There are no golf courses on council estates. If you don’t include the spontaneously improvised driving range on top of the Co-op building (ten stories, Abbey Wood’s Shard) from which balls rained down as far as Eynsham Drive for a good two hours on a balmy summer afternoon before the Police arrived, there is a distinct absence of all the trappings of the sport: no clubhouses, no fairways, no greens. So, my initiation into the pastoral arena was as bizarre and mundane as the sport itself.
What are we supposed to make of golf? What was I supposed to make of it? For the early part of my life it was the pastime of another country. There were green spaces between the flats on my south London council estate, at least there had been in the planning, the architect’s early glint and maybe even as far as the first innocent laying of turf, but any landscaped vision had been worn to wasteland by neglect and a residential scorched earth policy long before the caged saplings, planted to grow into decorative camouflage softening the stark Bauhaus sightlines, or future windbreakers shielding the empty acres beneath the flyover, had been either uprooted for bonfires or taken a beating (by an endless series of fiercely struck missed chances and the flailing bodies of fouled strikers) in their naturally destined lives as goal posts for twelve hour football marathons. Within a year the vision of a new Jerusalem was as barren as a naive architect’s dream or the hopes of those scrambling to free themselves from the mire of an estate already extending into the Clockwork Orange territory of Thamesmead. I had no experience of a sport that entered my world only through its crazy seaside derivative, lumpy dog fouled putting greens or the medium of the British sitcom. Like tennis, it was as inaccessible as tea at the Ritz and clearly belonged to another class, another world, an alien activity, demanding expensive equipment, expensive tuition and of course, a course (hence its confinement to the TV ghetto already crowded with horseracing, Antiques Roadshow and Ski Sunday - the latter requiring not only a course but a ‘whole nother country’); football, by contrast, asked for no more than a plastic ball (stone or crushed can) an empty street and a few friends. Not until some years later when I picked up a club at a driving range (and discovered with another surprise, the ghost of an ability to strike the ball) did I taste the obsession it could become.
For golf does seem to be less a sport than an obsession, a private addiction, an affair you just can’t bring yourself to end (married men talk of ‘golf holidays’ in the same tone as my parents spoke of ‘dirty weekends’; married women become ‘golf widows’). Perhaps masturbation would provide a more accurate simile for this most solitary compulsion. It is, in any case, an infection that, having spread as rampantly as AIDs through every high end spa hotel in the western world, before taking on the unsuspecting east, has long since been working its way into areas it was never intended to go: deserts, seabeds, the moon. Can you recall a time when it was a novelty to see the rich mix of greens of a manicured lawn or length of fairway vibrating upon the glossy pages of brochures and websites from Vegas to Dubai, accompanied by an unspoken pride in the financial muscle required to keep a single green green for your break in the sun (enough sprinkler power to keep an African township alive for a year)?
This has all been going on a long time now and, in a way, my adolescent suspicions seemed to have been confirmed and indeed developed during that first politically earnest year at university where I grew to know (and misunderstand) the middle class. It’s origins might lie in the impoverished ghetto of 15th century Scotland, but golf always had serious aspirations; it wasn’t going to hang around ignorant highlanders if there was money to be made elsewhere and money is the real player here. Golf is the gold-digging seductress, the high end accessory, the trophy wife to macho capitalism. If war is conducted through corporate enterprise, golf is the diplomacy of imperialism, the high class escort sweetening the deal (business meetings are conducted on the greens, introductions smoothed through a good humoured trading of handicaps, careers dependent on the development of the perfect swing).
However, such casual analysis can’t be confined to the simple causal equation of class and economics. We are all shareholders now, hence the democratisation of the sport. Golf clubs, like universities, are now available to all and tailored to all pockets (the Oxfords have their Readings). It has, therefore, become a little easier to observe the rituals of this phenomenon in a more dispassionate, objective mood. And it is a phenomenon, almost as insidious as the mobile phone, the social media site. The infection is global. Book a holiday and see how many hotels have a course organically attached or ‘within easy reach’, if the hotel itself is not actually an extension of the clubhouse. Wifi and golf, have become the almost inseparable bastard twins of business. Take a window seat on your next flight from Heathrow and as you bank and trawl away south east, look down at those stretched green canvases speckled with contorted Miro sausages or tiny curling foetus. Greens, bunkers artfully designed on plots the size of council estates while Britain is a choking, overburdened island of nomads who will never own a home. These are hallowed, protected areas, green belt greens. Despite its proliferation, Golf seems, like designer labels, indelibly associated with the luxury of wealth and privilege. It just can’t shrug it off. All that’s changed is the class of punter who wants in on the game (just as they want out of the ‘working class’). It is the sport of the aspirational.
