There is no Platonic ideal of any game.
When I was 8 years old, my father told me the Supreme Court had ruled that walking the course is not fundamental to golf. My father was, at the time, interested in golf. I, now, read Supreme Court cases for fun. Let’s intersect these.
In 2001, in PGA Tour v. Martin, the Supreme Court ruled that walking the course was not integral to golf. Casey Martin, a professional golfer with a circulatory condition that made walking dangerous, sued the PGA under the Americans with Disabilities Act for the right to use a cart in tournaments. He won, 7–2. The majority held that walking wasn’t essential to golf, so accommodating Martin didn’t fundamentally alter the game.
Whether Martin should’ve gotten the cart is a question outside the scope of this post. Commentary on it would require considering What Golf Is, What Role Golf Plays in Society, What Role Golf Should Play in Society, and a host of other deep, philosophical questions. This post will be long enough: hard pass.
What I want to argue is narrower and weirder. The 7-2 ruling rested on something I think is wrong: the idea that golf has an essence, and that judges can determine what is and isn’t part of it.
Here’s how the majority framed the question:
“a modification of the tournaments might constitute a fundamental alteration in these ways: (1) It might alter such an essential aspect of golf, e.g., the diameter of the hole, that it would be unacceptable even if it affected all competitors equally…”
“An essential aspect of golf”. They genuinely deliberated whether changing the diameter of a hole would alter the essence of the game. Prior to 1891, different courses used different hole sizes. And to think those players – on holes with 6-inch diameters – thought they were playing golf!
The Court debated this topic despite the Court itself not having achieved its own Platonic form: 50 justices, one from each state, with each justice’s height varying in one-inch increments from 7’6″ down to 3’4″. You hear how insane that sounds? It’s not just the height thing. It’s the very notion of a Platonic Court. Let’s drop the heights: is the Platonic form of the court one Justice per state? If so, the Platonic form of the Court would sometimes have an odd number and sometimes even. If not, how do you ensure fair state representation on such an important body?
There is no Platonic Court. There is no Platonic golf.
Chess is a wildly different game whether it’s played untimed, with a long timer (“classical”), a short timer (“blitz”), a timer with an added increment per move (a “Fischer clock”), or by a computer. Which of these is the Platonic Ideal of chess? Four hundred years ago, the technology didn’t even exist for timed chess. If the Supreme Court had existed, should they have solidified any traits of it as integral to the game?
Games evolve. They evolve through edge experimentation. Edge experimentation requires edges.
The location of basketball’s 3-point line varies between the NBA and NCAA. Professional baseball has two leagues with two different rules: Is the designated hitter part of the Platonic ideal of baseball?
Is golf about getting a ball in a hole? Is it about selling polo shirts? Is it about ad revenue on TV? In all cases, you cannot distill a game down to its Platonic ideal. Just as chess has evolved technologically, so has golf. So has the Supreme Court itself (and modes of interacting with it).
Evolutions in games are often derided, then adopted, then universalized.
Personally, I preferred Pickleball before the USA Pickleball Association banned wearing clothes the same color as the ball starting in the 2023 season. I was a player when that change happened. I understand why they did it. I preferred the previous game. And even that preference isn’t a comment on Pickleball itself — it’s a comment on Pickleball-as-the-USAPA-defines-it. Personally, I define Pickleball as a game where it’s legal to dress as a pickle (even though the ball is generally a yellow color two notches away from brine).
Scalia’s dissent saw all this clearly. The line that wins all the points:
“It is as irrelevant to the PGA TOUR’s compliance with the statute whether walking is essential to the game of golf as it is to the shoe store’s compliance whether ‘pairness’ is essential to the nature of shoes.”
I recently bought two shoes of different sizes. Please don’t assume same-sizeness is essential to the nature of shoes!
