Golf's Spatial and Spiritual Dimensions

To understand how golf can bring about feelings of transcendence and awe, we need to look at the physical layout of the game and those intimate connections between the ball and player.

The Set-Up

The union with the ball begins with the set-up stance, in which the golfer stares down at the ball, head bowed, as if in prayer. Few other sports require such single-minded focus on a stationary ball. In sports like baseball, basketball, and football, the ball moves too fast for anyone to get a lock on it; in golf, every play begins with a mini-meditation on the ball.

Flickr North Central College Championship

 Flickr Rennett Stowe 




Watching the Shot

In the switch from the stationary set-up position to the swing and then the ball’s soaring flight, the golfer undergoes a sudden, radical shift in perspective—from head bowed to head raised, from a focus on earth to sky, low to high, abjection to transcendence. Having started off like a prayerful hunchback, the golfer soars like a bird.                         

Flickr Russ Glasson

Flickr North Central College Long Shot

I say "the golfer soars like a bird" because the golfer is now intimately connected with the ball, as if it were his or her spirit double. The ball traveling through the air mimics the golfer's mind and body so precisely that its flight path reveals microscopic, hidden tics in the swing that even the golfer often can't consciously recognize. Once golfers see the ball going astray, they often apply "body English," contorting their bodies up and down, to the right, left, and sideways, as if the ball will feel obliged to change course, to please its human twin. Even golfers who suppress these spontaneous movements often still talk to their ball in such sincere tones that you could swear they somehow believe the ball can hear them. Whether mystical or maddening, it's hard to deny the felt union between the golf ball and player.



Even pros sometimes still apply body English (Anyonefortee.com)

Of course, you sometimes see body English applied in other sports as well, and that's for good reason: the same magical principle of "like produces like" appears around the world and throughout human history. This is what anthropologists call “sympathetic magic,” a long-standing, common type of magic found in everything from a love potion made with red flowers to induce a red heart, to bowlers who spontaneously jump to the left or right when they see their ball heading for the gutter. But golf takes this magical thinking to an extreme. By starting every shot with a stationary ball and putting such intense visual and mental focus on the ball's flight path, golf makes sympathetic magic an absolutely central part of the sport.

Searching for the Ball

Once the ball lands, the player assumes yet a different relationship with it. The ball is now a tiny white dot in the distance, whether nestled far off in the grass, or, worse, out of sight in the woods, water, or sand. The player now experiences what novelist John Updike called the "intoxicating relativity" of golf, i.e., the constant changes in scale and spatial relations as the golfer and his or her ball move through the game. Updike writes, “As it moves through the adventures of a golf match, the human body, like Alice’s in Wonderland, experiences an intoxicating relativity—huge in relation to the ball, tiny in relation to the course, exactly matched to that of other players” (Golf Dreams, "The Bliss of Golf," 1997, p. 147-150). Whatever you might think about Updike's fiction, it's fair to say his brief point about golf's relativity is as insightful as his famous essay about Ted Williams' final home run.

FlickR Erik Anestad

Although Updike is referring here to the tininess of the golfer’s body in relation to the course, his point also applies to the golfer’s spirit double, the ball itself, which is even tinier in relation to the course terrain. Here's the way Updike puts it: “To see one’s ball gallop two hundred and more yards down the fairway, or see it fly from the face of an 8-iron clear across an entire copse of maples in full autumnal flare, is to join one’s soul with the vastness that, contemplated from another angle, intimidates the spirit, and makes one feel small."  In other words, the ball induces a sense of the golfer's place in nature and the universe—connected yet humbled, as in religious experiences.

Flickr Andreas Krappweis

If talk of the universe and religion still sounds like romantic hyperbole, remember that sheer scale can fundamentally change a person's emotional experience, as anyone will attest who has ever felt awe and wonder at the grandness of the ocean, mountains, or stars, or just a beautiful, tall cathedral or large-canvass painting. Vast scale, in fact, is one of the quintessential aspects of awe, as social psychologists like Dacher Keltner have shown. Granted, seeing a golf ball fly is not the same as seeing the Grand Canyon for the first time. Most golfers only experience a tingly hint of awe when they're on the golf course, especially if it's one they've been on before. Golf only offers cultivated and controlled awe, but it's still a kind of awe that induces a physical, if not spiritual, sense of humility.

I got interested in these golf questions for personal reasons. My father-in-law has been battling with Parkinson's disease, trying to maintain his balance and coordination and dignity in the face of the disease's relentless attack on his nervous system, and he has fought particularly hard not to let Parkinson's take away his golf game, one of his greatest joys. Over the last decade, he made compromises. He accepted that his shots wouldn't go as far as they used to. Sometimes he fell down on the golf course. But he refused to give up. He also insisted on teaching me how to play. In fact, the worse his shot got, the more determined he seemed to teach me how to hit the ball right. I still can't say my shot has gotten very good, but I've felt as close to him on the golf course as anytime in the years we've known each other. And while walking through the grass and searching for my ball in the woods, I've had ample chances to reflect on golf's mysteries and how this game gets inside you.

Of course, I try not to think about all these questions when I'm swinging. I just listen to my father-in-law's advice ("hold the club gently, like you're holding a bird...feet shoulder-width apart"), bow my head, swing, watch the ball fly—and hope it reaches its destination.

Turnberry Kintyre course, Scotland, (Flickr Englishpointer)