The Five: Mother Nature's Son (1919)
Why golf's new dystopian vision isn't actually golf.
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I.
A century ago, a pair of amateur designers volunteered to turn a scraggly patch of real estate at the edge of a continent into something resembling a golf course. “It was all there in plain sight,” said Jack Neville, a two-time California state amateur champion who, along with fellow amateur champion Douglas Grant, had been contracted (apparently for no fee) by a mogul named Samuel F.B. Morse to transform the land known as Pebble Beach into a course unlike any other in the world (and to make Morse a tremendous amount of money in the process, because what is golf without capitalism?).
Years before he was given the assignment, Neville had already envisioned this patch of Pebble Beach as a golf course. He and Grant preserved the natural contours of the land and focused on placing as many holes as possible along the bay. They cut away a handful of trees, added some sprinklers, sowed some grass, and let the rest unfold organically.
“Nature,” Neville said, “had intended it to be nothing else.”
II.
Last week, 95 years after Bobby Jones won the first U.S. Amateur Championship contested at Pebble Beach, a bunch of people gathered inside a flat steel building in Palm Beach, Florida, and watched a handful professionals drive golf balls into a gargantuan television screen. This was the climax of the debut season of something called TGL. This supposedly stands for “Tomorrow’s Golf League” but I think it really just stands for “The Golf League,” which is the kind of name you get when you pay millions of dollars to a marketing firm to devise a clever name for A Golf League. This flat steel building, sponsored by a finance company, was crammed with state-of-the-art technology that allowed these selected professionals to simulate actual golf, all of it contested before a raucous group of fans who performatively play-acted excitement at watching a bunch of dudes get fired up over something entirely fake.
Now, it would appear there are people who truly enjoyed watching this thing, and that is their prerogative. But I found it made me actively uncomfortable. At first, I couldn’t figure out why, and then I thought about that old James Caan movie, Rollerball, and I thought about Arnold Schwarzenegger in The Running Man, all those dystopian sports movies played out in contained indoor spaces as a metaphor for our bleak tech-addled future, and I began to wonder if this was our bleak tech-addled future playing out on screen.
III.
Early in my career, I became a golf writer entirely by accident. I was working at a mid-sized newspaper in a city that hosted a professional golf tournament every year, at a time when mid-sized newspapers still had the budget to send writers to things like the Masters. When the previous golf writer departed, I inherited the assignment, and then spent the next several years eating pimento-cheese sandwiches and feeling like an imposter. Unlike nearly every other writer covering golf, I did not enjoy playing golf. I sometimes enjoyed watching it, not the pedestrian events but the fraught tournaments like the U.S. Open and the British Open, where the elements wreak havoc, and where there is a clear conflict between the sheer competence of mankind and the sheer ferocity of nature. The harder the course, the more interesting it became.
Honestly, though, the best part of covering golf was always the walking. The one thing my father taught me about golf (other than that the bathroom in the clubhouse is always by the bar) is that you always walk the course when you’re playing, for as long as you can actually walk. There is a reason the most resonant quote about golf—perhaps by Mark Twain, perhaps not, but most certainly the title of the late John Feinstein’s iconic book A Good Walk Spoiled—is about how the best part of golf is the actual peramubulation through the outdoors. I have an uneasy relationship with golf—its inherent elitism, its long and sordid history of exclusionary policies, its impact on the environment—but walking an elite golf course is often a beautiful and serene experience, and none more so than Pebble Beach.
IV.
One Sunday in June in the year 2000, I found myself walking 18 holes at Pebble Beach as Tiger Woods lapped the entire field at the U.S. Open. It was one of the most memorable assignments of my lifetime, to witness first-hand as the greatest golfer in modern history overwhelmed nature itself. To me, there is no more beautiful place in the United States—if not in the entire world—than the spot where the Monterey Peninsula juts out into the ocean, and where Route 1 eventually winds south along the cliffs into Big Sur. Pebble Beach is a window into that beauty. Pebble Beach is the best reason to justify golf’s continued existence, and the best way to explain golf’s fundamental connection with nature. And it is also a reminder that without nature, golf is reduced to its most crass human elements.
V.
What makes Mike White’s HBO anthology series The White Lotus so compelling is that it allows us to watch a bunch of humans wrestle with their own considerable egos amid the overwhelming beauty of nature. That, in a very different genre, is the essence of golf, as well. Every year I would cover the U.S. Open and listen to professionals complain about how the course was difficult to the point of being unfair; and then someone would conquer the elements and win the tournament and those complaints would fall away.
What concerns me most about TGL is that it has extracted that essential element from the sport without seeming to care at all about what that sacrifice might mean. I spend enough time on my devices, marooned in a virtual world; I don’t want to spend my leisure time feeling trapped in a claustrophobic setting dominated by machines. And the cheering and raucousness of TGL? I’ve often found it ridiculous that golf crowds are so performatively hushed, but I’ve started to appreciate it more as I get older and crankier because I think it’s a kind of tribute to nature itself. (And in the contrived environment of TGL, the attempt to gin up energy feels as artificial as the laugh track on Happy Days.)
Perhaps this is a melodramatic proclamation, but melodrama is the order of the day, and it feels increasingly like humanity is at an inflection point. We are trapped inside our own heads, navigating a society in which machines dictate and define our future. We are so insular we have literally made a cliche out of the phrase “touch grass.” And that is what I want from golf; I want to feel like I’m touching actual grass. TGL might work as a televisual product, but it’s really just A League. It’s not actually golf, because golf is inextricably tied to the outdoors. Nature intended it to be nothing else.
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Finally, something more boring than watching outdoor golf on TV.
Fake golf. I can’t think of anything more boring.