To start with, when we talk about ‘golf’, do we refer to the sport as a whole? Its beginnings and grassroots, where people first pick up a club? Or what we watch on television? While the latter might only represent 0.1% of golfers across the globe, what percentage of golfers across the globe does it engage?? And which of those things is more important to golf’s future?
“We know that golf’s greatest leveller is surely its ability to disorientate. To throw something at you that no amount of preparation or skill or intelligence can tell you is coming. To any player, of any ability, at any time.”
There are pictures and stories and messiness within the number, and that’s where the relationship with our sport truly lies, but there’s a grateful finality that seems impossible to find in every other part of life right now.
“We’re supposed to draw a line and then start a new drawing altogether. But 2020 was a series of new drawings in itself – every month, every tournament, every email confirmation PCR test and every yellow-ticker press conference resetting the rules and the consequences.”
“The stats can’t tell you how you feel. But the voices don’t always either. Both can distort reality and create it too.”
“Letting all those stories wash over my own reluctantly-building reflections of a 3 day tournament which included 15 birdies but a T-26th finish drew me to this conclusion: golf is about proving things to yourself.”
“Maybe I speak as a professional golfer and a competitor here as opposed to a fan, but this captures me far more than the final round at Winged Foot on Sunday…
The mutual acknowledgement of mutual demons and the willingness to shatter comfort zones in an effort to deal with them; that last resort of admitting vulnerability.”
All of us who have been lucky enough to have been dragged into golf’s bewitching complexity, we know that it’s exactly that. The complexity, and the desperate search for the peaceful moments of simplicity within it. The questions that it asks, and the occasional answers that we find.
