History gets old

At a recent meeting of a private golf club’s heritage committee, a frustrated member was bemoaning the lack of interest by newcomers to the club. “Half of our members have joined in the last five years,” he said, “and they have no interest in our nearly century of golf.”

The fellow had a point, though its truth resonated deeper than he might have realized. The problem is less about golf or the job the committee was doing than about the pace and whirl of our cultural direction — one in which the present seems all important and the past gets compressed into one amorphous mass.

Structurally, the problem is understandable. As a thought experiment, consider that for the average college student today, events five or six decades ago involving Richard Nixon, Vietnam or Watergate have the same resonance that World War I, Warren Harding and Teapot Dome had for me when I was in college. No wonder you get the sense with people today that their own awareness of the past can hardly distinguish between the Civil War and the Peloponnesian.

The issue is particularly salient in the golf world, where, lately, some 200 clubs a year are enjoying their centenary as products of the 1920s. One encouraging result is a flood of well-documented club history books. At the same time, it’s a fair question how much of the heritage retrieval resonates with members.

Golf, it would seem, is structured better than most sports to make its own history part of an organic, living experience. That sentiment has certainly animated an explosion of classic golf course restorations projects. There are only so many Fenway Parks and Wrigley Fields in baseball. In golf, there are thousands.

It becomes the job of heritage committees like the one I spoke with to make the past relevant today. To that end, a small, skilled number of professionally trained archivists has emerged to collect, collate and display club histories. Whether it be on websites, along clubhouse hallways or in dedicated rooms, we are seeing more attention paid to honoring the past and reminding golfers of the game’s traditions. Ideally, this has both an educational and an emotional function. The learning comes from immersing oneself in the game’s great lore. The personal growth entails modesty at one’s place in the game, in the club, and in facility decision making. You get humbled in the process, learning that your wants and opinions are part of a larger conversational stream.

How to cultivate this sensibility is not easy. I’m a big fan of placemats at the dining table that showcase the club’s earlier routing. Maybe it’s a version of an early Donald Ross routing plan. Or it could be a map of how the course played the one time it hosted a national championship. In either case, it’s the best way to get golfers thinking about a different version of the course than the one they are probably used to.

I also love how some clubs with the right lineage showcase the names of great players who have trodden the fairways. Whether it’s Harry Vardon and Ted Ray during their early 20th-century tour, a war bond fundraiser with Ben Hogan and Byron Nelson, or a pro-am involving LPGA greats Pat Bradley and Beth Danielson, any reference to Hall of Famers sharing the fairways cannot help but invoke nostalgia and respect.

I have seen far too many clubs skip over all of this and adorn their hallways with reprints of English hunting hounds. Or they fall back on monotonous displays of grim-faced past presidents, club championship winners and amateur invitationals.

It takes a little imagination, but the effort can often pay back in terms of memorabilia retrieved from dusty attics of the eldest members, or different versions of the club flag that had been stuck behind bags of fertilizer in the superintendent’s building.

At Oakmont Country Club, scene of this year’s U.S. Open and itself a living museum of golf, the most popular items on display are the club’s old and notorious deep-pronged bunker rakes. Of course, not every century-plus-old club has the history of Oakmont. But all it takes at any club is some inventiveness to make use of the items and implements on hand.

If your architect isn’t one of the Golden Age Gods, act as if he or she is and create an interesting biographical display with reference to other works by the same designer. Need memorabilia evoking an earlier generation? Go on eBay — or any other public auction market — and buy an antique vintage Wilson Jock Hutchinson steel shaft niblick for $23.99.

There are lots of ways to invoke history. The point is to stretch the moment, extend one’s metaphysical presence in the game and relocate contemporary people so they begin to think of themselves a little differently, as extended over space and time. Golf will do that to you.