Recent April: A consistent engagement with golf

Midway through Masters Sunday the tournament was finely poised with three leaders on -7 and a few lurking behind. It promised a finish for the ages. Within about half an hour it had become a procession with only one likely winner. In the space of five holes, from 7 through 11, Scottie Scheffler managed to make bogey, birdie, birdie, birdie, bogey around Amen Corner look boring. Crucially on 11 he did what Ludvig Åberg, in an otherwise incredibly controlled display, had been too naive to do, ignoring the pin and aiming for the fat side of the green. He duly missed right and couldn’t get up and down for par. But with Morikawa and Åberg having found the water by being too aggressive, and with Homa struggling in a bush ahead on 12, the tournament was Scheffler’s.

A cliché of the amateur golfer is (usually after a chunked iron or a topped drive) a plea for consistency. If only I was more consistent (when I haven’t played for a month), if only I could hit like I do on the range, if only I could stop three putting, my golf dreams would become my golf game. But this is a pursuit of the wrong kind of consistency. We know what it takes to play better golf; practice, instruction, patience, temperament, dedication, and in Scottie Scheffler’s case, otherworldly talent. But for the everyday golfer it’s not that easy to fit those things into our lives, and so the consistency we really need to develop is a consistent engagement with golf, because that is where its benefits lie. Playing it, watching it, thinking about it, remembering it.

This month we talked to Tom Murphy, founder and director of Make-Ready, a world leading studio in Fine Art screen-printing, based in London, who work with artists like Elizabeth Peyton and Ai Weiwei. He talks movingly about how the declining health of his father led him to take up the sport, how an inconsistent relationship between them in life became a deep and shared connection after his passing. Golf had always been a constant in his father’s life, playing it or watching it, and it has now become a legacy of sorts for Tom. Read the full interview here. We may not have Scottie Scheffler’s ball striking, but we can all learn from the way he makes golf look like any other part of his life, approaching the 12th tee at Augusta on a Sunday afternoon in April like he’s on a petrol station forecourt wondering whether to buy a Lion bar or a Mr Tom’s. Golf’s capacity to take us away from life’s pains and its ability to give us perspective on its trivialities is drawn from the fact that its moments of greatest intensity are largely psychological rather than physical, and that its triumphs are wonderfully meaningless, at the same time as feeling, just for a moment, like the most important thing in all the world.

At Recent Golf we are getting ready for our first weekend away of the year in Munich, where Moritz has organised a weekend of 45 holes of golf, at Wittelsbacher GC, GC Eichenried, and Margarethenhof by Tegernsee, and we are excited to have new friends joining the community for the first time. There’s a danger on these trips to be a little bit too excited, too eager to play well on new courses or to go flag hunting from improbable positions, but we will remember that consistency for us means that why we are playing beats how we are playing.

Golf is good for you.