Samizdata

Golf. There’s a sport to stir up hot passions or deep waves of apathy among certain people. British blogger Clive Davis is clearly not a fan of the sport once described, I believe by Oscar Wilde, as a good way of spoiling a good walk (okay, it may have been said by one of those other smartypants writers who are quoted for their supposed wit and wisdom, but whatever). Clive does not care much for the sort of people who often play golf and for the way it is often used by political types – mostly rightwing ones – in the United States. He has a point. Golf bores are tedious, just as football bores, rugby bores, athletics bores, horse racing bores (now that is really boring) or F1 motor racing bores, are, er, boring. However, Clive’s post hits a duff note in having a poke at Michael Douglas, in my view. Douglas, as well as being outrageous enough to have married Catherine Zeta-Jones, is a golf nut! Aaaaggghhh. I do not know why Douglas seems to bring out a certain hostile reaction in some folk. His Gordon Gekko remains, for me, one of the highlights of 20th Century cinema (yes, really). And I distinctly recall that Douglas, shortly after 9/11, decided to fly over to the UK for an Anglo-US amateur golf tournament, shrugging off worries about security to slug it around the links. He won my respect for that move.

Golf is both a team game and an intensely individualistic one and the latter point may explain its enormous popularity in certain parts of the world and also explain its appeal to a certain demographic. Although the number of people has expanded a lot in recent years as people get richer and due to the influence of the mighty Tiger Woods, it is still overwhelmingly viewed as a sport for the gin-and-tonic slice of the population (although I see nothing actually wrong with that). It is also a social game in that it is often the sort of game that allows people to discuss business and so on as they go around the course. My brother, a lawyer, seems to get briefed most of the time when he is on the fairways. (He once beat his boss and made a mental point not to do so again).

And I suspect this taps into the continued links between sport and class in the English-speaking world, especially in Britain. Golf, rugby union and arguably, cricket, is middle class, while polo or yacht-racing is seen as posh, and football (soccer) and rugby league is working class. I often find that people often reveal themselves quite a lot when “their sport” gets “invaded” by non-typical supporters. In the last soccer World Cup tournament in Germany, for example, I remembered reading comments by football regulars denouncing all those Home Counties types for showing a sudden interest in the English team selection, although perhaps England would have fared better had Ericsson paid some attention to their views. And the same goes, I recall once, when I went along to a sailing regatta and overheard some old salt muttering about “Chavs” becoming interested in sailing (an unlikely prospect, as far as I can tell. I cannot quite envisage this part of the English population wanting to navigate a yacht or change a spinnaker at speed in a heavy sea).

Anyway, as I write, it is around 3pm. Time for the football to begin.