This Thursday at Augusta National Golf Club in Georgia marks the 88th playing of The Masters, the most venerable tournament in golf. When the Masters were first played (in 1934, actually), golf was firmly the gentleman’s game. For a long time afterwards, this remained true, and it’s how the game was portrayed in popular culture. In a memorable scene in Goldfinger (1964), James Bond tees off with the titular tycoon (who brings along his enigmatic henchman, Oddjob, as caddie). Although we didn’t see Bond refining his short game in Dr. No, we aren’t surprised to learn that the Oxfordian superspy somehow fits in time to protect his handicap even as he trots the globe fighting SPECTRE. Sean Connery’s Bond—in Ben Hogan attire with GQ style—exudes the gentlemanly, if inescapably elitist, decency of the game, whereas his opponent’s crass violation of the “strict rules” is prologue to later villainy. This is the scene in which Auric Goldfinger is first introduced, and apparently it is sufficient for the character note of someone no less diabolical than a Bond villain to be that he cheats at golf. It’s apparently a hop, skip, and a jump from that to diabolically planning to irradiate the entire U.S. gold supply at Fort Knox. Or take another tycoon with an unhealthy affinity for that shiny metal: it’s not too far from pretending you only hit two shots from the rough on #7 to pretending you won more votes than your opponent in the state of Georgia.

Since 1934, and since 1964, the game of golf has gotten much more populist, and playing to the “strict rules” like Bond has become exceptional. The democratization of golf is essentially a good thing, of course. In the recreational game, caddies seem almost as bygone as butlers (meaning Oddjob needs a new job), and innovations like Top Golf have popularized the game dramatically with younger demographics. There are now around 25 million players in the U.S (with an overall participation base of 41.1 million, including Top Golf, according to the National Golf Foundation), and most are more likely to play a water-logged yellow Noodle 4 than a pristine Callaway 1. We have Tiger Woods to thank for expanding the racial diversity of the game and local programs and municipal courses to thank for increasing access to the sport for youth in low-income communities (and decreasing the start-up costs in the entire market). In many parts of the country, however, especially on the East Coast, golf remains a country club pastime—the rite of social and professional initiation for white-collar WASPs. It is associated with former President Donald Trump and his properties, such as Mar-a-Lago and Bedminster, site of many an informal summit during the Trump presidency (Trump even proposed to hold the meeting of the G7 at his resort in Doral, running slightly afoul of the Emoluments Clause).

As golf has become more popular, however, it has not necessarily become better. The existential threat to the game of golf today—from the casual weekend foursome to the professional game—is its appropriation by the “bros.” As golf fans worldwide enjoy this year’s Masters, which could well be won by one of the Bros of the Saudi PIF-funded LIV tour, it seems to be a good time to reflect on the strange, eventful history of golf in contemporary American culture, and wonder about the future of this deeply meaningful game.

I’ve played golf for most of my life. I’ve been an off-and-on player, my passion for the game diluted by spells of frustrating performance and subsequently buoyed after an indeterminately long hiatus by that inscrutable, quixotic exhortation to get back on the course. What has always remained constant in my relationship with golf, however, is my appreciation that it seemed to be a game that the Sports Gods had been gracious enough to design for me; it could accommodate the lanky body and ungainly limbs of someone who only saw the inside of a gym in mandatory physical education classes. It’s also good for the bookish; golf is described in mental terms much more often than other sports: I could treat it as chess on grass.

I’ve always felt strongly about this aspect of this game and chafed against those who saw it less as chess and more as arm-wrestling. That’s why I love someone who can write about golf in a way that makes me nod in inarticulable assent about its most ineffable values, the values which I fear are slipping away in the bro takeover of the game. The indisputable master of this craft is John Updike, whose profoundly insightful writings about golf appeared in his novels, stand-alone short stories, and essays for Golf Digest and the New Yorker (and are compiled in the wonderful book Golf Dreams). Reading Updike’s golf musings this year, I was struck by the degree to which golf is no longer his—or my—game; fewer and fewer golfers would recognize Updike’s Stoically introspective and philosophically expansive view of golf, which in his words, is “of games the most mysterious, the least earthbound, the one wherein the wall between us and the supernatural is rubbed thinnest” (so much for the Inner Game of Tennis). Fewer, in short, think of it as chess on grass.

