Golf Ugh!

Hole 10, Augusta National Golf Club

Golf is a time consuming “sport,” although it hardly looks like a sport since inertial force is not employed for the purpose of speed or strength. The closest sport to golf is probably baseball, though the difference is that the long languorous moments when nothing seems to happen in baseball are counterbalanced by spurts of action when a player tags up or steals a base or slides into home. Golf is a truly peripatetic sport and if it had been around during the time of Plato and Socrates one wonders if they would have cottoned to it as a place to create their dialogues. However, today because of the expense of the land and infrastructure most golf courses require, golf caters to conversations of a distinctly non-philosophically disinterested nature. It’s no accident that golf is the sport of the elite since it’s a wonderful place to do business. It’s a business lunch on wheels that provides the distraction of play. One could say that philosophers or common folk could also avail themselves of the traps and greens and runways for talk about life (and there are a relatively small number of overcrowded public courses that serve just this function), but you won’t find too many golf courses in ghetto neighborhoods. Golf may not have been created for the sake of exclusivity, but the particular kind of real estate it requires and life style that it fosters (Bermuda shorts, pink shirts, white pants and shoes with cleats) make it a past time of the rich. The matter of Who’s Who and golf has been epitomized by the Augusta National Golf Club, which up until recently didn’t allow for women members  (Condoleezza Rice and Darla Moore, its first two female members, were only admitted this August).The Augusta National has a truly august following of national leaders and the fact that there was an ancien regime still eager to keep anyone out became a public disgrace. But who knows how many less publically known golf clubs still maintain admissions policies that discriminate on the base of race and gender? Thus golf is more a club than a sport though the club which is the equivalent of the baseball bat is still capable of creating quite a racquet. In plain terms, golf sucks. When America goes through its version of China’s Cultural Revolution, golf clubs (both the institutions and the implements) will be the first to go.

Teed Off

Yes John Updike played it, golf that is and the likes of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama play golf, though Hillary Clinton would not be able to gain membership  to the venerable Augusta National Golf Club, whose hosting of the Masters has come under attack for its male only policy. Though the Times recently reported on some rare changes in golf's protocols ("Change 267 Years in the Making: A Tweak in the Rules of Golf", NYT, 10/27/11), Golf is the direct opposite of Occupy Wall Street to the extent that it, perhaps more than any other sport, epitomizes the spirit of laissez faire capitalism and of the status quo.Max Weber’s book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism could easily be re-titled, The 18^th Hole and the Spirit of Capitalism. Golf courses are where the robber barons of today network with other robber barons. From the caddies whose job it is to carry a golfer's bags to the steppinfetchit locker room attendants and rigid dress codes that are strictly enforced in opulent club houses, golf radiates a hive mentality. The scrappy immigrant who has worked his way up the ladder lands at a golf club where he is treated with a deference usually accorded to royalty. It’s no wonder that most golf clubs exude a pomp that is reminiscent of Buckingham palace. Sure there are public courses which cater to those who are not members of these exclusive clubs, but let’s face it, that’s not what we mean when we talk about golf. Golf courses have little if nothing in common with the asphalt oasis, the basket ball court, or even  tennis, whose effete precincts have more effectively been infected with the virus of democratization. Even the apparatus of golf reeks of privilege with the heads of the drivers, the so called woods, covered in soft velvet, velour or leather hoods that give them the cache of Faberge Eggs. If there ever is a revolution that topples the power elite, golf will likely be the first and only sport to go. OK there’s polo which is played  in Palm Beach, but it’s got too few adherents to make a dent.