We have arrived at the point in the program when we pause to consider all things golf and no word is more valuable for this exercise than the grandest one of all.

Duende.

It carries itself with such grandeur and is black tie in a leisure-suit world. Cheers to those who know duende to be a word of Spanish origin meaning “goblin,” but to those who are well versed in the way the word signifies someone or something as having personal magnetism or charm, stand and be saluted.

Fifty summers ago, the man who created a new space for duende and brought it mainstream – the late and great Boston Globe columnist George Frazier – passed away. Still, his memory is singularly personal (he was my mother’s cousin) and easily rekindled whenever tastes and desires are questioned and your assessment is offered.

Golf, the greatest of our games, is ripe for the word duende. While Frazier, a marvelous wordsmith, conceded that “duende is so difficult to define . . . yet when it is there it is unmistakable, inspiring our awe, quickening our memory . . . ”

Thus, it is not necessary to explain that strolling down to your golf club to spend the twilight hours chipping and putting and talking to fellow golfers is literally soaked in duende. So, too, is taking the time to clean out your golf bag, polish your clubs, wash towels, and separate the good balls from those that belong in the shag bag.

It's all about spending time with the game’s inner peace. In other words:

Being on site an hour before your tee time is vintage duende, arriving on two wheels sadly is not. Choosing teams and deciding the game has duende. Requesting to have side bets for junk never has and never will have duende.

Club championships still pack a good deal of duende, but only when juniors are accepted into the competition. As for member-guests that are all about the phony handicaps and calcuttas, well, they generate a lot of silly money but are totally devoid of duende.

Four clubs with four different head covers is vintage duende. Covers for your irons not so much.

The mysterious way of duende was explained by Frazier with his observation how Ted Williams was saturated in it (“even when striking out”) but Stan Musial was not (“even when hitting a home run”). So let us offer that Scottie Scheffler is duende through and through and so, too, Adam Scott; yet as crazy as it sounds, Rory McIlroy has nary a hint of it and that goes for Justin Thomas.

Billy Horschel? Duende. Patrick Cantlay? Not a drop. Ludvig Aberg? My, yes, the duende overflows. Rickie Fowler? Gracious and popular, but minus any duende. Robert MacIntyre is loaded with it. So is Tommy Fleetwood. But Collin Morikawa and Sam Burns are without.

Lydia Ko is this generation’s Lorena Ochoa; in other words, the duende simply flows. Nelly Korda is this generation’s Annika Sorenstam; in other words the duende is missing.

Fred Couples had it, has it, and will never lose it. Ditto Meg Mallon.

Fascination study, this duende. Consider the recent Tour Championship, which is jam-packed with marquee names and a backdrop of enough money to pay off the national debt. Yet what is the duende level? Zilch, nada, a big fat donut.

There are sports events and moments that are consistently blanketed in duende – the Kentucky Derby, the Super Bowl, the All-Ireland Senior Football Championship, the NHL handshake line after any playoff series, the World Cup finale, Opening Day, gold-medal runs in the Olympic downhill skiing, anytime Kelly Slater is riding a wave – and the common denominator with all of them is the lack of a price tag. For sure, money is deep-rooted, but it takes a back seat to the aura of the competition which in turn ignites duende.

Not with the Tour Championship, though. That’s an event where the emphasis is insufferable gobs of money on top of obscene gobs of money as if duende can be bought.

It cannot.

To take that a step further, golf is healthy these days because the game at the amateur and recreational level is loaded with duende. Not so at the pro ranks. Sigh.

Books that regale you with stories of golf’s treasured history are packed with duende. Those about Tiger Woods, Phil Mickelson, and LIV Golf don’t have a smidgen of duende.

Truth be told, we as a citizenry are closer to the planet of Pluto than the LIV Golf product is to realizing a drop of duende.

There are far too many contrived golf courses out there that host the professional Tours, so it is always worth a shout out to a layout that is grossly overlooked. Waialae CC, which hosts the Sony Open in Honolulu, is bathed in duende. Scintillating walk, cool doglegs, and a media center that offers a daily reminder why you want to be there are 6 a.m.

Should you be using these early September days to stock up on rain gloves and winter gloves for the three months of golf we have left, consider your golf savvy to be immersed in duende. If a Gore-tex bucket hat is part of your basket, the duende is thickened.

Which brings to mind the matter of weather. To make a tee time and see it through despite heat and rain and wind and cold is pure duende. To cancel tee times for various layers of meteorological conditions is completely without duende.

A superintendent making his rounds with a golf-course dog in the passenger seat of a golf cart has all-world duende. A pro shop that offers stationary has duende. A club that provides quality trolleys and encourages walking and sours on golf carts is off the charts with duende.

And if you properly call them trolleys and not push-carts, that’s duende. (To call them pull-carts is as far removed from duende as possible.) Wooden tees have duende, plastic tees do not. Marking your ball with a shiney dime is duende, using a poker chip is totally not.

Wearing white khakis on a wet, muddy morning is not duende, nor is wearing Sunday red, if you’re a competitor (that has been spoken for). As crisp and neat as they are, shirts with stripes rarely have duende. 

“So you can see,” wrote Frazier in a Boston Globe column in August of 1970, “that it is not easy to explain what duende is, except to observe that when someone or something has it, we feel icy fingers running up and down our spine. Why does ‘Huckleberry Finn’ have so much duende, and ‘Tom Sawyer’ so little?’ ”

Had he been a golfer -- and George Frazier was not -- he might have asked: "Why does Arnold Palmer have so much duende, and Jack Nicklaus so little?"

The answer rests in one's comprehension of duende, a most alluring word.