There is a well-established tradition in golf that if you make a hole-in-one, you’re expected to buy drinks for everyone in the clubhouse.
Some have proposed that this tradition exists to keep golfers honest; that is, a golfer is less likely to lie about having made one if they know that upon returning to the clubhouse, they’ll owe everyone drinks.
This sort of dry cost-benefit analysis is common among economists, who see humans as rational utility maximizers, trying to get the most out of the least amount of effort. From their perspective, if guilt (as a result of lying) is the only cost associated with becoming known as someone who has made a hole-in-one—the crowning individual achievement in golf1—lots of particularly unscrupulous golfers will lie about having made one. An economist would thus look at the tradition as a tax on lying, meant to stop golfers from doing it.2
However, while taxes are used to decrease demand for certain goods,3 it’s not as clear that the tradition-as-tax mechanism would stop particularly unscrupulous golfers from lying about making a hole-in-one. Consider that one of the “features” of having to buy everyone drinks after making a hole-in-one is being able to tell everyone that you made one.4 If someone cared enough about people knowing they made a hole-in-one to lie about having made one, the benefit of being able to tell everyone at once would vastly outweigh the cost of the bar tab.
Beyond the economic calculus not adding up, though, most golfers would find a tax on lying offensive. Its existence would imply that if it disappeared, we’d just as soon tell everyone we made a hole-in-one, even if we hadn’t. What an economist would fail to realize is that without golfers’ collective faith in one another not to do this, the game as we know it would cease to exist.
If I’m right, then the questions remain: how did the tradition originate, and why does it persist?
My theory is that the tradition originated because someone who made a hole-in-one wanted to celebrate.
This is not a grand insight; accomplishment is often followed by celebration. We celebrate after we make a hole-in-one, or win a championship, or pass the bar, or have a kid. But we never really stop and think about why.
If a newly-minted lawyer were found at a bar with friends and was asked why she was celebrating, she might say she’s indebted to those she’s celebrating with—perhaps her parents, who helped pay for her school,5 or her friends, who supported her through the lows. By this reading, celebration would be her effort to absolve herself of the debt she owes those who made her achievement possible.
Still, when I think of celebration, I don’t think of debt. I think of being out at bars with friends getting wasted and running up tabs with no real concern for who owes what to who. If I am making any effort to absolve myself of a debt that I owe as a result of whatever I’ve accomplished, it would be prior to celebrating—at, say, a ceremony whose explicit purpose was to allow me to acknowledge those I’m in debt to as a result of my accomplishment.
If ceremonies like the one I’m describing sound familiar, they should. Many familiar ceremonies are rituals of debt absolution. Rehearsal dinners are opportunities for couples to acknowledge the debt they owe to everyone involved in planning their wedding. Awards ceremonies—like, say, the Oscars, or the Emmys—are meant to recognize achievement, yes, but they also offer achievers the opportunity to acknowledge everyone they are indebted to. Trophy presentation ceremonies are opportunities for athletes to thank all those who made their accomplishment possible—their family, friends, fans, and often, even, the competition.6
This all seems normal beyond the point of being worth mentioning, but it is only because we have been conditioned to believe that if individuals achieve, it can only be at a cost to someone else. Achievement is thus a creature of debt. We have no other way to see it.
Still, it is worth noting that the very idea of “owing” our accomplishments to anyone is, historically, relatively new.
In Debt: The First 5,000 Years, David Graeber claims that the ability to conceive of our relationships in terms of debt is a function of the market economy. Sometime between 500 and 400 B.C., he notes, as India was first grappling with interest-bearing loans as a result of its evolution into a commercial economy—so too were the authors of its sacred texts—the Vedas—first grappling with the idea of to whom, exactly, they “owed” their existence.
It is hard to escape the conclusion that these two events are linked; it makes a certain sort of sense that as a country was first grappling with the idea of loans, interest, and thus, debt, that those in it would begin to wonder about not only their responsibilities, but their existence, through the same lens.
The authors’ conclusion, which Graeber summarizes, is worth noting. He writes (paraphrasing them):
“We owe our existence above all:
To the universe, cosmic forces, as we would put it now, to Nature. The ground of our existence. To be repaid through ritual: ritual being an act of respect and recognition towards all that beside which we are small.
To those who have created the knowledge and cultural accomplishments that we value most, that give our existence its form, its meaning, but also its shape. Here we would include not only the philosophers and scientists who created our intellectual tradition but everyone from William Shakespeare to that long-since forgotten woman, somewhere in the Middle East, who created leavened bread. We repay them by becoming learned ourselves and contributing to human knowledge and human culture.
To our parents, and their parents—our ancestors. We repay them by becoming ancestors.
To humanity as a whole. We repay them by generosity to strangers, by maintaining that basic communistic ground of sociality that makes human relations, and hence life, possible.”
