Episode Details

For some light-hearted but encouraging holiday reading, here is the first in a series of three short lessons from the most frustrating, challenging and beautiful game of all. 

I wrote these little pieces a few decades ago as scripts for TV spots. They were filmed at the Coast Golf Club by Anglican media and broadcast on Channel 7, probably at 5am. Whether any tape still exists I don’t know. 

I’ve adapted and updated them for their encore performance here. Feel free to share them with believing and unbelieving friends.

I don’t know if you’ve ever been called a fundamentalist. 

It’s not a compliment. 

It’s a word reserved for the lunatic fringe. A fundamentalist is a deluded fanatic who believes that the underlying basic truths of his particular religion or moral code are absolutely true and unvarying. 

Fundamentalists stubbornly stick to their rigid beliefs, even when the world and popular culture and technology and every right-thinking person have left them far behind. 

And this is why they are unpopular. Fundamentalists are figures of derision. 

Unless they happen to be golfers. 

All good golfers are fundamentalists. 

It matters not that you have equipped yourself with a new set of graphite-shafted, boron-infused, steel-forged irons with ‘HVF technology’ (Hits Very Far™).

If you haven’t mastered the fundamentals of golf, and continue to practise them, you’ll always be the kind of frustrated, inconsistent hacker that … well, that I once was. 

There are certain unvarying foundational principles that every half-decent golfer has mastered. (And I don’t mean wearing a loud, polyester polo-shirt that you wouldn’t be seen dead in at any other venue—although it helps.)

Ben Hogan famously identified five golfing fundamentals: 

* a well-formed grip on the club

* a relaxed, balanced, athletic stance

* a smooth coiled backswing that stores energy

* a smooth, accelerating downswing around a still centre

* a full follow-through

You could argue about whether these are the five, or whether others should be included, but every half-decent golfer observes some version of these fundamentals. They give them their own twist and personal expression. But the fundamentals remain the same, because they are grounded in the physics of how to hit a very small stationary ball as effectively as possible with a long, thin stick.

In golf (and in many other areas of expertise) we accept that there are certain underlying, unchanging, fundamental realities that we build on. 

Strangely, though, when we apply the same concept to our understanding of life more generally, people object. 

Anyone who wants to assert that there are absolutes—some fundamental, unchanging truths about us and our world, that we need to accept and respect—well that person is a fundamentalist and beneath contempt.

It’s very strange. Judging by our attitude to fundamentalists, we seem to have persuaded ourselves as a society that there aren’t any fundamentals. Only fanatics believe in fundamentals. Reasonable people like us can only wearily shake our heads, and make things up as we go along. 

Which makes about as much sense as taking up golf, paying no attention to the tried and true fundamentals of the game, and insisting on re-inventing it, moment by moment, according to our own individual whim. 

The real question is this: if there are fundamentals not just for golf but for life and morality in our world, where do we find them? Who has access to them? How can we discern between the various claimants who say that they are proclaiming the fundamental truths of existence? 

This, in fact, is one reason for the modern world’s aversion to fundamentalists. We have lost confidence in the notion that anyone might have access to fundamental answers. There is only one thing the modern anti-f