In the summer​ of 2024, Donald Trump played a round of golf at Bedminster, a course he owns in New Jersey, in the company of Bryson DeChambeau, twice winner of the US Open. The ostensible aim was to raise money for charity by teaming up to ‘break 50’ on a par 72 course. The YouTube video of the event reveals that there were indeed some shots played, to the accompaniment of whoops and the occasional slightly mangled fist-bump. But the real action was the celebrity banter. Asked which is his favourite of his golf courses, Trump settled for Turnberry, the magnificent championship course he owns in South Ayrshire, not because he can remember very much about it, but because – according to him – it’s ‘rated number one in the world’. In 2024 Golf Digest, the rankings bible, had Turnberry at number eight on its list of the world’s greatest golf courses outside the US: impressive, but no cigar. Bedminster was at that time ranked the eleventh best course in New Jersey. More instructive is DeChambeau’s mention of another ‘break 50’ contender, Garrett Clark – a ‘content creator’, he explains, who’s ‘pretty influential in the golf space’.

The golf space, like that of any other elite professional sport marketed to a global fan base of spectator-participants, is at once a broadcast and streaming institution and a crucible of social media clickbait frottage. Golf lends itself to spectacle. There’s a special thrill to the shape of the perfectly hit shot, a kind of lingering, dreamy eloquence. Live broadcasts of the major championships have recently been enhanced by a system that employs a camera set up behind the tee and an array of sensors to capture and display the arc of a ball’s flight from the moment it’s struck to its distant landing. Golf, John Updike wrote, is of all games ‘the most mystical, the least earthbound, the one wherein the wall between us and the supernatural is rubbed thinnest’. I’m not sure about that. To witness (or in the unlikely event execute) a decisive action in pretty much any sport is to experience a kind of grace. More noteworthy – exceptional, even – is the way in which golf’s less supernatural idiosyncrasies have continued to make the news. Take, for example, the ritual known as a ‘gimme’: a putt left close enough to the hole for the next one to be conceded, in a spirit of good will, by your opponent. Should the representative of a foreign government ever offer you a luxury Boeing 747 worth $400 million, think of it as a gimme. As Trump put it: ‘When they give you a putt, you pick it up and you walk to the next hole and say, “Thank you very much.”’

What distinguishes golf from the many other sports which involve doing something to or with a small round object is the degree of its internal as well as external mediation. External mediation occurs in the golf space; internal mediation is a function of the quality and quantity of equipment which comes between a player, amateur or professional, and their ability to execute a decisive action. A tennis player’s decision to exchange one racquet for another strung to a slightly different tension might well help to determine the outcome of a match. But that scarcely compares to the presence in the golfer’s mind and hands of the fourteen clubs at their disposal, each a small miracle of engineering, each designed (in some cases custom-built) to perform a specific task. The first professionals earned a living as much by the manufacture and sale of clubs and balls as by prowess on the course. That’s a lot of kit, all of which, plus towel, spare glove, umbrella and so on, has to be loaded into a bag the size of a portmanteau. Edward VII owned one made out of the skin of an elephant’s penis, a gift from a maharajah.

There’s more than a grain of paradox in this reliance on manufacture. Golf is the most pastoral of games. Its contests take place among rolling hills or in a simulacrum of lush parkland, ideally with a backdrop of seashore or near wilderness. The first easily accessible set of instructions appeared in 1856 in a Manual of British Rural Sports, alongside more extensive sections on hunting, hawking, steeplechasing and ‘pedestrianism’. ‘I like some trees,’ Trump explains to DeChambeau, gesturing at the expanse of Bedminster (maple and oak receive a particular mention). Still, small mercies: at least Bedminster doesn’t boast one of the gigantic fake waterfalls with which Trump has furnished some of the ten other courses he owns in America. But the ease with which golf’s characteristic settings can be accessorised does align it rather more closely than one might think with sports which revel in the exclusion of the natural world.

