FROM THE ARCHIVE: THE DANGER OF GOLF: TOM HUMPHRIES believes that golf is one of those issues which must be confronted by every male who grows in affluence
I HAVE a friend who detests golf. Fearing that the game might one day creep up on him like grey hair, he has taken precautions. He has explicitly requested that in the event of him exhibiting the faintest interest in acquiring a backswing or learning remedies for yips, one of his friends should fetch a gun and shoot him down. He will be many things but he will not be a golf bore.
Nevah, he cries as he passes overhead on his hang glider. Nevah! What standing his request has in law is a moot point. Would, for instance, his wearing of plaid trousers and naff shoes make for a defence of justifiable homicide if one of us were to misread the signals? Would it be a mercy if a friend blew him away on the suspicion that he was becoming, let’s say, a wine bore?
What if he is caught dissembling in order to impress a workplace superior over cocktails one evening? Hasta la vista, baby? C’mon Bertie Wooster-make my day?
Golf is one of those issues which must be confronted by every male who grows in affluence to the point of having discretionary income and the luxury of being able to take the morning off without having to forge a sick note or pretend that yet another relative has passed away.
To golf or not to golf. To put away the consoling wee vanities of youth and stride the fairways in a yellow V-necked sweater, wearing shoes that a New Orleans pimp would find distasteful and sporting comfort fit trousers as worn by 19th century dandies. If women must face menopause then men must face golf.
Increasingly as one pushes on towards middle age and the shiny little placebo inscribed with the words “life begins at 40”, one notices golf’s insidious influence all around. One by one friends out themselves as golfers. Others, those who have been out of the closet longer, gather around them supportively.
Watch your approach at the blind 13th and you’ll be okay, sunshine.
Being made of the very cheapest moral fibre this column likes to keep a foot in both camps. Some of my best friends are ardent golfers, etc, etc. I don’t want to know what they get up to out there; our enduring friendships are sufficient testament to my own broad-mindedness.
My own last game was fully a year ago, in the company of three Kerry men, one of whom was a novice and had the advantage of a splendid hurling grip with which he whisked the ball away into eternity, embarrassing the rest of us mightily. It was at the height of the soccer World Cup and we were in south Boston on a public course near Dorchester.
Occasionally, the crackle of gunfire and the squealing of sirens could be heard in the distance. Nobody broke 90 (for the nine). Everyone wore shorts and runners and assiduously avoided the use of golfing terminology.
“Six feet from the hole, boy, take out the putter there and bang it in.”
“What, into the hole with the flag?”
“Yeah.”
“Why didn’t you tell me that back there at the start ya bollo’x ya?”
And so we went, a living tableau of physical comedy and barely glimpsed potential wanting to play golf without actually becoming golfers. Insecure in our own scepticism.
Playing on public courses allows a man to paddle without becoming completely wet. More. You don’t have to slink home and tell your partner that you have been playing with the boys out at that place where she can’t actually become a full member.
It is golf’s emphasis on the economic disenfranchisement of women that makes the novice most queasy about what really goes down out on the private fairways. It’s a jungle out there when the big boys arrive at the weekend whipping out their graphite shafts and haggling over handicaps.
So that’s a crass generalisation (this week’s one), but out there on the golf course, under the surface, it gets a little bit macho sometimes. The boss peevishly, accepts strokes donated by the specky guy with the big mouth from accounts. Two good holes, and, the boss’s own braggadocio leads him to a sucker bet.
Handing over the money on the 18th, the boss passes on some bogus portfolio advice. Uh oh. Man. He hunt. He gather. He golf.
Golf clubs are eery places. Instead of being a haven, they are infested by beetle-browed chaps whose bible is the rule book, whose oxygen is etiquette. The club has become a substitute for: real life. Women, immune from the golf bore bug, are a threat.
Male victims need their privacy.
It is intriguing to watch golfers in repose. They gather for scoops and crane their heads towards whatever golf tournament is on television today.
Players are referred to on a first name basis. Seve. Cory. Ben. Arnie, etc. All except the one who best embodies their own worst fears, that Australian, The Great White Chicken.
Yes. Golf, which is a marker of society’s divisions and inequities, laughs loudest in the face of it’s own victims.
All those little humiliations and clumsy divots. They can’t be all bad, those duffers who choke once a week out there. They, must have absorbed some gentle philosophy amidst all that imperfection.
We seek mitigation on their behalf because truly there is something pathetic and poignantly desperate about the man standing on the first, assembling the moves he has learned at some expense. He’s slogged all week. Now he has fled his family. For what? For this? The feeling of belonging in male society.
He’s bent at the waist. Slightly. Legs apart so that the feet are spread slightly wider than the shoulders. His knees are flexed and he checks anxiously to see if he can roll his weight on the balls of his feet. He grips his club. It feels like a medicine ball on a piece of string. He checks once more that he is pointed in the right direction. Takes a practice swing and makes a delightful little whoosh through the air. Faces gather at the clubhouse window.
The flapping flares of his own plaid trousers tell him all he needs to know about the wind. Yikes!
His bag of clubs lies behind him like a great mobile home. He cosies his feet in fractionally nearer the ball. Makes his address. A pregnant hush falls.
He draws the club back. He gets to the top of his back swing, suddenly finds himself thinking of marshmallows. Begins his downward stroke towards perfect disaster.
His spirits sag but he is having fun. The male way. On the 11th he hits a shot that Seve would be proud of and he clings to it’s memory. Later, he’ll moss the entire round over into a clubhouse anecdote.
A very male practice. As gender roles become blurred, the golf bore shall become increasingly prevalent.
The course is the arena of male dreams. It’s where these kids are turning for their kicks.
What can be done? My friend has the germ of an idea. Golf needs to be controlled not eradicated. Give them their clubs and their sordid rituals but regulate it. So what if they have means but not taste. As the country slowly turns into one great golfing theme park, there is a case for the annual culling of golfers. I know just the people.
“Fore! Look out! Duck sucker! BOOM! Hasta la vista, darling.”
