I had been hearing about this book for over a year, via author Brett Cyrgalis’ dropped hints on social media, before I was able to get my hands on an advance copy, and I was eager to read it. By the time I turned the final page, I was sorry to have found that the reality had not lived up to my level of anticipation.
Golf’s Holy War: The Battle for the Soul of a Game in an Age of Science examines the yin and yang, so to speak, of how people approach the game of golf. The book opens by examining two well-known books about the game which are perfect diametric opposites of each other: Homer Kelley’s The Golfing Machine, a self-published opus of such diabolical complexity that it is either revered as the ultimate technical manual on the golf swing or decried as an impenetrable morass of swing-position micro-management and technical jargon; and Golf in the Kingdom, Michael Murphy’s guidebook to the mystical side of golf, a navel-gazing volume that is much revered by the members of the “be-the-ball” school of golf.
That first chapter reflects author Brett Cyrgalis’ general approach throughout the book, contrasting the softer side of the game, in many aspects—teaching the swing, playing the game, and even golf course design—with the technical, hard numbers approach that has gained so much traction in the age of Trackman and video analysis.
Cyrgalis traveled far and wide, and interviewed dozens of people—including the old golf mystic himself, Michael Murphy—in the process of researching this book; it seems that there was no one with any kind of a hand in the game from the standpoint of teaching or coaching that he didn’t interview or quote—some very well-known, like Butch Harmon, Dave Leadbetter, Sean Foley, and Hank Haney, and others who are less well-known except to the hard-core cognoscenti, those seekers of deeper truths and a lower handicap who aren’t satisfied with the monthly “How to Fix Your Slice” articles that are such a staple of the mainstream golf publications.
The book explores Michael Murphy’s detour into mysticism after a solid farm-country upbringing in our mutual hometown of Salinas, California, and presents more than we really needed to know (in a book about golf, at least…) about the founding of Murphy’s Esalen Institute. An exploration of Homer Kelley’s background in that ultimate example of theological dichotomy, the Church of Christ, Scientist (aka “Christian Science”) takes the reader down what seemed to me to be an unnecessary side road in the chapter “Golf and Religion”.
The hard-numbers side of the current state of the game is also explored, as Cyrgalis delves into the origin and development of the now-ubiquitous Trackman system, Professor Mark Broadies’ statistical “Strokes-Gained” results-analysis technique, and the blossoming of the hard-science, analysis-intensive golf institutes such as the Titleist Performance Institute and Taylormade’s Kingdom.
There is also quite a number of pages devoted to, you guessed it— Tiger Woods. I’m writing this review after some six weeks of pandemic shelter-in-place that produced a level of Tiger-hysteria over the cancelling of the 2020 Masters tournament and the wiping-out of Woods’ chance at a (highly unlikely, in my opinion) defense of his title that was second only to that which immediately followed his 2009 Thanksgiving evening run-in with his wife, a nine-iron, and a fire hydrant, in that order. The obligatory if-you-want-to-sell-a-golf-book chapter on Woods tested my patience, reiterating material that has been covered ad nauseum over the last decade or so, and serving mainly as a springboard into a look at the career of one of Tiger’s more controversial coaching associates, a pot-smoking Canadian named Sean Foley.
The book follows, in large part, the modern journalistic practice of reporting both sides of an issue impartially and without judgement, when in reality it is generally true that while there are often two (or more) sides to a story, usually only one of them is right. Therein lies its major weakness.
By exploring the far reaches of both ends of the range of approaches to the game of golf, without judgement, Cyrgalis does the reader a disservice, I think. Homer Kelley’s minutia-laden tome goes too far in one direction, and Michael Murphy’s book, which I found too ridiculous to even finish, goes too far in the other—and those are just the two most familiar examples—but we are not presented with any examples of more balanced approaches to the game which live in the fat middle portion of the bell curve, where actual success lives.
By meandering down so many side avenues and offering it all up with little in the way of examination, Cyrgalis presents a broad-spectrum look at how the game of golf is approached by the amazingly varied cross-section of humanity who play the game, but without a grounded judgement as to what really works.
It could be argued, I suppose, that golf doesn’t lend itself to that approach. The landscapes over which it is played, both physical and mental, are so varied, and there are so many, possibly infinite, paths that will arrive at the same destination—that is, getting the ball into the hole—that almost any path is legitimate.
Ultimately, the book’s broad-spectrum approach, while largely unsatisfactory to me, reveals something that just about anyone who has played the game with any level of introspection has realized: that golf is an unknowable, unconquerable game. Which is, I guess, why we love it.