Why? What’s the draw, the attraction, particularly in this world of indoor life, the Wii mini Olympics. Why aren’t business meetings accompanied by some computer game, say Call of Duty? (Maybe they are in Silicon Valley). Too confrontational? Too man-to-man? How much easier, how much more diplomatic, is it to outrank the opposition by racking up scores like (reverse) sales figures.
What is it any individual seeks in this increasingly alienated world? Individual control; the very human need for control. And is there anything more contrived, more manicured, more tailored to this need than the very individual activity of a sport in which we hammer a tiny ball several hundred yards to a place where we can delicately insert it in to a hole just wider than its own dimensions. The two perennial challenges to manhood, women and nature, had long since been tamed by the middle of the 20th century (every household had its own unpaid domestic servant and we’d run out of unchartered mountains); to replace such a loss society has had to invent two simulated challenges (Feminism and golf). Women are now ‘empowered’ and ‘choose’ to appear in basque and stockings on the front covers of men’s magazines. And, as in mountaineering, where if we don’t die in the process we say we have ‘conquered’ the mountain (in a form of emotional masturbation), golfers don’t compete so much against each other as against the course, beneath which nature has already been conquered. We have conquered and rebuilt nature and golf is the ritual celebratory dance of the victor.
Take the US Masters, held in the tamed beauty, the arcadian idyl of Georgia: sunlight and shade on the dappled greens, the heady jasmine in bloom, the cooling stream crossed by the ubiquitous rustic wooden bridge, a light breeze moving in the upper boughs of the windbreakers as if to convince us of the reality of the setting (the quintessence of an English or Narnian summer as conceived by the designers of Disneyland; a modern advertisers’ image of Eden, mocking Blake’s free spirited wilderness). Even in our front rooms four thousand miles away, we are familiar with the hushed cathedral reverence of the television commentary as a squatting Buddha surveys the invisible lumps and bumps on the 18th over which his ball will have to travel to the pin: the hunched concentration addressing the ball, the mimed false shot, the ecstatic whooping of the roped crowd as the long putt sinks, the deification of the winner, his modestly bowed head, his tentatively raised club, his name immortalised on the trophy even before he receives it, the celebratory (and self conscious, almost reluctant) donning of the green jacket like some ancient agricultural ritual (with rewarding virgins awaiting offstage). All has much to do with the celebration of control, not merely the immense skill in controlling the thumb sized ball in the face of wayward winds, glass lakes, sandpits and designer stubble terrain, to guide it safely like Bunyan’s pilgrim to the holy sanctuary of the shaved green, but the control of nature this man-made course implies. The Odyssey around the 18 holes (9 out, 9 back - a ritual smacking of the ghost of the original challenge nature presented centuries earlier) has much in common with the conqueror striding over the plains of the defeated, and although each player (or his well paid lackey) carries a bag of clubs and irons, less violently than scalp belted Iroquois or Mayans curling dead ball kicks with the sagging heads of their victims, it is still with a certain unconscious pride (perhaps particularly for Americans) in the overpowering and control of nature.
Nature holds little opportunity for us any more (other than saving it and ourselves from oblivion). In fact, it cowers away in fear of a species who, no longer presented with a natural challenge, has to invent one. Just as the genuine horrors of real life have been transmuted into the genre of horror (the more science explains the world the more we need to regress to a time when we can be frightened by the unknown, fabricating books and movies to do the job) carefully designed golf courses, theme parks for the middle aged, provide the simulation of an ancient confrontation.