Motor racing, for example, is almost all motor, with occasional outbreaks of racing along the way. Witness the decisive effect in many races of a purely mechanical function such as the timing of a pit-stop to change tyres. Formula One drivers are a key component in the elaborate programmes of data-driven pre-season design and testing which prepare the car they will race in. Red Bull’s 2025 car has been built so closely to Max Verstappen’s specifications that other drivers have found it almost impossible to handle. A Formula One driver’s helmet incorporates the microphone and earpieces of the two-way radio that allows him to communicate with the team of engineers in the pit. The radio’s wiring is rigged inside his fireproof suit; the jacks which connect it to the car emerge umbilically at midsection. He’s plugged into it. Or is it plugged into him?

DeChambeau markets himself as ‘the golfing scientist’. His iron clubs are built to the same length, ensuring an absolute consistency of posture. He’s proven a conscientious student of books with titles such as The Golfing Machine: Its Construction, Operation and Adjustment and Vector Putting: The Art and Science of Reading Greens and Computing Break. One of his more endearing habits is to test each ball he plans to use in a tournament in a solution of Epsom salts so as to identify the tiniest imbalance (there is, of course, an elucidatory YouTube video). The science doesn’t stop there. DeChambeau has in effect engineered his own body through diet and exercise so that it fits the equipment. His distinctive swing moves the club back on a single plane with no wrist-break. Watching him in action, it’s quite hard to tell where the person ends and the club begins.

Successful though he is, DeChambeau has not so far been able to establish in golf the kind of dominance Verstappen has enjoyed in Formula One over recent years: the best driver in (most of the time) the best car. For golf’s internal mediation by technology is itself internally mediated by an elaborate and quite often long-drawn-out thought process that involves a good deal more than the choice of which club to use. Extensive psychological preparation remains the focus for influential coaches such as Bob Rotella, who is credited with helping Rory McIlroy to victory in the US Masters this year. Rotella reckons that the best way to hit a good shot is to learn to live with the bad ones you’ve already made and will before long make again. ‘We begin with the idea that golf, by design, is a game of mistakes, and if you love golf, you have to love the mistakes.’ Or, get over yourself.

There’s a reason for the mental churn. Writing in 1908, Arnold Haultain, one of the earliest and most eloquent of the sport’s many metaphysicians, wanted to know why it is much harder to hit a stationary ball than one that comes at you through the air, as it might do in a game of cricket or tennis, with the added spite of velocity and curvature. In those games, Haultain observed, the movement of the ball is sufficient stimulus. ‘Now, in golf there is no such stimulus, and the mind has to be goaded into attention and action by laborious and incessant iteration of mental formulae dinned into the memory and repeated over and over again.’ ‘My golf is so delicate,’ Updike once complained, ‘so tenuously wired together with silent inward prayers, exhortations and unstable visualisations.’

This is a sport in which players ‘address’ the ball by assuming a stance that will allow them to position the head of the club directly behind it. Address, however, is a moment of settling that can easily unsettle. It’s a bit like staring down the open mouth of a chute into which a large amount of rubbish is about to be tipped. Address is the place where golfers go to learn to love their mistakes. The term suggests that the feat of self-discipline envisaged will depend on rhetoric as well as on moral or spiritual awareness. In Updike’s Rabbit, Run (1960), Harry Angstrom seems to take the injunction literally: ‘In his head he is talking to the clubs as if they’re women.’

Inherently rhetorical, golf is a game of anticipation fuelled by an eagerness to foreshadow or forestall, to steal a march. No one understands such eagerness better than Trump, for whom the decisive action is all in the address: each post on Truth Social a preliminary boastful waggle of the clubhead before it comes to rest behind the ball. ‘Trump Cheats at Golf,’ participants in the recent ‘No Kings’ marches were keen to point out. The sports journalist Rick Reilly has catalogued in exhaustive detail the ways in which Trump contrives to get ahead of his own game. Own the fastest cart seems to be rule number one. As soon as everyone has teed off, put your foot to the floor and hightail it up the fairway to where the balls have landed. Safely out of view, you’re then at liberty to rearrange them as you choose, ensuring the best possible position for your ball while at the same time dumping that of your closest competitor into a nearby hazard. Should decorum require an interval of conversation with your fellow players, your caddie will do the rearranging for you – a method also adopted, incidentally, by Ian Fleming’s orange-complexioned bullion fetishist Auric Goldfinger. Reilly also provides ample testimony to Trump’s habit of awarding himself a gimme, in defiance of strict protocol, whenever confronted by a putt he thinks he might miss. This is a sport conceived in the future perfect tense, as a series of shots that will have been played exactly according to plan. It’s pure science fiction.

