James P. Carse taught at New York University for thirty years as the Professor of the History and Literature of Religion, and Director of the Religious Studies Program. He retired from the University in 1996. He is a writer and an artist, and lives in New York City and Massachusetts.

“Another six yards I would have been
over the brow of the hill on thirteen,
with a wedge to the green”

    “You saw the way my
     goddam ball hung
     on the lip at three?”

“I still think I was in bounds on that ball I lost on eleven.”

    The gentlemen of the foursome were seated facing each other on the balcony of the clubhouse with a sweeping view of the course they had just played. The occasion is fictional, but it is also perfectly typical. Any golfer will be familiar with the experience, and will in fact have taken part in something similar scores of times. What first strikes a casual passerby is the animated quality of each remark. The speakers are thoroughly enjoying the occasion. The words tumble out with a gleeful energy. But a closer listener will note a peculiar feature: not one of the participants responds to another. The scattered comments follow each other with no obvious connection.

What is more, they are describing acts that all of them witnessed anyway. They just spent eighteen holes in a friendly match, after all. This is not, therefore, an exchange of information. No one could possibly learn anything new from what is being said. Properly speaking, this is not even a conversation, but a private recitation spoken aloud, each speaker his only listener. What are we to make of this near universal phenomenon?

At one level, it can be taken as an exercise in collective insensitivity, a willful disregard for what seems to be so important to others. But this would miss the more important point: the need of each player to craft a coherent narrative of the game just completed. That no one else assists in the effort seems to have no effect on the vitality and persistence of each speaker’s presentation. Were we to follow them out to the parking lot, we would quickly note that their efforts are not finished with the final round of beers. Days later, we can find any one of them stopping a friend at the supermarket or addressing neighbors at a cookout.  “Hank, I was great off the tees, but, hell, I couldn’t have hit a crater on the greens.” Here, too, the response of the listeners can be safely predicted. But the narrator of the events in question is hardly deterred by the indifferent “Mmms.” The story still needs to be told. It is as if the narrative is in control of the player and only reluctantly will release him. There is a story here and the player must find it. If he doesn’t succeed, it will be as if the game never existed.

Notice also that the reported events are all threats to the even flow of the story. These are all unfortunate turns, missed opportunities, malignant interferences. No one seems interested in what was done correctly. Hitting all the greens in regulation may earn a comment, little more. A hole in one will cost a round of drinks, but will soon fail to dominate the discussion. Grave disasters are also overlooked. That ten on a dog leg par four can remain unmentioned. What gets the greater attention is that in-between region where a fine game was ruined by the player’s foolishness or wretched luck. This is the glue of a narrative. A story’s power rests in a tension between what did and what might have happened, a sequence of possibilities, some realized but most lost, and the more lost possibilities the better. Think of the cost to human culture had Odysseus navigated a safe route home.

Golf is an ideal setting for the creation of narratives. I would go so far as to say that its appeal—and the reason it is the greatest participant sport in the Western world—is its capacity for story production. Like all games, it is played within precise boundaries and undisputed rules. The selection of participants and the line-up of partners are carefully balanced. The rules, properly observed, leave no doubt who the winners are, and the losers. But golf is not like all games. It has features that are essentially unique. Begin with the natural beauty of the course. There is no rule that it be so. There is no reason why it could not be played on flat, treeless, grass worn fairways. But the rarity of such conditions reveals something important. Natural beauty is not accidental to the game, but its sine qua non. Ugly courses mean ugly golf. The course is in effect a stage setting. Unlike a soccer field or tennis court, it is designed. It is a mise en scene, a work of art. Master designers are celebrated. Courses are often presented as the creation of one or another architect. Variety and surprise of the terrain are highly valued, and sometimes notorious: the location of a green on a rocky spit of land extending into undeflected ocean surf.

The variety in the sequencing of holes has its own narrative importance. Each hole has a distinct personality. Players come to know its vagaries and quirky features: the way a ball rolls on this part of the fairway, the influence of wind from an elevated tee. For this reason, each hole develops its own mythic background as a place of epic achievements and failures. Each player has a personal history, painful and triumphant, with every hole on the course. There is a cumulative personality and level of risk, all between the tee and the green, the beginning and the end of the player’s struggles. A hole is, in other words, a chapter in the longer narrative of the game. In no other game are there such chapters, each with its unique setting and distinctive history.

