Or at least it ought to be, exhilarating that is. And maybe it would be if folks stopped trying to make it so fun.
If I wanted have fun, i.e. if I wanted to eat and drink and listen to music and flirt and laugh and talk, I'd head out on a summer Saturday night to a bustling high-end jazz club in Manhattan for all the food and music and drinks and flirting and talk I could handle, and later that night we'd all take a cab to some 24 hour bowling alley in Queens and giggle as we drunkenly sent one ball after another into the gutter.
What I wouldn't do, if I wanted to have fun that is, was strap my golf clubs into the back of a cart and pile it high with stale sandwiches and crappy chocolate bars and then race around on 200 acres of grass-covered farmland, stopping just long enough to find and hit with pitiable inconsistency a small white ball using a ridiculously ill-suited metal implement over and over again, until I got the chance every half hour to annoy and harangue some poor young cart girl with my anachronistically charmless banter as my equally boorish friends and I ordered and downed one tasteless beer after another, all to the sounds of 80s rock blaring from a bass-heavy portable speaker.
That's not fun. Interestingly, perhaps, that's not golf either. Golf is many things, but it isn't fun; it is by turns challenging and confounding and engrossing and perplexing and deeply satisfying, punctuated throughout by the highest of sporting highs and the lowest of lows: by close calls, by agonizing indecisions, by long stretches of foolish pride and frustrated ego, by the brave and confident shots and the timid and foolhardy ones, by brilliant 280 yard drives straight down the middle followed minutes later by a jerky timid stroke and a missed 12 inch putt -- and by moments of near out-of-body bliss, the rightness of it all. All of this is not a surface and skittish bit of fun or happiness; it is more a deep, enriching (and even sometimes quiet) kind of joy -- the joy, and the exhilaration, that is the game of golf.
Or at least, that's what golf ought to be, and what it can be on the game's most interesting and challenging and (sometimes subtly) complex fields of play -- be that an old English course like Kington or a modern American one like Kinglsey, both of which seem to speak not of sustained/consistent and even-tempered fun but instead of special moments of jolting exhilaration; and that quality exists there because of one thing, i.e. the architecture.
I've written before of my local course; I'm very fond of it, and grateful for it - the easy walk, the steady stream of decent and good golf holes with nary a single head-scratcher, the inexpensive golf it provides. Yes, it is fun, I guess I would say -- and that is both its strength and its main weakness. But there is another course, about 30 minutes further away, and more expensive, and a harder walk as it was built on a much more undulating/severe and windier site -- and it is definitely not fun, and it has several holes that are truly nothing more than connectors, and it even has a couple of poor golf holes, but it also has -- that is, it provides -- moments of genuine exhilaration: a 220 yard uphill Par 3 to a green that heaves and sways and drops off dramatically on three sides into chasms of near death experiences; a short extreme dogleg left Par 5 that practically screams birdie chance when you stand on the tee, but if you don't clear the trees on the left your are in them, probably forever, and on the right the fairway runs out quickly into high native grasses, and suddenly the (wide) fairway seems to narrow to a thin ribbon of fear right before your eyes; a skyline Par 3, the perched green seemingly ringed by deep bunkers and dropping away at the back, and, while you've never been back there, back there always seems scarier than the bunkers, and so you never take enough club.
Seeing photos of Kington reminded me of this other course, and of the exhilaration it provides. And late at night, as I type this, I realize I want more of that type of golf. Golf, I say again, is not supposed to be Fun; its fields of play should instead set something ablaze: sometimes heart, sometimes body, and sometimes soul! I get enough smart/thoughtful designs, as there are plenty of those kind of golf courses around -- courses with all the necessary and proper and expected angles and choices and features/hazards and proportions (even quirky proportions) clearly evident, and with enough width and sensible openings in the front of greens so that the course can be playable and enjoyable i.e. fun for all. Maybe architects can start messing up a little again, you know: if you need to have a connector hole or two in order to later on freak me out with a complex and frustrating and challenging and potentially exhilarating golf hole, please don't be afraid to route those in, and not to have 18 postcards. I don't need elevated tees, nor does anyone not in a cart full of stale sandwiches and beer and out looking for fun need a shot from that tee to a wide expanse of fairway that has everything but real teeth to it.
At least, that's what is seems to me right now, at 1 am...
Peter
Edit: and it just occurred to me, like a revelation: maybe that's why, when I know I can play alone (and not bother anyone) and late in the season for sure, I play with a set of old persimmon woods and blades. Yes, I can hit some real squakers and scuttles off the tee, but oh, sometimes, sometimes: a solid strike, and that sound, and the golf ball rises and actually fades, it actually moves, just as I intended, off the fairway bunker on the left and back to the centre of the fairway, 230-240 yards of carry and then the roll; and I follow that -- oh, once a month maybe, once every few rounds -- with a 7 iron, a Hogan blade, that is struck just right and it too actually moves, but this time from right to left, and lands on the green 150 yards away and rolls up close. Fun? I guess -- but no: Exhilaration!
Edit #2: Oh, the Par 5 8th at Crystal Downs, the only Par 5 to this day that I've ever loved. The perfect, and perfectly exhilarating, golf hole. I think, i.e. for my tastes, in my necessarily humble opinion, that several of the highly touted Par 4s there are "fun"...they are good, maybe even great, golf holes in their way. But the 8th -- it stands alone, right at the top; I find myself wishing that, for what will very likely have been my one and only time at Crystal Downs, I had brought my persimmons instead.
Good night, and good luck