- 17
- Episodes
- 2023
- First episode
About Pitchmarks Podcast
Musings on a mysterious game... pitchmarks.substack.com (https://pitchmarks.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast)
- Publisher
- Richard Pennell
- Category
- society & culture · sports
- Language
- en
- Explicit
- No
- First episode
- 24 Jun 2023
- Latest episode
- 31 Aug 2025
Latest episodes
17 episodes in the feed.
31 Aug 2025
Pitchmarks #114 - “Colt’s Canterbury”
Host [Host Name] interviews [Guest Name] about the surprising brilliance of Harry Shapland Colt's Canterbury golf course design.
24 Aug 2025
Pitchmarks #112 - “Between Heather and Heaven”
Philip Truett interviews guests about the unique challenges and camaraderie of playing hickory golf at Walton Heath.
27 Jul 2025
Pitchmarks #108 - "Firm and Fast"
Host discusses playing golf with SHANE around Hayling and Pulborough, highlighting the unique and inspiring qualities of both courses and the experience of discovering them with fresh eyes.
15 Jun 2025
Pitchmarks #102 - “Decision Fatigue”
The host explores how playing golf with limited club choices on Cleeve Hill alleviates decision fatigue and fosters a sense of joyous, creative freedom.
8 Jun 2025
Pitchmarks #101 - "I know just what you mean"
This episode explores the absurdities of life and golf, drawing parallels between Milan Kundera's work and the shared suffering and hope experienced on the golf course.
1 Jun 2025
Pitchmarks #100 - “Not sure who's madder…”
The host visits Machynlleth Golf Club in Wales with companion D despite heavy rain, finding joy in the rustic nine-hole course and its community feel in this episode.
25 May 2025
Pitchmarks #99 - “Rule Number 6”
The host of Pitchmarks Podcast reflects on the importance of not taking oneself too seriously, especially during a round of winter golf in New Zealand with friends, emphasizing laughter and camaraderie.
18 May 2025
Pitchmarks #98 - "Guardians of Joy"
“Comparison is the thief of joy” President Theodore Roosevelt Some new ranking comes out, a list of the places we are supposed to hanker after across Great Britain & Ireland, presented as if it were the official league table after a vast, scientific experiment. At first, I shrug, but then, in a moment of weakness, I zoom in on the chart and catch myself just as my blood begins to boil at some gross injustice before me, and I cast the screen away like some weak slap of a drive, for I can feel the joy slipping away. Across social media platforms, folk have begun to jostle over the relative positions and movements of their own favourites, imposing their opinions as if the world is only built from facts, and they alone are the keepers of the ultimate truths. Ears are taken by storm, and the debate rumbles on as it surely will until the next edition lands. But it is - perhaps - human nature to look to classify, as a means of understanding, a way of bringing order from the chaos of this strange life. We use numbers to keep track of everything - our best and worst restaurants, or golf courses, or even Presidents - when really, the quote attributed to Teddy Roosevelt above serves only to remind me of the primacy of his final noun in all this: “joy”. The closest I get to studying a ranking these days is an occasional dip into a list with no particular order to it, but rather a collection of places that make the world - and the lives of us golfers - a little more splendid with every inclusion. Early on in the “147” (https://golfclubatlas.com/147-custodians-of-the-game-5/), Ran Morrissett notes that “long-form writing is dwindling on a popular basis”, and that his literary heroes and mine “are no longer here to remind us how the joy of the written word can bring a course to life”, but I finish each dip into the joyous waters of Ran’s prose glad that he is here to uphold that standard, for his joy in the sort of places that simply breathe golf is infectious. During the introduction, he writes of measuring a course worthy of consideration for this palace of treasures as one where, at the end, “you feel invigorated rather than exhausted”, and of landscapes with “features that connect man to nature”, and I think about how many of those that I have seen - often as a direct result of consulting the “147” - have changed me along the way. And so one day, after many years of lurking at the fringes of his golfclubatlas.com (https://golfclubatlas.com/countries/minchinhampton-golf-club-old-course/) and quietly tracing his steps from afar, a chance arrives to join Ran in person for a few holes, and