What is the Spirit of the Game?

[Brent Hutto]

vk,

For me anything that involves more than four persons at a time on a golf course is more party than golf. Or perhaps in some cases more committee meeting than golf.

Even four golfers each with his own caddie, stopping to confer every so often over matters of great import, is a "circus" atmosphere. Even absent the whole scramble hoo-rah. That's the sort of thing I escape FROM to the golf course.

But that's just me. I can accept that some people feel anything worth doing alone or with two or three other folks is made even better by widening the circle. It can just get a long way from the core activity of putting a ball on the ground and whacking it with a stick!

[Mike Hendren]

The spirit of the game is that it gives more than it takes and that's it's good for the soul.   Everything else is just a by-product.

Bogey

[Jeb Bearer]

After some reflection I would like to amend my comments. My position that golf is at its core competitive was clearly too narrow minded. I like the big tent idea. Can we say that the spirit of golf is individualism? That whatever results in enjoyment for a person is the spirit if golf for that person? This by corollary leads to creativity, etc, and if this is valid, then banning the anchored putter is actually contradictory.

[Jason Thurman]

My grandfather played his first few holes of golf since receiving a heart transplant, multiple back surgeries, a knee replacement, and a titanium humerus last year. He only played 4 or 5 holes in a cart on an executive course, and didn't always hole out. Still, you could tell how much it meant to just be back out there again.

I like this idea that the spirit of the game might be rooted in the experience of the individual, and that it's about finding something that brings you happiness, satisfaction, relaxation, or peace.

Maybe it's the very act of worrying about things like anchored putters that is against the spirit of the game.

[Patrick_Mucci]

Dave, et. al.,

How about putting with a pool cue like putter, what's wrong with that ?

How is it any different from the long putter issue ?

[Charlie_Bell]

Without defining the spirit of the game, I would observe that often golf feels no more competitive to me than painting or writing poetry.  To be sure, trying to do it "well" involves using the fewest strokes -- a constraint like that of medium or form in artistic pursuits -- but hitting the ball and savoring everything else about the experience (the smell of cut grass, the feel of fresh air, the joy of companionship or the bliss of solitude, and so on) matter far more than the result.