As the Ryder Cup unfolds at Bethpage Black in New York, the spectacle of golf reveals much about human devotion; its beauty, its dangers, and its absurdities. With Donald Trump in attendance, golf risks being not just a game but a form of worship.
This weekend’s Ryder Cup at Bethpage Black in New York is more than a golf tournament; it is a public liturgy of devotion, discipline, repetition, sacrifice, and study, concentrated into a pulsating spectacle. A few elite golfers ride these thermals of form and fortune and seem to soar to the heavens, for a while at least, before they too crash back to earth like kites in Afghan skies when the string is inevitably cut. The drama is irresistible, but it poses a question that outlives any score-line: to what, exactly, are we devoting ourselves?
The sacred rituals of the swing
At its best, golf is a school of patience. It asks for humility in the face of weather, turf, and one’s own nerves. It rewards practice, contemplation, and attention to the smallest details, a grip, a breath, a tempo. Golf resembles religion. Devotion in both domains is built on habit and ritual; it forms character long before it delivers results. Simone Weil once wrote that attention, taken to its highest degree, is a kind of prayer. The concentrated presence a golfer brings to a four-foot putt is recognisably kin to the stillness of a chapel pew.
And yet devotion curdles if it is chained to outcome. The Bhagavad Gita’s old counsel remains freshly relevant: we have a right to the work, but not to its fruits. Cling to the result and the swing tightens; clutch the trophy in your imagination and the putter goes numb. In faith as in sport, non-attachment does not excuse carelessness; it names a posture of wholehearted labour without the tyranny of winning. The paradox is that this posture often improves performance, even as it refuses to worship it.
Trump and the ludicrous devotion
The dangers of misplaced devotion are underlined by Trump’s appearance at Bethpage. Trump’s long-standing use of golf as a stage, boasting about handicaps, burnishing prowess, inaugurating new courses, has turned a game into a personal liturgy, a ritual of self. That such theatrics can command global attention speaks volumes about the state of our devotions. Golf here becomes not pastime but pedestal, not craft but idol.
Devotion as transformation, not performance
There is, then, a clean line to draw, not between golf and God, but between devotion as performance and devotion as transformation. One aims at the leaderboard; the other at the remaking of the self. The first needs crowds and cameras; the second can unfold in silence. For Weil, the telos of attention is not triumph but “decreation,” the emptying of the grasping self to make room for truth and love. Meister Eckhart puts it more daringly: to love “without a why”.
Iain McGilchrist’s work on attention helps too: a narrow, instrumental gaze treats even devotion as a means; a broader, relational attention allows the world, and other people, to disclose themselves, not simply to be used.
The kites at Bethpage
The Ryder Cup is a mirror. In its soaring kites and its countless crashes, we see the drama of human devotion: our longing for transcendence, our tendency to idolise the trivial, our capacity to discipline ourselves for goals that may or may not matter.
The challenge is to turn this devotion towards ends worthy of our humanity. To play golf is no sin. But to make golf, or power, or prestige, into a god is to mistake the game for the goal. Trump embodies this error in full, a warning as much as a caricature.
The Ryder Cup will pass; the headlines about who soared and who crashed will soon be yesterday’s news. What remains is the kind of people our devotions are making us. If golf helps you become more patient, truthful, and compassionate, then keep the rituals and hold the outcomes lightly. If your devotion, on the course, in politics, or in religion, narrows your world to applause and advantage, change your altar.
The kites at Bethpage will rise and fall all weekend. The wind is fickle; the strings are fragile. The question that matters is the one the scoreboard cannot answer: what, finally, is your devotion for?
More from Mike Chitty
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