Golf has increasingly become a game for bludgeoners, not ballerinas. For hammers, not scalpels. For kings, not philosophers. This is the Bro Takeover, and it has diluted the ethereal powers which Updike waxed poetic about.  In the professional game, there is Bryson DeChambeau, the dominant champion of the 2020 US Open at Winged Foot (considered one of the most difficult golf courses in the world), who has avowed to fundamentally alter how the game of golf is played through a brawny strategy of pounding drives and Mach 3 iron shots. He has had mixed results since that major triumph (and, unsurprisingly, has since moved to the LIV tour), but DeChambeau remains one of the most well-known names in golf today, perennially threatening to beat Augusta National into submission, and he has influenced how most younger men see golf: as a test of their manliness. Most people my age I see on courses today are trying to fly out of their shoes with their drives.

In fact, the entire phenomenon of the LIV tour in many ways constitutes the apotheosis of the “bro”-ification of golf. Any viewer of Full Swing, the Netflix docu-series which has chronicled the behind-the-scenes turbulence of the past two tour seasons, as the PGA-LIV saga has played out, will note the glaring divergence in personalities between those who stayed loyal to the tour and those who took the Saudi check (the split is not as Manichean as I’m suggesting, as the stories of players such as Ian Poulter indicate). In Full Swing, Brooks Koepka, a 5-time major champion and indisputably one of the best golfers in the world today, complains that he does not receive the same adulation for his athletic achievements in golf compared with athletes who play basketball, football, baseball, and even tennis. Koepka’s beefy physique and jock personality (“just gotta go out and execute”) are, in fact, more complementary to other sports. But remarkably—and not least because of his remarkable success in major tournaments— he and his acolytes are remaking golf in their image (not dissimilarly, note the outsize influence of trash-talking, basketball-obsessive Nick Kyrgios in the once-chivalrous world of tennis). Legions of jeering golf fans—including some who have taken to interrupting players’ backswings—have changed what tournaments look and sound like, and frustrated many traditionalists with their trampling Yahoo behavior. Should LIV triumph and fundamentally alter the professional game—and signs increasingly point to Greg Norman, MBS, Mickelson and Co. having gotten their way—it will be a victory for Koepka, Dustin Johnson, Patrick Reed, and all the golfers who seemed to value trophy wives more than trophies, and paychecks more than the respect of fans (or as they are called at Augusta, patrons). The troglodytes are prevailing.

But there is a gaping hole at the center of this vacuously hyper-masculine, frat-house version of golf. If you look back at the golfing scene in Goldfinger, you may be struck by Bond’s strikingly untelegenic putting posture—with an arched back posture, the epitome of masculinity in the Cold War hardly seems to exude manly suave. Curious. And if you have ever watched Jack Nicklaus—the winningest major champion of all-time—play golf, you will notice an even more pronounced dip. Golf has always had a deep aesthetic element, but that is far more about the undulating emerald hills of the course and the soothing thwack of a well-struck ball. Sports are about the limits of human physical achievement, and while we marvel at what the body can do, we should marvel more at what games ask of us, and challenge us to create. By revering golf and not golfers, we submit to something larger than ourselves.

That hole (pun partially intended) can be filled again if we look back to the wonderful tradition of Golf Philosophy. John Updike, who explored how golf metamorphoses our mortal arrogance into a hopeless muck, was perhaps the most eloquent proponent of this field. In a quasi-Buddhist sense, he discussed how golf is about suffering more than anything else. Golf is fun, but that’s not the end of the story: on some strange spectrum between pain and pleasure, it is about the paradoxical fun of suffering: it’s about the juxtaposition between the feeling of utter exasperation after a putt lips out or a bunker shot sails over the green and that feeling of total incomprehension when one follows a duff with a clean strike to within ten feet of the pin. These are the kinds of feelings so powerful that we don’t have names for them.

Updike would have been appalled by those who now view golf decidedly un-spiritually; as a cheap excuse to get plastered on a Saturday afternoon, say, or as a chance for some nyuk-nyuk networking with the folks from Corporate. “Few sights are more odious on the golf course than a sauntering, beered-up foursome obviously having a good time,” Updike wrote, and I have tended to agree. Chuckling, betting, and sophomoric “locker room” jokes (if you’ve seen Full Swing, you know a certain demographic has never outgrown them) pierce the serenity of an afternoon of purgatorial ball-striking. Playing golf one should feel like Sisyphus raking a Zen Garden, where we will never get every pebble in exactly the right place. Think of the painful peacefulness of that oh-so-brief scene in Lost in Translation where Bill Murray tees off alone on a course beneath Mount Fuji. Because of the transcendence that golf can convey, Sofia Coppola needs just a moment to show us a man and the state of his life. 

