James Griffin: Suits me to a tee

James Griffin. Photo / Dean Purcell

There are those out there (let's call them "non-golfers") who think golf is stupid. Even among those who think all sport is stupid, golf is regarded as especially stupid - the stupidest of the stupid, if you like. And, in many ways, they are right.

At the most basic level most sports are, indeed, stupid. Kicking a ball into a net, throwing a ball through a hoop, putting a ball on the ground over a line (or, if you're an English rugby player, drop-kicking it through a giant-H) - they are all pointless, except for the fact that they test physical prowess and provide an outlet for aggression within the various sub-tribes that make up society.

Golf, meanwhile, with its stated intention of hitting a small ball across many metres of manicured nature and into a small hole, has no point that I can discern. The physical attributes a Sonny Bill Williams or an Irene van Dyk must possess to succeed at least offer some special advantage in real life - opening jars or putting stuff away in a tall cupboard, for example. There is not much call in everyday life for someone who can use a broomstick to hit a mandarin 100 metres, to within a metre of a coffee cup.

So while most sporting superstars are clearly genetic freaks, golfers are, for the most part, your bog-standard human beings and would therefore probably be the last picked, after the All Blacks and Silver Ferns, in any game of cross-sporting-code-celebrity bullrush. But in a way it is the very fact that gold is played by normal-sized and shaped people, along with its staggering degree of pointlessness, that makes it my most favourite sport of all time.

I think a big part of this is because of the huge inherent contradiction in golf. On paper it is deceptively simple, whereas in life it really isn't. When you stand on the tee about to hit a golf ball, it is perfectly still. There is no two-metre tall West Indian fast-bowler hurtling the ball at you at 150km per hour. You, too, are standing still - rather than running across a tennis court, desperately trying to return a Roger Federer forehand for example. To make it even easier, when you're standing on the tee they even five you a little stick to rest the ball on, so you don't hit the ground. It is the easiest thing in the world.

Except it isn't. It really, really isn't. I know this for a fact. This is because when you play golf there are actually two people playing golf in the same body, at the same time. There is you, who knows exactly what to do at every singly moment of the round; the right shot to play, the right club to hit and so forth. And then, there is the other you, the one inside your head, who suddenly takes control of your body when you are using the right club to play the right shot, and turns it into the wrong club and the worst shot imaginable.

This is what gold is actually all about: the war between two opposing entities for control over your body and your spirit - and, eventually, your soul. This eternal struggle, between the Forces of Good and the Forces of Chaos, carries on within every golfer, every time they stand, club in hand, over their ball. Anyone who plays the game. from the 13.1 handicap hacker James Griffin to Tiger Woods, understands this fact. (Actually, within Tiger there is a third Force at work, which is why he got into all that trouble a while back, but that is a whole other story.)

Outsiders and those who mock the game cannot begin to comprehend how a seemingly straight-forward one-metre putt can turn into an internal conflict of Passchendale proportions when the Forces of Chaos are raging an offensive. Nor can they understand the sense of elation when the Forces of Good clear a path through the psychic minefield long enough for you to hit a shot that even the great Jack Nicklaus would be proud of.

And that is it in a nutshell: the allure of golf. A seemingly simple act, that of propelling a spherical object towards a small cylinder in the ground, is actually an existential struggle to defend the universe from demons that would have us all back in the Stone Age, hitting each other with our clubs and cowering in caves, rather than sitting in the 19th, sipping beer and lying about the putts we should have made, safe in the knowledge that Chaos has been tamed, for today at least.

But like I say, most non-golfers won't understand this - which only makes the task of those who do golf all the more sacred.