Ever since there has been serious writing about golf – which is to say ever since the sport’s initial boom in popularity during the final decades of the 19th century – there has been science fiction. Two imaginary versions of the game, ‘obstacle’ and ‘electromagnetic’, feature in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), but Huxley provides no explanation at all of what either might involve. Far more illuminating is a slim novella first published in 1892: Golf in the Year 2000: or, What We Are Coming To by J.A.C.K., pseudonym of the Scottish writer J. McCullough, about whom hardly anything else is known. Golf in the Year 2000 is a jeu d’esprit clearly intended, as one reviewer put it, both as a ‘satire on the present golf craze’ and as a ‘forecast’ of the ‘wonders’ that science will bring about over the course of the next century. ‘Even golfing is to be done by machinery at that period.’

The ostensible model was Edward Bellamy’s influential Looking Backward: 2000-1887, published in 1888, which in effect frames a closely argued manifesto for immediate social, political and economic change in the future perfect tense. Bellamy’s protagonist, Julian West, falls into a deep sleep and wakes in 2000 to find the US has become a socialist utopia. He is forced to endure several lectures on the merits of the organisation of late 20th-century society from his guide, Dr Leete, before he’s allowed to experience it at close quarters. McCullough’s Alexander J. Gibson, by contrast, having fallen fast asleep on 24 March 1892, with a heavy defeat at golf still vivid in his memory, awakens on 25 March 2000 in the anteroom to an elegant chamber equipped with bath, wardrobe and what could easily be mistaken for a generous selection of body butters, peptide serums and scalp scrub shampoos from Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop range. There’s no plot to speak of and McCullough foreswore the romance Bellamy had woven into his bestseller. Gibson’s response to evidence of social and political transformation is one of blank dismay. There’s nothing in his account to indicate, for example, the part the Ladies’ Golf Union would play in the campaign for women’s suffrage (one of its leading members, Mabel Stringer, claimed to have converted a cabinet minister to the cause by defeating him in match play). It’s the gizmos that enthral him, from the brush that shaves chemically to the underground bullet trains which will whisk him to courses in distant parts of the country and the giant screens on which he will watch tournaments taking place on the far side of the world.

Gibson’s guide, Mr Adams, is soon on the spot, and, glancing at the digital watch embedded in his signet ring, announces that dinner will shortly be served. After-dinner conversation turns at once to golf. Adams, who holds the post of Chief Inspector of Golf Clubs, informs Gibson that he has ‘a few new things in the golfing line’ to show him.

‘Indeed,’ I said, ‘in my day they thought they had got golf almost to perfection. I suppose you still use the bulger?’

‘The bulger?’ he queried – ‘I have never heard of that.’

Horace Hutchinson, amateur champion in 1886 and 1887 and a prolific author, attributed the invention of this novel ‘driving club’ to the Scottish amateur Henry Lamb. Its aim, Hutchinson added, was the ‘prevention of error’. ‘The face of the head is convex,’ Gibson tells Adams, ‘and it matters not whether you heel or toe a ball, they always go straight.’ He has never used one himself, he adds, reasoning that ‘if you don’t hit a ball fair, you deserve to go off the line and get punished for it.’ Two things about this exchange are worth noting. First, it concerns the piece of kit used to execute the most athletic of all golf shots: the drive that launches the ball off the tee as far down the fairway as possible. Secondly, it includes the strong suggestion that the design of this piece of equipment poses a significant threat to the game’s credibility.