there is no decision to be made. If we were each to choose a course for such a meeting, I might well have chosen Minch Old, and on writing this piece I jump back into his first reflections on the course, where he finds it “hard to believe a bunkerless, common ground course could have so many standout holes”, and that it possesses “a graceful charm and quiet dignity unto itself”. And in case I needed further proof that my utter delight each time I land on that little common in the Cotswolds was justified, it comes when Ran explains that he bought a house down the road in order to “be near this”, which in time will reduce his commute to the opening tee on which we meet by around four thousand miles… So we push tees into the ground, and begin, and the course is all fiery after a lengthy dry spell. At the first, my approach goes bundling through the back, and I remember that this place plays firmer than most links when the rain stays away. We climb back up the gentle slope for the second, then swing around behind The Old Lodge to find the third green. At the fourth, the diagonal, dry ditch berates my timid approach once more, and then we gaze across to spy a little gap in the back nine to our right. The course is busy today, and it is great to see, but to stroll across and pick up at the fourteenth offers a chance to keep moving. This loop within a loop is known as “Old Man’s Nine”, and though by playing it we skip a few of the “standout holes” Ran identifies in the eighteen hole version, the two options are equally wonderful. The fifteenth beguiles us as it often does, and the sixteenth thrills us - a carry across a flinty hollow to a green pitched against play, with motorbikes and open-top cars roaring past behind the flag on their way towards “The W”, a kink in the road leading south off the common. Often when I drift off into thinking - or dreaming - of Minch Old, this sixteenth dominates my thoughts, but every time I am here in the flesh and manage to survive that glorious challenge, the penultimate hole enchants me afresh, with its tight, taunting drive and the cunning demands of the second. The ball scurries right with each hollow bounce on this marvellous turf, and holes like this - simple yet subtle, where the lay of the land dictates the challenge - make me yearn to live nearer Minch. I left Surrey to come here this morning, passing many of the places that dominate that new ranking en route, but Ran’s planned migration to these parts makes more sense with every stroke we play. Minch Old isn’t on that many radars, but it always feels to me like a distillation of all that once was, and can still be, pure and natural about this game I love so much. It’s like the soul of golf haunts this place, quietly blessing us in the whispering of the breeze. Above my desk now lives an image of Minch Old, to extend and replenish the inner smile that I always wear on my return, and it reminds me to let the others get on with their endless comparisons, casting authority as if any of it matters. Instead, I shall plough my own furrow, scramble through my own bulwarks, and stand guard against the theft of my joy. “Minchinhampton stands for proper golf”, Ran once wrote, back when his love for this place was in its first, giddy flush. And so does he. And so do I. Post-post note…in looking for the link to insert the 147 above - in the hope that some other soul might toss the latest ranking away in favour of the hunt for “proper golf” - I realised that since I started to plot this missive, another update had landed. Each year, Ran’s hunt turns up a further worthy inhabitant of this golfing gospel, and so as I clicked on the “147+6”, I had some mysterious inkling that a further gift might be there lurking. And so it was, and the world winked at me once more. For the latest addition is Minch Old’s second cousin across a valley or two, and one of the other marvels that has forever changed my golfing palate: Cleeve Hill. How marvellous! Get full access to Pitchmarks at pitchmarks.substack.com/subscribe (https://pitchmarks.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4)
6 Apr 2025
Pitchmarks #92 - "A Slowly Beckoning Beauty"