Although Scotland, the natural home to the sport and the gritty counterpart to Georgia, hangs on to courses of icy wasteland, some clinging relentlessly to eroding cliff faces, preserving the absurdly obsessive trial of the coastal winds, the rain, the still savage, still tantalising struggle with nature; elsewhere simulation and artifice is the theme for this unconscious ritual of dominance and display (those clothes, those Rupert the Bear outfits, the unselfconscious fancy dress) which makes the sport so addictive and an acceptable social addiction. It allows even the dull, the timid, the suburban, the non-athlete a share in that feeling of supremacy over nature (like the shirt wearing football fan who for the price of a ticket or a subscription to Sky, feels a part of the triumph of his club).
Quiet, contemplative, far from the explosive excitement of track or field, it always seems like an older man’s sport, out there with the back bending pensioners and their quietly clicking bowls or indeed the chinless wonders and their croquet and tea. It’s no surprise to see golf courses and bowling greens in a sales pitch for retirement homes. Golf has always had the image of the middle income, the middle class and the middle aged. There is, in fact, a relentless association with the nondescript, the dull, the characterless, an anonymity doggedly socialising even the youngest and biggest names in the sport. Most of the professionals look as if they were born middle aged. Plenty I’m sure endorse golf related products (Pringle sweaters, sensible walking shoes, etc) but how many are ever employed for their charisma, still less their sex appeal? These are the ‘chartered accountants’ of sport (indeed many accountants are keen golfers). Perhaps the choice of clothes, a remarkable combination of the office 9 to 5, the undistinguished and the outrageously garish (the accountant’s overcompensation) seems to confirm the cliche. Which other sport in the 21st century is conducted in the clothes you might get away with in your day job? If your day job was a children’s entertainer. And check out the bodies pre-Tiger Woods (could you really distinguish the golfer from the darts player in an identity line up?). One of the greatest British golfers in recent years is remembered for what? His prowess on the tee? His manliness? His wall to wall trophies? No, his man-boobs and the ‘affectionate’ nickname, ‘Mrs Doubtfire’.
Would the original pioneers, those who actually tamed nature, have ever hung around at base camp, stopped off the wagon trail for a round of golf? Would Christ have ever become a happy clapping Christian? Golf was doomed from the start to fill a necessary role, to become the mere appendage of privilege, an extension of the boardroom, office politics in the open air and a means of allowing less adventurous, more sedentary generations the right to lord it over the land dominated by the real achievers of the past. It’s imperial hold will continue until the mountains fall, the seas run dry and the land reclaims itself.
DG 2013
What are we supposed to make of golf? What was I supposed to make of it? For the early part of my life it was the pastime of another country. There were green spaces between the flats on my south London council estate, at least there had been in the planning, the architect’s early glint and maybe even as far as the first innocent laying of turf, but any landscaped vision had been worn to wasteland by neglect and a residential scorched earth policy long before the caged saplings, planted to grow into decorative camouflage softening the stark Bauhaus sightlines, or future windbreakers shielding the empty acres beneath the flyover, had been either uprooted for bonfires or taken a beating (by an endless series of fiercely struck missed chances and the flailing bodies of fouled strikers) in their naturally destined lives as goal posts for twelve hour football marathons. Within a year the vision of a new Jerusalem was as barren as a naive architect’s dream or the hopes of those scrambling to free themselves from the mire of an estate already extending into the Clockwork Orange territory of Thamesmead. I had no experience of a sport that entered my world only through its crazy seaside derivative, lumpy dog fouled putting greens or the medium of the British sitcom. Like tennis, it was as inaccessible as tea at the Ritz and clearly belonged to another class, another world, an alien activity, demanding expensive equipment, expensive tuition and of course, a course (hence its confinement to the TV ghetto already crowded with horseracing, Antiques Roadshow and Ski Sunday - the latter requiring not only a course but a ‘whole nother country’); football, by contrast, asked for no more than a plastic ball (stone or crushed can) an empty street and a few friends. Not until some years later when I picked up a club at a driving range (and discovered with another surprise, the ghost of an ability to strike the ball) did I taste the obsession it could become.