In a Sisyphean sense, golf is indeed more about the ball rolling down the hill than it is about it reaching the top (and sometimes literally so). Golf is far more about failure, not success. Think of the scoring; the whole notion of par is criminal—for most amateur golfers, a par is a great result on a hole, but according to the rules of the game, that great result is merely what you are expected to do. (Birdies? Now let’s not get greedy). 

Golf is also about consciousness and unconsciousness. In a piece called “Swing Thoughts,” Updike parodied the chaotic din of half-remembered tips which bangs around in the heads of all golfers when we line up to the ball, even though we all know deep down that a total cavern between the ears is usually, somehow, the better option. A swing thought is the “golfer’s equivalent of the rock climber’s Don’t look down,” Updike writes. And yet we always look. Why do we look? I don’t know: read Hamlet, I guess. Or The Interpretation of Dreams. Those are the closest answers humanity has to show for itself.

Golf is about the virtues of both youth and age. While other sports can only be played skillfully in the halcyon days of peak physical prowess, one can be a much better golfer at sixty than one is at thirty. The composer John Williams, who is now 92, still plays four holes of golf a day for his exercise regimen. Golf is not designed to make the young feel smug about their youth, but rather to make all people more comfortable with all stages of life. It is to make the overly confident young more self-aware and the self-doubting old more hopeful for the future.

I hope that new golfers—of my generation, those younger, and those yet to be born—embrace Golf Philosophy, not the Bro approach. I hope they consider all the tenets above, and more. This game is entering new hands: almost half (48%) of all golf participants (including Top Golf) are between the ages of 6 and 34, a larger proportion than those ages represent in the total population. LIV—with its abridged tournaments and match play formats—and Top Golf—with its gamification—reward the instant gratification tastes of younger generations.

But rather like going to the moon, golf is something we do not because it is easy but because it is hard. Pros who went to LIV were rightly criticized not just for taking dirty money, but for choosing 54 holes over 72; they wanted to play less golf. And while the tour schedule is surely grueling, this is hardly an inspiration to fans who play golf at every opportunity they can get, such is their love for the game. Players who stayed on the PGA Tour, like Rory McIlroy, have been rightly lauded not just for sticking with their principles, for wanting to play more golf, and hence losing more, because they love the quality of the competition most. Golf is humbling, and for those who are too often told in life how special they are (Duke students most certainly included), golf knocks us down a notch. Updike has a great line for this as well: “Only golf trusts us with a cruelly honest report on our performance.” The vast space of a golf course, as opposed to the rigid confines of a basketball court or football field, remind us of our smallness, and yet allow us to marvel: Did I really hit that ball that far? So to new golfers I say: enjoy your shanked second shots and bungled chips. Respect the honor (like James Bond does), don’t give gimmes from ten feet, dress like you care, but don’t look too preppy. And embrace golf as a game against yourself, not the rest of your foursome. Make goals, not bets. 

And lest you think—particularly with my sartorial prescriptions—that I am merely cranky that golf is being taken less seriously, let me leave you with one last axiom of Golf Philosophy: golf is inescapably not just fun but funny. Stephen Hawking said that “life would be tragic if it weren’t funny,” and—not to overemphasize the metaphorical power of sports—golf is like that, too. The game is so utterly frustrating, so utterly demoralizing and alienating, that it is ultimately absurd. That’s why Robin Williams’ stand-up bit about golf, which imagines the addled thought processes of the inebriated Scotsmen who first conjured up the game (“with a little f**ed up stick I whack the ball, it goes in a gopher hole”), is so hilarious to watch. Golf is a way for us to interact with the absurdity of our own existence. Had there been more courses in French Algeria, Camus would have been around them all the time; indeed, Updike also pointed to the existentialist tradition in Golf Dreams: “like a character out of Dostoevsky, we perversely continue to play with wild and self-punishing imperfection.” Forget the ax: imagine the damage Raskolnikov could have done with a 4-iron. Much of Golf Dreams is focused on the humor we can get from golf, even its worst moments (“a foozled chip has its gentle comedy,” “a ground-out in baseball or a tennis ball whapped into the net is not especially amusing, but bad shots in golf are endless fun—at least, the other fellow’s are”).

I’m not advocating for a return to the sexist, stratified world of Caddyshack (or Goldfinger, for that matter), but there are certain traditions in the game of golf which we should cling onto in order to stop the sport from changing for good. The gentleman’s game is different not just from the boozer’s game, but also from the executive’s game, and golf does not have to choose between the Scylla and Charybdis of plutocracy and riotousness. Golf can reconcile populism and tradition if more players embrace the best aspects of the “gentleman’s game.” Updike wondered if success would spoil golf. I hope not.

by Zachary Partnoy