The first published reports on the performance of the bulger demonstrate that the interest of the club lay less in the accuracy it allegedly guaranteed than in the distance it enabled a ball to be hit. Arriving at St Andrews, the home of golf, Gibson is presented with what looks like a great improvement on the bulger. The club’s face is fixed to the head by ‘an immense number of small springs’, Adams explains, so that its ‘propelling power’ is greater than could be got from the shaft alone. It didn’t take long for propelling power, from the outset one of golf’s most virulent ambitions, to begin to threaten the credibility, if not of the game itself, then of the design of the traditional championship course. In 1902, J.H. Taylor, scion of the Northam Working Men’s Club and five-time winner of the British Open, took exception to an ‘American hole of over 900 yards’ which had apparently been built with the sole purpose of ensuring that the great Harry Vardon, six times Open champion, would not be able to reach the green in ‘three full strokes’. So it goes. The sport’s ruling bodies, the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St Andrews and the United States Golf Association, have announced that from 2028 all professionals will have to use a ball modified so as to damp down the distances they are able to propel it.

McCullough was not alone in understanding that this particular genie was out of the bottle. Willie Park Jr, who was as well known for the design and construction of courses as he was for his two victories in the Open Championship, observed that no part of the game gives ‘greater pleasure’ than ‘long driving’, even though accuracy from the fairway and on the green are more likely to produce a low score. ‘Drive for show, putt for dough,’ as the saying goes. ‘The golfer who does not feel a sensation of keen gratification, of superiority of power and skill, invest his body when he gets away a long straight drive,’ Park added, ‘must indeed be unimpressionable.’ One golfer who certainly did feel that sensation was the game’s most entertaining chronicler, P.G. Wodehouse. According to the novelist E. Phillips Oppenheim, Wodehouse sought propelling power above all. ‘He had only one idea in his mind when he took up his stance on the tee,’ Oppenheim recalled, ‘and that idea was length.’ The discovery that he had just propelled a drive a record 343 yards apparently lit a ‘glow of happiness’ in his expression – as it would today in the expression of any of the relatively few golfers, amateur or professional, capable of such a feat. Golf has created its own brand of techno-narcissism: high-spec equipment understood not as a means to an end, but as an end in itself, a mirror to the prowess of the individual user.

One of the sport’s most credibility-threatening sideshows is an elite competition designed solely to test the capacity of special techniques and customised equipment to launch a ball into the blue yonder. As far as I know, DeChambeau is the only top-ranked player to have taken part in the Professional Long Drivers Association World Championship. In 2022, he came second. The current world record of 579.63 yards (512 yards of carry before the ball has even landed) is held by Kyle Berkshire. Internal and external mediation are fused in the YouTube video of the feat, which includes ball-tracking. Techno-narcissism’s circuit is complete. According to Oppenheim, Wodehouse didn’t even bother to count his strokes. For Berkshire and his colleagues, there are no strokes to count.

Given the number and variety of challenges confronting those players who do still wish to count their strokes, it ‘will not appear so very unreasonable’, as Hutchinson put it, ‘that there should be a more or less corresponding number and variety in the weapons which are employed for such diverse functions’. By the 1890s, these ‘weapons’ had acquired an occult nomenclature of their own. To get from fairway to green, you would have to unsheathe one or more of the following, in approximately this order: brassey, cleek, mashie, jigger, baffy and niblick. In his second and final publication, Golf: Containing Practical Hints, with Rules of the Game (1899), McCullough, rather more alert than most to the game’s rhetorical dimension, speculated about the origin of some of these terms. He thought that the mashie, for example, a recent invention, might be so-called ‘because of its weight and aspect, as if a thing that could hit a smashing, mashing blow, could make a mash of anything it hit’. The feeling mirrored by the thing that could hit a smashing, mashing blow wouldn’t appear to have much to do with mysticism.