Still, as Graeber notes, what is interesting about this list is that these are nothing like commercial debts. He sums it up nicely, writing:
“[One] might repay one’s parents by having children, but one is not generally thought to have repaid one’s creditors if one lends the cash to someone else.”
In his final thoughts on what the authors of India’s Vedas had to say about debt, Graeber drops a bit of a bombshell. He writes:
“One could in fact interpret this list as a subtle way of saying that the only way of ‘freeing oneself’ from the debt was not literally repaying debts, but rather showing that these debts do not exist because one is not in fact separate to begin with, and hence the very notion of canceling the debt and achieving a separate, autonomous existence was ridiculous from the start.”
If this is true, and “achieving a separate, autonomous existence was ridiculous from the start,” celebration is our way of admitting it.
Consider that we commonly refer to celebration as “sharing” an accomplishment. This makes little sense in the world as we know it today; most of us are more comfortable owning something, even if it means being in debt to someone, than we are with sharing it.7 In a world without debt, though, sharing an accomplishment makes perfect sense. The reason for this is simple: if you remove debt from the equation, it becomes impossible to conceive of individual achievement. In such a world, it would thus feel weird to accomplish something—like making a hole-in-one—and not celebrate it.8
If you find yourself questioning this, consider that we commonly refer to acts of sharing as “selfless.” Acting selflessly doesn’t mean acting in the best interest of others, though that’s often how it manifests. It means acting as if the “self” doesn’t exist.
This is exactly what people are doing when they celebrate,9 and it’s what I’d like to propose originated the tradition of buying drinks for the clubhouse after making a hole-in-one.
At the beginning of this essay, I asked two questions:
How did the tradition of buying drinks for the clubhouse after making a hole-in-one originate?
Why does the tradition persist?
Though it might be tempting to say that my answer to the first question is also the answer to the second, I don’t think that’s the case. A quick look at how the tradition plays out today illustrates that celebration has taken a backseat to debt absolution as the tradition’s primary function.
This article in Golf Magazine proposes that if you make a hole-in-one, you could simply buy a bottle and leave it at the bar. Some clubs take this even further, offering hole-in-one insurance, whereby members pay a monthly premium such that if they make a hole-in-one, some portion of the clubhouse’s tab is covered. At many clubs, insurance is included in members’ dues, almost as a preemptive debt payment. Viewed through the lens of celebration, all of this is rather depressing; the financialization of celebration, by rendering accomplishment synonymous with debt, has turned it into a chore.
Further, in any debt absolution ceremony, it’s not clear that you’re paying who you “owe.” Consider the golf example again. That you’re expected to buy drinks for the clubhouse makes it clear that the club’s members are your creditors.10 Still, any reasonable person couldn’t possibly see them as the only creditors.
If I make a hole-in-one at a club in the future, a reasonable list of creditors would include not just the club’s members, but—
my dad, who taught me the game
my high school teammates, without whom my passion for golf might never have developed
everyone I’ve ever competed against, without whom I would never have been able to test my ability
my playing partners that day, whose witnessing of my hole-in-one guarantees that others will believe it happened
the manufacturers of the club I used to hit the shot, or the ball I used, or the clothes I wore
the founders of golf itself, without whom I never would’ve had the chance to make a hole-in-one
the golfing world—that is, everyone who has contributed to the collective understanding among golfers that a hole-in-one is, actually, an incredible accomplishment
Still, there are issues here, too. First, of those on this list, I would only be paying one group back directly by purchasing drinks (in bold).11
Second, if I were really determined to stick to the debt story, I would necessarily have to include not just those on the list above, but everyone who has ever existed. It isn’t a stretch to say that had anything in the history of the universe not happened the way it did, I would not have made a hole-in-one. Any attempt at creating a list of creditors for not just a hole-in-one, but literally any accomplishment, naturally leads to the realization that doing so is impossible.
This is the paradox of viewing accomplishments through the lens of debt. Our ceremonies of debt absolution persist because because we insist on seeing our accomplishments as having created debts, but the very use of the word “debt” implies that we could at least imagine paying it back. What I hope to have made abundantly clear is that this is, unquestionably, impossible.
Where, then, does this leave us?
The resolution to this paradox is in Graeber’s two separate ways of imagining humanity.
On the one hand, we have the market economy—and thus, the idea of debt—which insists that we are all individuals, and that achievement creates debts that must be absolved. We do this via ritual (awards ceremonies, etc.), or by simply thanking people; as I mentioned in “The Venmo Generation,” the words, “much obliged”—old-fashioned for “thank you”—literally mean, “I am in your debt.”
But on the other hand, we have celebration—the “sharing” of accomplishment—which appears to insist that, as Graeber writes, “…these debts do not exist because one is not in fact separate to begin with.”
So which is it?