Because the game is so produced, so determined to have its own beauty, it is distinguished from most all other sports for the strict application of etiquette and custom. Taking honors, playing through, stepping over the imaginary line between ball and cup, calling out to players about to be struck by an errant drive, hardly begin the list. A certain horror is attached to events as small as pushing a tee into the ground with one’s index finger. The greatest scorn is reserved for those unfortunates aptly referred to as “hackers.” None of this has anything at all to do with the outcome of the game. But without it the game’s appeal is significantly diminished.

What all this adds to the narrative potential of the game is analogous to how an excellent storyteller lays out the setting. Henry James’ Isabel Archer had to be transferred from a modest home in Albany to the stunning but treacherous hills of Tuscany. The plot by itself could have been executed quite as well had all characters never left their gray American city, but had it been, The Portrait of a Lady would have been remaindered after its first limited printing. It is not just that one missed a putt on the eighteenth green, but that the soft afternoon light, the heady scent of cut grass, and the audience of the three other members of the foursome, if not that of the beer-nursing crowd on the overlooking porch, place the event in a physical, social, and esthetic environment that make it a singular moment, an element of a unique narrative. The final backhand of a tennis game, the last lap of the 100 yard freestyle, a shot at the two remaining clay pigeons, all have their importance to the outcome of the competition, but they are too thin to have stories of their own. They reduce to fact, are more interesting as numbers than as experiences.

Golfers are, to be sure, fascinated by numbers. It is rare to omit from a biographical reference to a player the history of his handicap. But in the discourse at the end of a game, the importance of numbers quickly fades before the travails of reaching them. It is initially interesting, for example, to cite the quantity of someone’s wealth, or lack of it, but the discussion will continue only so far as it includes the odyssean struggles that end or begin with such facts. The greater the troubles the more compelling the tale. Like the Greek hero, the golfer is under a spell. Once off the first tee, all memory of the preceding warfare vanishes. The office, the laboratory, the classroom, needed car repairs, marital distress—all forgotten. There is nothing ahead but an open sea, and the fragile confidence that its multiple dangers can be safely navigated. In short, golf is life in miniature. This is its narrative appeal. Like life, it is partly suspended in the certainty of surprise. It is all anticipation and possibility. Will we complete it as heroes or as clowns?

Unlike life, however, from our location in the club house over the 18th green, we have the privilege of telling the story from its end backwards. We have survived with a kind of post-agonistic immortality. From this perspective, we can make sense of it. The parts all have a fixed place in a finished chronology. Nothing is left out. There are no disconnected events. The gimme on ten cannot be fully understood independently of the muffed shot in the trap at fourteen. The game is wonderfully comprehensive, a world that carries all of its meanings in itself. Real life, in contrast, is full of disconnections. In fact, it is all disconnection. Because there is no way of taking our place on the balcony with an elevated view of our history, from beginning to end, the meaning of the whole is hidden, and will be always. Life is in a sense one hole after another in an unbroken succession, with no concluding eighteenth hole. Is it therefore meaningless? Perhaps. Still, we struggle to make sense of it. Not to do so is madness. But to be sure we can do so is also madness. What we do on the fourth hole will be experienced at the time as something unambiguous, but looking back from the 27th or the 190th, we will see it very differently. Even then what we see is a revision, a bracketed temporal artifact, waiting for yet another retelling. For some, this may be taken as a recipe for despair, but for others an invitation to endless creativity. In real life the existence of an 18th green is a fantasy, but fantasies, after all, must be created, shaped out of a flow that has no shape of its own. Some of those who take this view of life may have a name for it: Buddhism. For them, golf is truly a samsaric event, a creation that knows it is made of nothing.

The last putt of the game is a pseudo-death. It reenacts what we think awaits each life: a real ending. The gentlemen now finishing their beers know this at one level. It shows up in the playful seriousness of their disconnected banter. They willfully confine the recently completed oddyssey to the four hours between tee up and putt out. Still, looking back they see in this game shadows of games past. The contours of the course, the sound of a shanked iron shot, a scary electric storm, a dropped chip shot—all these come together in a long succession of moments in which time seems to go in both directions with no beginning and no end. In all likelihood, they will return to deadly seriousness when they climb into their SUV’s and head home. There, they can suppose that life has a final clubhouse, and an enduring meaning, if they could just tell the story right. But we know they can't. We know we can't. Did the Buddha leave us a sutra for this woeful condition?