‘In this multitude of golf clubs,’ Hutchinson wrote, ‘there is perhaps wisdom – somewhere – but it can scarcely be that all of them are necessary.’ To put it another way, golf’s techno-narcissism has not been restricted to the pursuit of propelling power alone. Struggling to sort mashie from jigger and baffy from niblick, I couldn’t help thinking of a set of experiments conducted by the psychologist Wolfgang Köhler at an obscure research station established on the island of Tenerife in 1914 by the Prussian Academy of Sciences. Tool use had long been understood as an index to the development of both human and non-human animal intelligence. Köhler set a cohort of captive chimpanzees the task of securing an item of food placed well beyond their physical grasp on the other side of the bars of a cage. In one experiment, the chimpanzees had at their disposal an array of sticks of different shapes and sizes, some close to hand, others needing to be fetched from a distance. They were able to solve the problem by selecting what looked like the right stick for the purpose and extending it through the bars until its far end lay beyond the item of food and so could function as a hook. Köhler’s aim was to show that anthropoids do not proceed, as had always been assumed, by the slow, incremental process of hands-on trial and error. Instead, they grasp the solution in a moment of ‘insight’ or abstract conceptualisation. First published in 1917, the results of his experiments laid the foundation for future primate research.

For Köhler’s chimpanzees, an implement remained a means to an end. It’s hard not to warm to the nonchalance of a veteran called Tschego who showed no interest at all in either of the two sticks available to her until some younger chimpanzees wandered across the compound towards the banana she clearly had in mind for lunch – at which point she immediately got hold of the longer one, stuck it through the bars of the cage and hauled in her tasty snack. Human intelligence, by contrast, when confronted with a choice between sticks, likes nothing better than to lose itself in the mirror of conceptualisation. The ‘funniest’ of all the new-fangled clubs Gibson encounters in Golf in the Year 2000 is a kind of niblick, or sand-wedge. ‘It had a double head, and when you swung it, it revolved like the paddle-wheel of a steamboat, only very much faster.’ That’s one inventor who had to go the long way round to find a way to prise a ball out of a bunker.

There was, of course, a world war going on as Tschego, stung into abstraction, pondered her choice of sticks. An aside in McCullough’s 1899 handbook might even suggest that he saw it coming. ‘The tendency of the age,’ he noted, ‘has been to exchange wood for iron in golf clubs almost as much as in battleships.’ Offering advice on how to choose a driver, Vardon singled out a recent invention known as the ‘Dreadnought’, the chief features of which were ‘very large heads and very whippy shafts’. (The root of the term ‘to equip’, probably from the Old Norse skipa, is to kit out a vessel.) HMS Dreadnought was some invention: the first battleship to be powered by steam turbines, it mounted a single-calibre main armament of ten 12-inch guns capable of firing an 850 lb armour-piercing shell at a range of more than 16,000 yards. Vastly superior to anything else afloat at the time of its launch in 1906, it was soon to be eclipsed in its turn. Built for shoot-outs on the high seas, its only notable achievement during the First World War was to ram and sink a German U-boat near the Pentland Firth in March 1915. The ship was sold for scrap in 1920. The Dreadnought club had long since met a similar fate. ‘All these things,’ Vardon wrote, ‘are largely matters of fancy.’

McCullough’s ‘satire on the present golf craze’ derives its bite from detailed observation of the wilful extravagance of the indirect or abstract thinking that posed a threat to the sport’s credibility. You won’t have ‘got it to perfection’, he tells a man he meets in the clubhouse at St Andrews, ‘until you have a machine for walking round the green and swinging the club, while you sit here and manage it’. McCullough – in this respect more Swift, in a minor key, than Bellamy – revels in the absurdity of all the getting it to perfection which will render life in the year 2000 virtually unrecognisable. Gibson teases Adams by wondering if people occasionally take a trip to the moon for a change of air. No, Adams replies, they’ve not yet gone to ‘that length’. But it’s the literal and figurative lengths to which golf as a sport had already gone in 1892, and has continued to go, that frame it as a commentary on an era of rampant techno-narcissism. Anyone for a cryogenic afterlife or an eleven-minute expedition with some mates to the edge of the earth’s atmosphere? One thing’s for sure: if Alexander Gibson had awakened in 2025 rather than 2000, his first assignment would have been to ‘break 50’ with Bryson DeChambeau at a golf course owned by Donald Trump.