The order of operations is telling here. In just about every case I can think of—weddings, awards ceremonies, graduations—ceremony precedes celebration.
Amidst ceremonies, we are individuals making every effort to absolve ourselves of debt or “take credit” in order to reestablish some baseline of equality. Realizing, though, that we are not so much seeking equality as we are seeking oneness—that is, “we are not separate to begin with”—we follow ceremony with celebration, selflessly sharing our accomplishments, and discarding the very idea of the “self” in the process.
Thus, when we say that our accomplishments are only possible because of others, what we really mean is that our accomplishments are only possible because of the very idea of “others;” that is, the very idea that we are separate at all. Searching for an origin story for celebration, then, naturally leads us to the conclusion that there is something within us that rejects said separation—and thus, debt; we celebrate not because we want to climb the pedestal, but because we are desperate to escape it.
We know this truth implicitly, even if we don’t come out and say it explicitly—that is, being celebrated—like being a “celebrity,” derived from the same root—is, in a very real sense, miserable. Having “Happy Birthday” sung to you sucks. People who insist on flattery are exhausting. The cliché of “it’s lonely at the top” is only cliché because it is actually true.
Our rituals of debt absolution thus exist as a function of a society obsessed with seeing itself as a collection of individuals organized via debt, constantly striving to cancel whatever is owed—whether financial or simply perceived—to reestablish some baseline of equality.
By Graeber’s reading, equality is a myth because we are not separate, and thus cannot owe each other anything.
Celebration is our way of admitting it.
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Of course, winning a major tournament as a professional would probably be higher on most amateurs’ list than making a hole-in-one, but that simply isn’t realistic for the vast majority of those who play golf. I think part of the ethos around the hole-in-one is that in theory, any player, almost regardless of ability, can make one, but many very good players never have.
“If you tax something,” economists are fond of saying, “you get less of it.”
Chicago adds a seven cent tax on using plastic bags at grocery stores. It doesn’t stop me from using them every time, mind you, but it certainly doesn’t make me want to use them more.
Why else would you be buying them drinks?
In which case she is literally indebted to them, even though it’s unlikely that her parents would expect to be paid back.
After winning the PGA Championship last weekend at the ripe age of 50, Phil Mickelson spent much of the trophy presentation ceremony talking about what a privilege it was to compete against such talented players, including his playing competitor, Brooks Koepka. This was far from a hollow gesture; achievement is very much a function of the quality of one’s competition. What is unique about golf is that you are not only competing against other players; you are also competing against the golf course. This could explain why, after Hideki Matsuyama tapped in for bogey on 18 to become the first Asian-born and Japanese golfer to win the Masters in April, his caddy bowed to the golf course. When asked why, he cited gratitude. We often despise our competition, but we also must, in a sense, be grateful for them. If they did not exist, we could not compete.
Our language makes this clear; how else could someone be considered to “possess” an education?
As I was writing this essay, a friend asked me a question. “What type of person, assuming they had the means, wouldn’t buy drinks for the clubhouse after making a hole-in-one?” I thought it was a good question. The answer, at the risk of circular logic, is the same type of person who wouldn’t want to celebrate any accomplishment, because it might dilute the degree to which they consider it theirs. Ball hogs, attention seekers, people who refuse to “share” the spotlight, etc.—they are all the same people; their tendencies just manifest in different ways, given different contexts.*
*[EDIT]: a reader pointed out that there are plenty of others who wouldn’t buy drinks for the clubhouse for reasons other than selfishness—like, say, if they were recovering alcoholic, or if they had severe social anxiety, or if they didn’t know anyone in the clubhouse. The list of reasons why someone might not buy drinks for the clubhouse—other than “because they’re an asshole”—is conceivably infinite. The only point I meant to make with this footnote is that there are certain people who would prefer not to share an accomplishment for the exact reason that it would dilute the degree they could consider it theirs. Those are the ones I’m referring to—not those who would avoid sharing an accomplishment because the typical way of doing is dangerous for them, or otherwise worth avoiding.
Critically, this does not mean celebrating *someone*—something I feel I should clarify, given the proliferation of birthday parties where friends effectively gather to worship someone, who is often wearing a crown, for nothing more than surviving another trip around the sun. I am basically taking it on faith that people will understand celebration to be a ritual during which the very concept of the “self” is tossed out the window, but maybe celebration’s evolution into a ritual of self-worship is worth another essay.
The real nail in the coffin for this “debt” theory is considering what happens when someone makes a hole-in-one on a public golf course, where the course’s existence is funded, in part, by taxpayer dollars. At least at a private course, you know members are all paying dues, even if they’re not playing, so you could reasonably say you owe all of them equally. On a public course, the “debt” you owe would be impossible to even conceive of.
Also—who could possibly determine the financial value of having made a hole-in-one, let alone try to figure out who was owed what portion?