For golf does seem to be less a sport than an obsession, a private addiction, an affair you just can’t bring yourself to end (married men talk of ‘golf holidays’ in the same tone as my parents spoke of ‘dirty weekends’; married women become ‘golf widows’). Perhaps masturbation would provide a more accurate simile for this most solitary compulsion. It is, in any case, an infection that, having spread as rampantly as AIDs through every high end spa hotel in the western world, before taking on the unsuspecting east, has long since been working its way into areas it was never intended to go: deserts, seabeds, the moon. Can you recall a time when it was a novelty to see the rich mix of greens of a manicured lawn or length of fairway vibrating upon the glossy pages of brochures and websites from Vegas to Dubai, accompanied by an unspoken pride in the financial muscle required to keep a single green green for your break in the sun (enough sprinkler power to keep an African township alive for a year)?
This has all been going on a long time now and, in a way, my adolescent suspicions seemed to have been confirmed and indeed developed during that first politically earnest year at university where I grew to know (and misunderstand) the middle class. It’s origins might lie in the impoverished ghetto of 15th century Scotland, but golf always had serious aspirations; it wasn’t going to hang around ignorant highlanders if there was money to be made elsewhere and money is the real player here. Golf is the gold-digging seductress, the high end accessory, the trophy wife to macho capitalism. If war is conducted through corporate enterprise, golf is the diplomacy of imperialism, the high class escort sweetening the deal (business meetings are conducted on the greens, introductions smoothed through a good humoured trading of handicaps, careers dependent on the development of the perfect swing).
However, such casual analysis can’t be confined to the simple causal equation of class and economics. We are all shareholders now, hence the democratisation of the sport. Golf clubs, like universities, are now available to all and tailored to all pockets (the Oxfords have their Readings). It has, therefore, become a little easier to observe the rituals of this phenomenon in a more dispassionate, objective mood. And it is a phenomenon, almost as insidious as the mobile phone, the social media site. The infection is global. Book a holiday and see how many hotels have a course organically attached or ‘within easy reach’, if the hotel itself is not actually an extension of the clubhouse. Wifi and golf, have become the almost inseparable bastard twins of business. Take a window seat on your next flight from Heathrow and as you bank and trawl away south east, look down at those stretched green canvases speckled with contorted Miro sausages or tiny curling foetus. Greens, bunkers artfully designed on plots the size of council estates while Britain is a choking, overburdened island of nomads who will never own a home. These are hallowed, protected areas, green belt greens. Despite its proliferation, Golf seems, like designer labels, indelibly associated with the luxury of wealth and privilege. It just can’t shrug it off. All that’s changed is the class of punter who wants in on the game (just as they want out of the ‘working class’). It is the sport of the aspirational.
Why? What’s the draw, the attraction, particularly in this world of indoor life, the Wii mini Olympics. Why aren’t business meetings accompanied by some computer game, say Call of Duty? (Maybe they are in Silicon Valley). Too confrontational? Too man-to-man? How much easier, how much more diplomatic, is it to outrank the opposition by racking up scores like (reverse) sales figures.
What is it any individual seeks in this increasingly alienated world? Individual control; the very human need for control. And is there anything more contrived, more manicured, more tailored to this need than the very individual activity of a sport in which we hammer a tiny ball several hundred yards to a place where we can delicately insert it in to a hole just wider than its own dimensions. The two perennial challenges to manhood, women and nature, had long since been tamed by the middle of the 20th century (every household had its own unpaid domestic servant and we’d run out of unchartered mountains); to replace such a loss society has had to invent two simulated challenges (Feminism and golf). Women are now ‘empowered’ and ‘choose’ to appear in basque and stockings on the front covers of men’s magazines. And, as in mountaineering, where if we don’t die in the process we say we have ‘conquered’ the mountain (in a form of emotional masturbation), golfers don’t compete so much against each other as against the course, beneath which nature has already been conquered. We have conquered and rebuilt nature and golf is the ritual celebratory dance of the victor.
