The oldest golf joke I know is one about the player who threw his clubs into the ocean after a terrible round and the next day was drowned trying to get them back again. To people who don’t play golf, this is a silly story; to those of us who do, it isn’t. Trying to comprehend the appeal of this frustrating game has engaged the interest of poets and lunatics for centuries with limited success. Passion cannot be explained, only endured.

One component of the game’s appeal, however, is tangible and yet frequently overlooked. More than any other game, golf is played with a sense of history. All tennis courts look pretty much alike, and while there are still a few distinctive baseball parks left in the land, you have to be a professional athlete to compete in them. In golf, however, the rankest amateur can stand where the greatest players in the history of the game have stood and face the same challenge. Just as an infantry veteran visiting a battlefield site can survey a piece of sloping land and know how to position troops, so a golfer can look down a fairway and know how to shape the appropriate shot for the attack. Whether, in the heat of the contest, he will do so properly is another question.

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