a good walk. We are heart and soul, mind and body, and all four benefit from motion. We are not born to be still.
We play to satisfy our innate want for integrity, drawn to the game by ancient and often arcane laws and rules that can seem odd in the particular but which in the general add up to an established and long-agreed-upon set of moral codes and traditions. The game is time-honoured, and both time and honour are central to it.
As we continue to climb this ladder of motivating factors, we must recognise that we play also for the idea of quest.
The quest sits at the centre of our oldest stories: what is the Odyssey? What is Scheherazade and the king and the 1001 nights? What is the story of Christ? Every day is another step on a quest to discover all that life has to offer. All games we play, from ice hockey to Monopoly, aspire to be a model of this quest, but golf encapsulates it perfectly: the quest of taking a little ball and a bag of sticks, and hitting the little ball around a field in search of the perfect ending. The hole is order and literally everything outside it is chaos unbound. Our quest is not to overcome chaos, because chaos can never truly be overcome; our quest is to go through the chaos and emerge from it and claim the order that exists on the other side. And, of course, as it must always be, the order is by essence fleeting: we stoop and pluck the ball from the hole and step forward to confront the chaos again.
From the mundane to the sublime, those are some of the reasons we play.
And just like everything that embraces the mundane and the sublime, the game allows the occasional transcendent moment to land.
Divinity is equally a perfectly-rendered Beethoven sonata, a sunshaft through the clouds, or the feeling that comes when your body and mind and heart and soul coordinate fully and fleetingly in a single moment: whether that moment is the gratitude that envelops you as you tie the laces on your golfshoes in the club carpark at 7am with the promise of 18 holes ahead of you; or the realisation that hits you forcefully that you are here now on the sixth green, with your son or father or grandfather, in a glorious moment you know, even now, will be something you will remember for the rest of your days; or the rare and extraordinary experience of swinging a club and feeling the contact with the ball not as something apart from your body, but as something within it, an extension of your sensation that seems for a nanosecond to be the embodiment of perfection itself, before it passes and leaves just a sense-memory in your brain and in your bones.
To admire greatness but seek fragility
Why do we watch?
For some of the above also, but plenty of people pull up a pew and settle in for the golf on Sunday afternoon without ever having held a club. So we must watch for other reasons too.
We watch, it’s safe enough to assume, for the same reasons we observe anything that has the potential to be great.
We watch for the possibility of the transcendent moment. We seek what’s standout, what’s special, what’s sublime, what’s spiritual.
We watch so that we can see others, people just like us—even if they are blessed with genetic beauty or height or strength or skill—do things that we’d like to think we might have been capable of, in another time with another life.
There was a story in the New York Times recently about the growing industry of “e-pimps”, the individuals and businesses who manage and profit from the production of custom-made pornography to satisfy the kinks of guys with money to spare and loneliness to overcome.
One of the e-pimps told an interesting story about beauty: the most beautiful girls, those with the most perfect faces or bodies, were often harder to sell. Speaking of one candidate, he said:
“She’s too beautiful. Not common enough. Impossible looks are for magazines and runways. What people really want, in the end, is someone they can imagine talking to in real life.”
While it’s a long par five from custom-made porn to golf from the couch, the thinking here is not dissimilar.
Yes, we can admire Tiger at his peak, but Tiger when his marriage falls apart, his career hits the rocks and his body breaks down? That’s something we can love.
So too the drama of the psychological meltdowns: the theatre of watching those who have everything they’ve ever worked for within their grasp and watch it slip away. A generation of sports fans were drawn to golf by Greg Norman’s full day collapse in 1996 and Jean van de Velde’s 15 minutes of infamy in 1999.
We admire greatness but what we yearn for most is fragility.
Because we know implicitly that fragility is what we’re made of and what we must strive to overcome and often fail in the trying, day after day after day.
To find people like us
Why do we go to golf events?
Attending golf events includes some measure of both of these things, but with added ingredients too.
Yes, of course, of course, of course, there are many who go to golf events for the corporate hospitality, for the drinks that might be taken and the deals that might be done.
We go to entertain ourselves, to be entertained.
We go because days like this—days when we get up at 4am and drive to the park-and-ride and sling a bag on our shoulder and board a bus to the venue—are what all the rest of the nondescript and banal days are for.
We go to stand behind the rope or in line at the concession stands and be in lockstep and shoulder to shoulder with many many nameless people who are just like us.
We go to be part of something bigger than ourselves.
We go to be in a place, even for a day, where we feel that great quantum paradox: on the one hand to feel the call to be bigger, bolder, more capable than we normally are, and on the other to be somewhere we feel we truly belong. Even for a day.
And we go to get up close to people we’ve seen on TV, heard about, read about, to watch how they stand, how they walk, how they talk, and to see if there’s even a snippet we might learn about two of the most important games we’ll ever play, the game of golf and the game of life.
The swaying rope bridge
This is why we—some of us, at any rate—play golf, watch golf, go to golf events.
Yes, golf has a problem with its relationship to sustainability.
Yes, golf has a problem with inward-looking insularity.
Yes, golf has a problem with elitism and exclusivity.
This does not mean that the LIV tournaments, which is where this essay series started, are not golf.
But it does mean that the LIV tournaments are not golf the way we’ve come to know it.
The great wheel of time turns always, bringing the decades when nothing seems to happen and the weeks when decades happen.
This moment right now is a massive threat to golf’s status quo, but isn’t that what always tends to happen when something becomes the status quo?
We can hope that amid the ongoing transition from heritage game to entertainment package, we collectively find a way to hold onto the deepest and most cherished values.
Should that preclude us from taking in an hour at a Topgolf for wings and swings, or an afternoon at a different type of pro event where we can watch some of the best players in the world before a party night of drinks and music?
Rory and Justin Thomas and Jordan Spieth seem to embody the heritage and the spirit. Bryson and Brooks and Phil represent the fireworks and flashing lights.
Between golf’s past and golf’s future, we stand on a swaying rope-bridge, hoping we don’t lose too much over the edge.
The End