From the player’s perspective the course is both inviting and disturbing, offering not only fairways and greens, but hazards of various kinds, and therein lies its dual possibilities. . . . How to quite explain the fearful allure of a curving stream or cavernous bunkers, if not in an image? How to convincingly impress the uneasy narrowness of a fairway, the tempting painful possibility of close-felt trees or an out-of-bounds? The viewer, to see and feel these things, has to imagine himself playing the game, seeking life on the green, fearing disaster in the water or trap.
–Walter T. Schmid, Golf as Meaningful Play, 2
Golf and its habitats display a curious combining of the natural world and the formation of human meaning. Not articulated with words, it is nonetheless shown if one views the game and its courses from a certain angle.
Golf’s landscapes have shaped the way the game is understood, played, and felt. The dunelands of Scotland and its four-legged residents lent contours to the game’s origins and heritage. Conversely, the game has given its fields a particular kind of meaning understood only within its parameters.
The game imbues bucolic pastoral settings with non-pragmatic causes of trepidation and caution. Streams easily crossed with a solitary stride become the occasion for a golfer’s indecision and fear. A bunker no bigger than a child’s backyard sandbox causes a grown man to stiffen like a corpse. A tree one would marvel at on a hike now becomes the object of a verbal stream of vitriol as it knocks down the almost-perfect escape shot. It is a beguiling part of golf that an aesthetically beautiful scene, when played, can elicit those interior responses fit for the ugly and repellent.
The course is nature suffused with creative, playful human impulses, meaning and culture. But it’s not as if this human-instilled meaning is superficial; simply layered upon the surface of neutral earth. Like the game itself, its playing field—with its challenges, quirks and beauties—is the result of countless men and women concocting with their creativity, thoughts, emotions and playfulness something larger and broader than any one person, time, or place.
Along with this has come the stitching together of communal meaning, purpose, taste and appreciation. In other words, tradition: the ongoing, organic transmission of the game, its spirit, development and heritage.
But there is something of an inner key one needs to unlock this vision of the golf course, namely, the player-perspective Schmid refers to above. It’s through one’s initiation, apprenticeship, and ever so slow mastering of the game that the scene of the golf course becomes more intelligible, the whisper of its inner message more clearly heard.
One could say that a baseball or football field require such a player-perspective to make sense of them and their essence as well. And this is true. Yet, among playing fields, only golf’s is as expansive and encompassing of the various facets of the natural world. Grass in all its glorious forms, flora, fauna, water, wind, sand, stone, it’s all there. Golf’s scale is grander than those other games and an integral component of what constitutes its distinct nobility.