Take the US Masters, held in the tamed beauty, the arcadian idyl of Georgia: sunlight and shade on the dappled greens, the heady jasmine in bloom, the cooling stream crossed by the ubiquitous rustic wooden bridge, a light breeze moving in the upper boughs of the windbreakers as if to convince us of the reality of the setting (the quintessence of an English or Narnian summer as conceived by the designers of Disneyland; a modern advertisers’ image of Eden, mocking Blake’s free spirited wilderness). Even in our front rooms four thousand miles away, we are familiar with the hushed cathedral reverence of the television commentary as a squatting Buddha surveys the invisible lumps and bumps on the 18th over which his ball will have to travel to the pin: the hunched concentration addressing the ball, the mimed false shot, the ecstatic whooping of the roped crowd as the long putt sinks, the deification of the winner, his modestly bowed head, his tentatively raised club, his name immortalised on the trophy even before he receives it, the celebratory (and self conscious, almost reluctant) donning of the green jacket like some ancient agricultural ritual (with rewarding virgins awaiting offstage). All has much to do with the celebration of control, not merely the immense skill in controlling the thumb sized ball in the face of wayward winds, glass lakes, sandpits and designer stubble terrain, to guide it safely like Bunyan’s pilgrim to the holy sanctuary of the shaved green, but the control of nature this man-made course implies. The Odyssey around the 18 holes (9 out, 9 back - a ritual smacking of the ghost of the original challenge nature presented centuries earlier) has much in common with the conqueror striding over the plains of the defeated, and although each player (or his well paid lackey) carries a bag of clubs and irons, less violently than scalp belted Iroquois or Mayans curling dead ball kicks with the sagging heads of their victims, it is still with a certain unconscious pride (perhaps particularly for Americans) in the overpowering and control of nature.
Nature holds little opportunity for us any more (other than saving it and ourselves from oblivion). In fact, it cowers away in fear of a species who, no longer presented with a natural challenge, has to invent one. Just as the genuine horrors of real life have been transmuted into the genre of horror (the more science explains the world the more we need to regress to a time when we can be frightened by the unknown, fabricating books and movies to do the job) carefully designed golf courses, theme parks for the middle aged, provide the simulation of an ancient confrontation.
Although Scotland, the natural home to the sport and the gritty counterpart to Georgia, hangs on to courses of icy wasteland, some clinging relentlessly to eroding cliff faces, preserving the absurdly obsessive trial of the coastal winds, the rain, the still savage, still tantalising struggle with nature; elsewhere simulation and artifice is the theme for this unconscious ritual of dominance and display (those clothes, those Rupert the Bear outfits, the unselfconscious fancy dress) which makes the sport so addictive and an acceptable social addiction. It allows even the dull, the timid, the suburban, the non-athlete a share in that feeling of supremacy over nature (like the shirt wearing football fan who for the price of a ticket or a subscription to Sky, feels a part of the triumph of his club).
Quiet, contemplative, far from the explosive excitement of track or field, it always seems like an older man’s sport, out there with the back bending pensioners and their quietly clicking bowls or indeed the chinless wonders and their croquet and tea. It’s no surprise to see golf courses and bowling greens in a sales pitch for retirement homes. Golf has always had the image of the middle income, the middle class and the middle aged. There is, in fact, a relentless association with the nondescript, the dull, the characterless, an anonymity doggedly socialising even the youngest and biggest names in the sport. Most of the professionals look as if they were born middle aged. Plenty I’m sure endorse golf related products (Pringle sweaters, sensible walking shoes, etc) but how many are ever employed for their charisma, still less their sex appeal? These are the ‘chartered accountants’ of sport (indeed many accountants are keen golfers). Perhaps the choice of clothes, a remarkable combination of the office 9 to 5, the undistinguished and the outrageously garish (the accountant’s overcompensation) seems to confirm the cliche. Which other sport in the 21st century is conducted in the clothes you might get away with in your day job? If your day job was a children’s entertainer. And check out the bodies pre-Tiger Woods (could you really distinguish the golfer from the darts player in an identity line up?). One of the greatest British golfers in recent years is remembered for what? His prowess on the tee? His manliness? His wall to wall trophies? No, his man-boobs and the ‘affectionate’ nickname, ‘Mrs Doubtfire’.
Would the original pioneers, those who actually tamed nature, have ever hung around at base camp, stopped off the wagon trail for a round of golf? Would Christ have ever become a happy clapping Christian? Golf was doomed from the start to fill a necessary role, to become the mere appendage of privilege, an extension of the boardroom, office politics in the open air and a means of allowing less adventurous, more sedentary generations the right to lord it over the land dominated by the real achievers of the past. It’s imperial hold will continue until the mountains fall, the seas run dry and the land reclaims itself.
DG 2013