Amidst the fading memories of an eighties childhood, the sound of Alistair Cooke’s voice, delivering his weekly sermon from across the pond, left an indelible mark. Sundays in our kitchen would stand still to let his deliberate pace re-set us for the week ahead, and at least once a year – usually the week after the action – his sharp attention would turn to what he called “the same ravishing landscape” of Augusta National Golf Club. For more than thirty years, Cooke would attend The Masters tournament, in the process becoming close enough to Robert Tyre Jones Jr, whose cabin he and Pat Ward-Thomas would frequent, to know that he hated to be called “Bobby”. “Letter from America” would be delivered into a huge microphone, Cooke reading from a typed leaf of A4, but in these days of computerised everything, one blessing is that, alongside many of the original, yellowing crib-sheets, sits an archive of audio files; his legacy preserved as intact as that of his great friend, golf’s finest amateur. It is only just April, but another unforgettable feature of growing up in a world without internet was the anticipation of Masters week, and of that Sunday evening broadcast, and so I delve back into Cooke’s writing on golf, and seek out a few editions to accompany me as all thoughts drift towards what he called “a slowly beckoning beauty” in Georgia. In one edition, Cooke delves into the history of the property, and I am struck by how random the path is, from “sumptuous botanical garden” via a failed hotel development to this annual carnival of golf. At every turn, terrible luck seems to play its cards on first the Berckmans, whose fruit farm fell into decay after the old man passed away, and then Commodore Stoltz, whose dreams of a real-estate empire disappeared in the face of a hurricane one morning in the roaring twenties. And then some “Wizard of Wall Street”, Clifford Roberts, and Bob Jones, thrown together by fate in the dining room of an Augusta hotel, found themselves peering at a view the rest of the golfing world may never never tire of. For in Cooke’s words, “he looked beyond what is now the long cathedral sweep of the tenth fairway, and shifted his gaze across to Rae’s Creek, the little bridge and the shining water. ‘This’, said Jones, ‘is the place’. And so it was. And so it is.” And through every back nine of this little Invitational, as Jones originally called it, the same themes of luck – good and bad – and of the building of memories and stories drift back across the Atlantic, holding back the march of modern life for just a few hours in favour of the telecast. Cooke called Augusta a “sanctuary from the real world”, and noted how the concerns of the political landscape upon which his weekly reflections usually focused seemed to recede under “the towering Georgia pines”; between the Azaleas and the Dogwoods, “and the Magnolias and the Firethorn”. Elsewhere, describing the concentration of the competitor as they creep through Amen Corner, trying to ride Lady Luck back up the hill to that magnificent clubhouse, he talks of “a trance in which all of life before and after is blotted out”, and every April we golfers seem to fall under the same spell, enthralled by the beauty of this distant place, and of the gladiatorial march of the greats, as they produce occasional glimpses of a transcendent mastery. The course that Jones built, in collaboration with the great Alister Mackenzie, has changed in a thousand ways since this “American Festival” first caught the imagination of the golfing public; yet the strategic brilliance of the puzzle those two gentlemen left behind continues to charm, continues to test and perplex even the modern athlete. Decisions must be made on each and every hole, and the beauty of this major being played on the same rolling carpet every year is that there is nowhere to hide from the stories of the past. No one can pull on a Green Jacket – surely the finest sartorial moment of any golfing career – without carrying those same tranquil waters as their forebears, and The Masters seems to channel the world’s best to the top of those vast white leaderboards like no other competition, not even The Open. Jones spoke of the desire to “give pleasure to the greatest possible number of players… (that Augusta should) never become hopeless for the duffer, nor fail to concern and interest the expert.” And alongside those eighteen blessed holes, carved through an old fruit farm, Jones also leaves a further legacy that seems even more valuable in the modern age – an insistence on courtesy, and decency. As the players line up their putts, Cooke notes a deafening “silence around every green”, and suggests that one might question whether they were at the right place for the golf after all, and not “at some vast open-air prayer meeting”. The Masters is, in every way, an “occasion civilised more than the ordinary by the still haunting presence of its founder”, as Cooke put it, and if ever there was a journalist perfectly formed to report on this annual retreat into the kaleidoscopic celebration of golf that is The Masters, it was Alistair Cooke. What a legacy those two left us. Not long to go now… This edition of pitchmarks first appeared on Golf Today’s website, along with a number of other articles. You can find mine here (https://golftoday.co.uk/author/richardpennell/?