Then Scalia’s sharpest paragraph, dripping in glorious sarcasm:
“It has been rendered the solemn duty of the Supreme Court of the United States, laid upon it by Congress in pursuance of the Federal Government’s power ‘to regulate Commerce …,’ to decide What Is Golf. I am sure that the Framers of the Constitution, aware of the 1457 edict of King James II of Scotland prohibiting golf because it interfered with the practice of archery, fully expected that sooner or later the paths of golf and government, the law and the links, would once again cross, and that the judges of this august Court would some day have to wrestle with that age-old jurisprudential question, for which their years of study in the law have so well prepared them: Is someone riding around a golf course from shot to shot really a golfer? The answer, we learn [from the majority decision], is yes.”
And then, the philosophical conclusion:
“It is quite impossible to say that any of a game’s arbitrary rules is ‘essential.’ Eighteen-hole golf courses, 10-foot-high basketball hoops, 90-foot baselines, 100-yard football fields — all are arbitrary and none is essential.”
Just because rules are arbitrary – just because they are non-essential – does not mean they are unimportant. In fact, it is their arbitrariness which contributes to these games being low-stakes and light and playful, which are generally key to them being fun. Why is the basket 10 feet high? Because at that measurement, the game is fun. Move the basket to 8 feet and slam dunks become trivial. The arbitrary numbers are what make the games fun. And over time, as people excel at these arbitrary numbers, we change the numbers but keep the name.
Here’s the meta-point: the Supreme Court is also playing a game. Their game has rules. One of those rules is that process matters. Another is that the Court should answer questions it can answer, and decline to answer questions it can’t.
The question What Is Golf is not a question SCOTUS can answer. Even the PGA can only define What Is Golf As Regulated By The PGA. Players can influence What Is Golf by playing the game. Tradition can inform What Is Golf Today. None of those is the Supreme Court of the United States. And none are really clear answers of What Is Golf. Personally, I prefer golf with windmills and tiny gnome figurines. I prefer golf where each player gets two tee-tosses per 18 holes. I prefer golf where one deducts a half-stroke for bonking an opponent’s ball with one’s own ball. (This is a real game with real rules that I have really played. It is entitled Julian Wise Presents: a Julian Wise Production: Wise Minigolf, brought to you by Julian Wise.)
By answering What Is Golf?, the Court broke its own rules. They played their game badly. They claimed jurisdiction over a domain they couldn’t competently rule on, using a standard (“essence of golf“) they invented for the occasion.
One more thing the Court got wrong, while we’re here.
Games are unavoidably unfair in their outcomes. They have to be — that’s what makes them games. Scalia, sharper than I could put it: “The very nature of competitive sport is the measurement, by uniform rules, of unevenly distributed excellence. This unequal distribution is precisely what determines the winners and losers.”
The ADA, on Scalia’s reading, guarantees Casey Martin equal access to the competition, not an equal chance to win it. The latter is impossible by the nature of competition. Some people are taller. Some people see colors better. Some people have circulatory conditions. The unevenness is the game.
Due to visual processing changes, I see colors with less contrast than I did three years ago. I’m therefore a worse player at speed-jigsaw-puzzling, for reasons that have nothing to do with skill or effort. The unevenness isn’t a bug. It’s the thing being measured.
My insight here is not legal nor moral. It’s that games lack a single, definable essence. Every game is the version currently being played, by the people currently playing it, under the rules they’ve currently agreed to. Golf, chess, the Supreme Court, marriage, work, the publication you’re reading. You can never step in the same game twice. There is no Platonic version sitting elsewhere, waiting to be discovered.
Games evolve. The evolution becomes the new game. We use the same name because it’s easy.
Further fun facts:
- The “Rules of Golf” are (or at least were as of 2001) jointly written by the United States Golf Association (USGA) and the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of Scotland. The latter, to my disappointment, is not formally abbreviated RAGS.
- Reading this case has increased my desire to be a religious organization. In the US, religious organizations have their own rules. From the case: “The provisions of this subchapter shall not apply to private clubs or establishments exempted from coverage under Title II of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 … or to religious organizations or entities controlled by religious organizations, including places of worship.”
- The district court judge “found” that the purpose of the walking rule was to inject fatigue into the skill of shotmaking, but that the fatigue from walking was insignificant. This isn’t a finding. It’s an opinion. You can tell because I found that the purpose of the walking rule is to increase the number of rules that start with W.
Julian Wise 