SPORTS SECTIONS SEE ALSO
|
 The Daily Online Sports Magazine The Imagination of Nicklaus Jonathon Kahn SportsJones Magazine July 20, 2000 Page 2 | Back to Page 1
Coming up with the appropriate shot can be tormenting. Adopted son Tom Watson said of his early experiences in the British Isles, "When I first came over here I hated it. I said, this isn't golf, golf is played through the air, not on the ground, and what's the deal with all these bounces. It wasn't until I'd been over here several times that it occurred to me that this was golf, not what we played, that this was way the game was meant to be played." The key insight here is that golf is in "all these bounces." It's not that links golf is defined by random and unpredictable hard-luck – so often the accusation by disoriented, struggling Yanks – or that the breaks of bad bounces teach an important moral lesson. Instead, what's in those bounces is literally the golf course itself – the land. The biggest fallacy about links golf is that it is unpredictable. Hard surfaces, after all, bounce rather predictably. What is true about links golf is that because of the pitch and shape to the surface, each shot is packed densely with subtlety. Shots must be landed on exceedingly small targets – a much different and more complex version of target golf than most American players and fans are familiar with. And because these targets are immensely difficult to discern, links golf throws into stark relief one's own ignorance. But this sort of golf can be exhilarating because it breeds the closeness of a relationship. I'm not talking about a mystical, intangible relationship, but about the way a sensitive golfer literally feels the golf course asking him to expand and experiment with his game. Courses become texts to be read. Golf becomes less an activity of repetition and more an interpretive art. Nicklaus was the best reader of golf courses who has ever lived. And the more seemingly empty the course, the better reader Nicklaus was. By all accounts, this is was not something Nicklaus came to immediately. He struggled in Britain as an amateur. He insisted in the 1964 British at St. Andrews on fading the ball, "then pray[ing] that the wind would swing the ball back on target." Of course, the wind in 1964 insolently imposed itself on his game. Nicklaus tamed St. Andrews on his return in 1970 because he drew the ball – "something I had resisted over the years" – holding it against the wind. He learned how to read what the course gave him. When Nicklaus is asked to pause on the bridge on 18, and that boxy corner of St. Andrews resounds with 40 years of appreciation, he'll stand there, of course, as the best that ever was. But he'll also stand there as someone who learned what St. Andrews had to teach. He made its unseen face known. Nicklaus took the will of St. Andrews not as impudence but as an invitation to do things with his game with which even he, to invoke Bobby Jones's turn of phrase, was unfamiliar. Finally, it is my sense that the Nicklaus era at the
British will end in spectacular and fitting fashion: Jack's long final pause on the
Swilican bridge will take place on Open Sunday, not Friday, after four rounds of
revisiting his golfing imagination.
Jonathon Kahn is working on his doctorate in the philosophy of religion at Columbia University. He has recently written for Slate.com. SportsJones special section on The
British Open More Golf articles Respond to this article |
o place
more than St. Andrews is suited to the skill of envisioning shotmaking. St. Andrews
is singularly the most ill-defined championship golf course on the planet – a lunar
expanse that does not provide familiar cues or directional signals. Players must
shape shots with no frame and little context.
