5-min read · 1065 words
ESSAYS · THE GAME ITSELF
Golf, as a concept, is walking between shots. The shots are the punctuation; the walk is the sentence. For most of the game’s history, this was obvious and unremarkable — you walked because walking was what you did, because there were no carts, because the course was built for walkers and the architecture assumed a walking pace. The golf cart changed all of this. It changed the game more than any equipment innovation, any rule revision, any tour format. It changed the relationship between a golfer and the ground they play on. And the argument here is simple: it changed it for the worse.
What Walking Does to Your Game
Start with the practical. When you walk to your ball, you approach it from the direction you just played from. You see the shot from every angle as you walk toward it. You feel the terrain underfoot — whether you’re going uphill or downhill, whether there’s a false front you didn’t notice from the tee, whether the lie you’re about to face has been shaped by a slope that isn’t visible from the fairway. You arrive at your ball having processed, however unconsciously, a significant amount of information about the hole you’re playing.
When you ride a cart, you arrive at your ball from the side. The cart path takes you to the nearest convenient parking spot, which is rarely the most informative angle from which to view your shot. You step out of the cart, often while your playing partner is still driving to their ball, and you’re immediately in execution mode — club in hand, decision to make — without the walk-up process that would normally have loaded your visual and kinaesthetic memory with useful context. Riders play more reactive golf. Walkers, whether they know it or not, play more thoughtful golf.
“Walking the course is the deepest way to read it. Every slope, every false edge, every invisible wind channel that runs between the trees — you feel these things through your feet before you think about them with your mind.” — A classic course designer on the walking game
The Tempo Question
Walk in any pro-am or charity golf day and you’ll notice something about the cart riders: their tempo. Not in the swing — in the overall pace of their game. Cart riders tend to be rushed. They tend to stand over their putts for slightly too long, because the walk to the ball that would have given their mind time to process the situation didn’t happen. They tend to pull clubs quickly, because the ride to the shot bypassed the pre-shot thinking period. They tend to finish their round feeling like they haven’t quite played the course they paid to play — like they watched it from a vehicle rather than engaged with it on foot.
Walking imposes a natural tempo. The time it takes to cover 200 yards of fairway at a comfortable pace is roughly the time required to properly read a hole, to decide what shape of shot you want to hit, to feel where the miss goes and plan your recovery, to carry on a conversation that enriches rather than distracts. The walking pace is the golf pace. Everything else is a concession to something that isn’t golf.
The Fitness Non-Argument
The most common defence of cart riding is that it’s easier on the body — that walking 18 holes in summer heat, carrying or even pushing a bag, is physically demanding in a way that not everyone can or should manage. This is legitimate in certain specific circumstances. For players with significant mobility limitations, for older golfers in genuine physical difficulty, the cart provides access to a game they might otherwise lose. This is not a trivial thing. Golf should be accessible.
But the version of this argument that most cart riders actually deploy — “it’s just more comfortable,” “it saves time,” “the heat,” “my knees” (said at 43 in mild autumn weather) — is not really about access. It’s about convenience. And the inconvenient truth about that convenience is that the discomfort of walking, the mild fatigue of it, the warmth and the footwork and the physical presence in the landscape, are not incidental to the golf experience. They are part of it. A round walked is a different experience from a round ridden, qualitatively, in almost every dimension.
The Architecture Argument
Here is an argument that the course architects make and that golfers rarely hear: the great courses were designed for walkers. The routing of a Golden Age course — the way holes flow from one to the next, the way the walk between holes contextualises the hole you’re about to play, the way a long walk up a fairway with a green in the distance creates anticipation and spatial understanding that can’t be replicated from the passenger seat of a cart — these are design features, not accidents. When you ride them, you bypass them.
Bandon Dunes, the finest destination golf experience in America by most accounts, is walking-only. So is Augusta National, at least for the competitors who play it with the most focus and the most at stake. So is every links course in the British Isles, where the idea of riding a cart is treated with the gentle puzzlement that one reserves for customs from distant, unfamiliar cultures. These are not coincidences. They are expressions of a belief about what the game is and what it should feel like.
The Invitation
Next time you book a round, book it for walking. Take a caddie if the course offers one. Push a trolley if it doesn’t. Leave the cart in the car park. Walk to your ball from the direction you hit it from. Feel the ground under your feet. Look at the green from every angle as you approach it. Let the fairway tell you something about the hole you’re on. Play slower, oddly, than you would in a cart — and enjoy the game more for it. The walk is not incidental to golf. It is the argument for it.