Finding the Center

We met this local kid who was trying to make it [Ayoub Id Omar, who has since turned pro]. The government was backing him, saying he was one of the country’s best golf hopes. So we went to where he lived, and that’s it—a dirt-floor house. That’s his hood. And the golf course is nearby, just on the other side of the fence.

He decides he wants to play, but he can’t afford it. So he builds himself this little three-hole course in the dirt, between the road and the golf course. He just makes holes and puts sticks in them. Somehow, he gets some clubs and a ball. And he learned how to hit shots off this ground with a driver. No grass, nothing.

And he’s making shots off this stuff! He trains himself this way, playing these three holes day after day, year after year, until he finally gets picked to go over the fence to the real course. It’s phenomenal.

I left this place with all these little boys and girls running around, still playing the holes he built, went back to my fancy hotel room and just totally broke down. Completely started crying. The whole experience absolutely freaking leveled me. It was a reminder that any time you see kids smiling and making things work in situations where we might think they absolutely shouldn’t, that’s the human spirit at its finest.

This woman in the bunker is one of my favorite photos ever. We got off the plane and drove straight to the course [Royal Golf Marrakech]. This was the first picture I took. When you see golf in its barest form, like it was in Morocco, it’s like a planet being born. It’s incredible to be there from the beginning and see golf take root.

Our brains get wired a certain way because we’ve been around golf so much. I consider myself someone who likes golf in a pure form, and even I caught myself thinking of all the things that golf in Morocco was not. I had to remind myself that it’s OK to strip away all this artifice and get down to the essence of golf. So, yeah, the edges were rough. Who cares?

What matters about the game if you strip all of it down? What’s left? And how does that give you hope? We’re off-center all the time, but we’re trying to return. And golf is just a reflection of that general principle. That’s our entire motivation. So, how does playing the game generate that into us? What does it teach us? How we’re off our center, how to get back to center—and sometimes it gets us there. Then we have hope again. Something’s ignited in us. If you strip all the grass and the scores and the handicaps and what your driver does and whatever else down to this, that principle still works. That’s the most amazing part. That’s the actual power of golf. When you get to witness it, like I did here, it’s like seeing a little face of God.

​​If you take everything away—for instance, all of the ways we think bunkers should look, and all of the freaking grass, and even scoring—all these things are just the stuff that we’ve tacked on to golf over time to make it into this thing. But the basic principle, the basic DNA, is that I have a ball and I’m returning it to the center. That’s our purpose. That’s what we’re trying to do.