Let’s face it, even when these autumn days are wall-to-wall sunshine, as they recently have been, the walls start too late and arrive too early. Thus, there’s no chance for dew-sweeping morning rounds at 6:45, nor for chip-and-putt sessions carried out before a majestic sunset at 7:30.
Sure, there’s a decent window in between to squeeze in a round of golf, but to fulfill the need for even more golf, the fuel on which my days run, there is an office filled with books and a laptop with research tools that allow golf thoughts to flow. When breaks are needed, there are old putters and dozens of golf balls to be putted upon a rug that runs true, even if it only stimps out at about 8-and-a-half.
Ample enough, this setting, so that quiet time can be afforded on those evenings when the grandest of all words, the one that tickles my fancy like no other, settles into my consciousness.
Duende.
Arnold Palmer, whether he was winning majors or throwing them away, was immersed in it. He had it while standing next to his red Cadillac convertible or when selling you motor oil. Jack Nicklaus, meanwhile, never had a drop of it, even while winning all of his 18 major championships.
Mickey Wright had it, but not Kathy Whitworth. Babe Zaharias and JoAnne Carner, yes; Betsy Rawls and Nancy Lopez, no.
Bobby Jones was drenched in it, and so, too, Ben Hogan, Bryon Nelson, and Peter Thomson. Bobby Locke, yes, but Gary Player, no.
Oh, and Walter Hagen. Even George Frazier, the man who made duende his own word, confirmed that Hagen had that special ability to transmit a profound emotion.
From his Boston Globe column in another era, Frazier explained it thusly: “Duende is so difficult to define, yet when it is there it is unmistakable, inspiring our awe, quickening our memory . . . when someone or something has it, we feel icy fingers running up and down our spine. Why does Huckleberry Finn have so much duende, and Tom Sawyer so little?”
My wanderings into previous columns about duende have touched on this subject but it deserves transparency, again. It’s personal, you see. George Frazier’s father was my maternal grandmother’s brother, which made George my mother’s cousin, which in turn made him a must-read in our kitchen in the early 1970s, even if as a young teenager my interests tended to be sports only.
George Frazier had exquisite feel for a wide range of interests, golf not being one of them, though he did comprehend the mystical powers of Hagen.
But to study the brilliance of duende and to marvel at how George Frazier designed columns around this Andalusian word is to accept that it can be seamlessly used to describe those topics in golf that touch buttons within me. (And this is where great credit should be given to Charles Fountain, whose book, "Another Man's Poison," is prominent on my shelf.)
Let's consider Greg Norman, for instance. Back when he didn’t know how to stop losing major championships, the Aussie had oodles of duende. But once he thought he knew everything about anything – from grass to beef to wine to how to “grow the game” – he lost every ounce of duende.
“It’s very odd,” Frazier once wrote, “how a person fairly dripped with it yesterday and yet is utterly devoid of it today . . . It was Carlyle or Emerson or Thoreau, someone like that, who observed that every hero eventually becomes a bore.”
Tiger Woods, for instance. He surely dripped with it, but it doesn’t have the sort of shelf life that Woods’ curious career has mandated. Could it return? Perhaps. Though there’s nary a whiff of duende in anything connected to indoor golf, simulators, shot clocks, and the hammer.
That’s right, the hammer registers zip on the duende scale.
You know what also doesn’t have a scent of duende? Club twirls, fist pumps, inane conversations between player and caddies, and tapping down spike marks then missing the putt and blaming the bumpy green where you just patted down.
Ah, but the Curtis Strange stare, Raymond Floyd’s glare, and Lanny Wadkins’ snarl. Duende, through and through.
Tucking a green behind a stone wall? You better believe it's duende. (And you can experience it yourself at Marion Golf Club. Sweet stuff.)
Some stroll into the game and have it at a young age. We’re looking at you, Seve Ballesteros. Others struggle to find themselves, then break through and beat the very best the game has to offer on the biggest stages and are draped in duende forever. Take a bow, Tom Watson.
Taking a drop over your shoulder had duende. Bending your knee daintily and softly floating your ball into a comfortable patch of grass as if it were a butterfly? Zero duende.
Sometimes the great ones have it without seemingly trying, like Lorena Ochoa and Ernie Els. Other times the great ones, like Annika Sorenstam and Phil Mickelson, don’t have it despite trying their mightiest.
You can’t be assigned duende by a media that is starved for another darling, which is why Jackson Koivun doesn’t have it. At least not yet. You can possess duende and not seem to want it, like Scottie Scheffler. Or you can possess it, then lose it, then get it back, and somehow lose it again, like Rory McIlroy.
Frazier on a number of occasions pointed out that “anything can have it, savings banks no less than running backs.” So it is that false fronts, cross-bunkers, punch bowl greens, gently sweeping doglegs, stone walls, thick flagsticks – they’re all drenched in duende.
But golf courses with paved cart paths, long green-to-tee walks, steep-faced bunkers, sharp doglegs, bunkers so enormous they require six rakes, phones somewhere on the eighth hole to call in food orders – nope, nada, nay.
Foursomes is soaked in duende. Four-ball not so much.
Golf clubs with historians? Duende. Golf clubs that care nothing about their history or identity? No duende.
Michael Bamberger’s prose about golf? Duende, through and through. Golf broadcasts with four or five people on a stage post-round to talk incessantly about that which you already watched and are smart enough to have absorbed? No duende, that.
The dogged pursuit that outlawed anchoring (but not really, wink-wink)? No duende there. But Jack Burke Jr. in his 90s, demonstrating that when you just had to shake in a 3-foot putt in his day, you tucked your forearms in tight against your body “and that was anchoring,” he said. Now, that was duende.
LIV Golf when they had zillions of Saudi riyal never had a drip of duende. Now that they are down to just a few pennies . . . well, their duende tank is still pointing to E.
The PGA Tour on the other hand? It’s got a full tank of duende. Ditto the DP World Tour.
Bryson DeChambeau has all kinds of YouTube viewers, but zip for duende. Patrick Cantlay doesn’t seem to have a parade of loyal fans but in a strange way methinks he has duende.
How’s that? Well, George Frazier explained it some 63 years ago when he used duende for the first time while writing his column in The Boston Herald: “The Spanish have a word, duende. It has no exact English equivalent but it . . . is the ability to transmit a profoundly felt emotion to an audience of strangers with the minimum of fuss.”
So, yeah, Cantlay has duende.
Should you run to your dictionary and discover that duende means “hobgoblin,” well, it does. Only Frazier went deeper (and his legend shall speak for me) and explained that to the Andalusians duende represents a mysterious power, one which Babe Ruth had but not Lou Gehrig.
That’s the baseball version of Palmer had it but not Nicklaus. The essence of duende.
