Pitchmarks #167 - "Spots of Time"

“All moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just the way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them.“
From Kurt Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse-Five”

I’d known I might have some time to actually read on holiday for months. An arrow spanned our little trip, guarding the calendar against all the other threats and commitments, and eventually the moment came for my last-minute packing. I hurriedly made a list, and the last item unticked simply said “books.”

Writing this a full thirty days after the holiday ended, I remember that I’d meant to find my copy of Don Quixote and finish that epic mission (see here: “Tilting at Windmills”). But my memory neglected that plan in the midst of my preparatory haste, and so, while standing in a charity shop as the dog paid through her little black snout for the latest bout of post-Brexit daylight robbery, I spotted another supposed classic going for a pittance. Slaughterhouse-Five was a title I’d missed in adolescence, but enough people love Kurt Vonnegut to pique my curiosity, so it went in the bag, along with my internet friend Tony Dear’s latest.

Tony’s stuff is often a source of delight via LINKS Magazine, where his topic ideas are as wonderful as his apparently encyclopaedic memory. The Story of Golf in 50 Tournaments seemed a nice companion for Vonnegut — the chance to dip into nostalgic territory felt like a break from the somewhat heavier material the back cover of Slaughterhouse-Five promised.

It turns out the latter isn’t really about the bombing of Dresden, partly because Vonnegut’s brilliant, meandering opening chapter admits that neither he nor his oldest friend from that time can actually remember much themselves. From there, the novel and its lead character, Billy Pilgrim, shuffle in and out of time, the wider mysteries of life woven into a narrative that only seems to regard Dresden as its unifying theme. It is, from the first page, the masterpiece I’d been promised, and I finished it in a few hours, my focus broken only by fits of laughter at the playful genius of the author.

Tony was up next, and — having read the introduction when it first arrived a few weeks back — I was delighted once again by the mention of Wordsworth on page five, and the reminder of his phrase “spots of time,” used to describe those moments of our lives that are somehow fixed, as if through a camera lens, every detail rendered permanent by our attention, or by some deeper meaning we attach to it.

Tony calls these “distinct, vivid memories.” Where some people insert here the moment they learned of the fate of JFK, or Martin Luther King Jr., for me it might be standing at the bar as some stranger told me Kurt Cobain had died, or the fast-taken corner that sent Liverpool past a bewildered Barcelona. Or the day Covid-19 closed all of our doors, and all of our tees, or better still the day they opened again. Our sharpened focus in such spots of time encases fine detail the way a fossil does, and though golf hadn’t really found the Lake District in Wordsworth’s time, I like to think he’d approve of us pinching his term to examine our sport this way.

The deep, reflective quiet of the pandemic brought an awareness of how I’d fallen out of love with golf, though I’d been positively intoxicated by it through my teenage years. The years since — playing more, trying new courses when I can, and trying to cement these personal spots of time by writing about them — have somehow wound back the clock, letting me leap through time like Vonnegut’s Billy Pilgrim to the simpler days when golf ruled my life.

For those of us who love golf, watching it played by the masters, at the peak of their ability, can be to experience awe. On one level it’s only a game, and a daft one at that; on another, we watch the drama unfold, the hopes and dreams of the protagonists shifting in the breeze like the flags they hunt, and know they’re welded to their present, and ours. In real time, Jack’s win at the 1986 Masters — the first edition I watched, with no idea who this “Golden Bear” was — was a rollercoaster ride, a staggering feat of momentum that hasn’t faded with time.

Tony brings that moment and a few dozen others back to life brilliantly, including the strange echo of Jack in Tiger’s 2019 comeback win on the same creeping bent turf. He paints the pictures in words, filling in the details no photo could offer for context. That golf — already a few hundred years old, and now a global business — can still produce these peak experiences for us and for our heroes says something about the depth of this pursuit.

In here are the charges to glory of Palmer and Zaharias, Jones and his own heroine, Joyce. “The Duel in the Sun”, “Hogan’s Alley”. And many other pivotal moments in this sport we love, frozen in time — no, “unstuck in time,” à la Mr Pilgrim — for us to rediscover whenever the spirit moves us. And when our modern professionals slip beneath the old standards of golfing conduct, as one or two have done of late, what a joy it is to be able to immerse ourselves instead in such moments of distinction, respect, and decorum.

Tony closes with Rory’s career slam at Augusta in 2025, well aware that the text could soon be out of date — and so it proved, when a successful defence of his green jacket followed in almost equally dramatic circumstances. A simple register of champions is just a list of names and numbers but, armed with Tony’s marvellous companion, the iconic moments that make up the timeline of our game are rendered with the love and care of a writer who describes the sport as beautifully as his subjects play it.

So I tick the box marked “books” on my packing list, and recommend both to anyone who’ll listen. Unlikely companions, perhaps, but masterpieces in their own, delightful way. And then I wait patiently for another Open to unfold, and wonder what stories, what spots of time will lie hidden in the dunes at Royal Birkdale this week.

Time will tell, no doubt. It always does.

“That's one thing Earthlings might learn to do, if they tried hard enough: Ignore the awful times, and concentrate on the good ones."
From Kurt Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse-Five”

Read some excerpts from Tony’s book via his Substack blog, here. Then buy the book from the publisher, Back Nine Press, or from Amazon. You can thank me later!