Liminality

I am walking down the fifth hole of my local club staring down the fairway that is framed between trees on both sides. There is no one around me, there is no sound except for my own walking. I stand still for a moment to take in this moment of absolute liminality. What does this mean? Liminality is a very interesting concept, and since I heard about it, I could not stop thinking that golf inhabits this space so perfectly. In short, liminality is a space of transition. It is not a space in which you stay, it is a space you use to move towards another space. In other contexts, it might symbolise the process of moving from an uninitiated to an initiated. Liminality is the space in between, in the moving from to being. There is a rather cultish following online of liminal spaces. These spaces are characterised as spaces in which transition happens but with an eery and abandoned feeling, like an office building’s passageway or corridor. Late at night, with minimal lighting, this office corridor space might produce an eery feeling of solitude. But this is a very specific meaning to the word or space. I think golf, and the spaces in which you play golf, is an ideal way to explain liminality and also to show how golf is, what I call, a liminal sport.

Liminal Spaces and Sport: Spaces of Movement

Various scholarly work has been published on sport in liminal spaces and liminality and golf. It came to me as a shock that this area of study exists. I thought that I had something new in mind, but to my dismay when I googled the idea and various articles, and dissertations has been published on it. But in any case, let us try and define liminal space in terms of sports. Liminal might refer to the threshold. Think of the frame of a painting. The frame keeps the painting “inside” and the world beyond the painting “outside”. The frame acts as the threshold and can be a liminal space. In my home language we have a word “tussengang” or directly translated “between corridor”. But the word is rarely used in this literal sense. It is, instead, used in the same sense as liminal. In short, the working definition for a liminal space then is that space that separates the in- and outside. It is not a space you occupy in the same way you would occupy a space in which you end up in. The corridor is the “threshold” you need to step through in order to enter your office. You need to step through this threshold again to get to the outside. You do not occupy the space, rather you move through it. Liminal space, then, is a space characterised by movement. And this is where I think golf is an absolute example of sport that occupies or inhabits liminality.

Golf and Liminality

Golf is a game where you always move towards something else. When you tee of the first hole, you play to get into the hole in order to move on towards the next hole. If you finish the 18th hole, you move towards your next tee off time. Or you move on towards the so-called 19th hole (that is, the bar). The game never really gets to a point where you “arrive”. Some other sport might be of such nature that you finish the objective. But the objective of golf is to move on towards your next round, until you die. There are some sad stories of people dying of a heart attack on the golf course, but this is enviable to certain golfers. Where would you want to die instead of the golf course, that is if you are an avid golfer. The objective of golf is never to finish golf. Hence, the idea that golf is a liminal sport. Or that it occupies a liminal space in the strictest sense of the word. You never want to get through the threshold, the threshold is exactly where the game is played.

Again, where I started. I am standing on the fairway of the fifth hole. It is a long straight par 5. Both sides of the fairway are trees. This space I occupy is the threshold I need to get over in order to get to the next hole. I need to finish this hole in order to play the next hole. And so forth. The fact that I am outside in the vastness of nature emphasises this feeling of liminality. It is not the case that I want to occupy this space, to keep on standing there. I want to get past it, move through it. I want to finish the hole in order to play the next. On a more comical note, the whole golf course, all 18 holes, are the liminal space, the threshold I need to move through in order to get my beer afterwards. From the 1st tee then the idea is to end up and occupy space in the bar where I can drink my beer. The golf game is thus an absolute illustration of a liminal space.