_author_category=opinion), along with several other excellent contributors under the Opinion tab. Get full access to Pitchmarks at pitchmarks.substack.com/subscribe (https://pitchmarks.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4)
23 Feb 2025
Pitchmarks #85 - "The Thing to Do"
A reading from the blog post linked below, from 23rd February 2025: https://pitchmarks.substack.com/p/pitchmarks-85-the-thing-to-do?r=oquyo (https://pitchmarks.substack.com/p/pitchmarks-85-the-thing-to-do?r=oquyo) Get full access to Pitchmarks at pitchmarks.substack.com/subscribe (https://pitchmarks.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4)
16 Feb 2025
Pitchmarks #83 - "You need to know this"
A reading from the blog post linked below, from 16th February 2025: https://pitchmarks.substack.com/p/pitchmarks-83-you-need-to-know-this?r=oquyo (https://pitchmarks.substack.com/p/pitchmarks-83-you-need-to-know-this?r=oquyo) Get full access to Pitchmarks at pitchmarks.substack.com/subscribe (https://pitchmarks.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4)
9 Feb 2025
Pitchmarks #81 - (Not) Only on Sundays
A reading from the blog post linked below, from 9th February 2025: https://open.substack.com/pub/pitchmarks/p/pitchmarks-81-not-only-on-sundays?r=oquyo&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web (https://open.substack.com/pub/pitchmarks/p/pitchmarks-81-not-only-on-sundays?r=oquyo&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web), Get full access to Pitchmarks at pitchmarks.substack.com/subscribe (https://pitchmarks.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4)
2 Feb 2025
Pitchmarks #80 - "Bumps and all"
A reading from the blog posted linked below, from 2nd February 2025: https://open.substack.com/pub/pitchmarks/p/pitchmarks-80-bumps-and-all?r=oquyo&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web (https://open.substack.com/pub/pitchmarks/p/pitchmarks-80-bumps-and-all?r=oquyo&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web) Get full access to Pitchmarks at pitchmarks.substack.com/subscribe (https://pitchmarks.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4)
27 Jan 2025
Pitchmarks #79 - "Baltray - Beyond Termonfeckin"
A reading from the blog posted linked below, from 26th January 2025: https://open.substack.com/pub/pitchmarks/p/pitchmarks-79-baltray-beyond-termonfeckin?r=oquyo&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false (https://open.substack.com/pub/pitchmarks/p/pitchmarks-79-baltray-beyond-termonfeckin?r=oquyo&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false) Get full access to Pitchmarks at pitchmarks.substack.com/subscribe (https://pitchmarks.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4)
27 Jan 2025
Pitchmarks #78 - "Dollymount"
A reading from the blog posted linked below, from 19th January 2025: https://open.substack.com/pub/pitchmarks/p/pitchmarks-78-dollymount?r=oquyo&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false (https://open.substack.com/pub/pitchmarks/p/pitchmarks-78-dollymount?r=oquyo&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false) Get full access to Pitchmarks at pitchmarks.substack.com/subscribe (https://pitchmarks.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4)
27 Jan 2025
Pitchmarks #77 - "Like the Provisional"
A reading from the blog posted linked below, from 12th January 2025:https://pitchmarks.substack.com/p/pitchmarks-77-like-the-provisional (https://pitchmarks.substack.com/p/pitchmarks-77-like-the-provisional) The upside-down fire method explained:https://tim.blog/2009/02/02/how-to-build-an-upside-down-fire/ (https://tim.blog/2009/02/02/how-to-build-an-upside-down-fire/) Get full access to Pitchmarks at pitchmarks.substack.com/subscribe (https://pitchmarks.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4)
24 Jun 2023
About Old Friends
A reading from the blog post linked below, from 24th June 2023: Get full access to Pitchmarks at pitchmarks.substack.com/subscribe (https://pitchmarks.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4)
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