Confessions of a pitch and putt-playing class traitor

Golf revels in its snooty conventions but for a swing at a more down-to-earth game, it has to be pitch and putt, writes DONALD CLARKE

EVERY FOUR years, the Olympics come around to remind us of sports we had just about managed to forget. There’s that bizarre amalgam of handball and association football. Oh no, it’s the dancing horses. Spare us mass suicide by BMX.

Pitch and putt has, to date, managed to avoid being co-opted into the orgy of nationalistic fervour. The sport’s ostentatious, impure cousin – I believe it’s called “golf” – will make an appearance at the Rio Olympiad. But pitch and putt sits proudly outside the camp. This is as it should be. The shorter, uncorrupted version of the game remains what it has always been: a sport created for and played by the people (while drinking Cidona and eating Topics).

Unless I am making this up, depictions of pitch and putt, painted in the socialist realist style, once hung proudly outside Lenin’s tomb in Red Square.

On August 24th, however, the sport will enjoy its moment of grand celebration. The World Cup Teams Competition is coming to the Royal Meath course (it really is called that) near the township of Clonee in that county. Just over 50 years old, the facility boasts a proper clubhouse and bunkers with real sand in them.

Certain eccentricities of the tournament are worth noting. The Federation of International Pitch and Putt Associations is one of the few sporting bodies that recognises Catalonia as an independent entity. A team from that locale will trade chips with the likes of Andorra, Germany, Great Britain and the home nation. Once again, pitch and putt proves itself to be on the side of the downtrodden and the dispossessed.

The teams playing in Meath – for all their undoubted democratic leanings – comprise, of course, the elite of the pitch and putt universe. But the game’s base remains the poor idiots who, with iron and putter beneath elbow, take buses out to scrubby suburban courses each weekend.

Let us venture into dangerous territory. It is probably fair to say that the readership of The Irish Times is disproportionately fond of the activity we pitch and putt aficionados refer to as The Other Sport. Each day, reports on obscure golf tournaments in Tuna Fish, Iowa or Banana Tree Island are gobbled up with indecent levels of enthusiasm. Rory McIlroy appears in these pages about as often as Barack Obama. Excuse me while I climb beneath the table, pull on protective clothing and denounce the sport in guttural, militant tones.

There are such things as municipal golf courses. Not every club secretary suffers a conniption if some deranged Maoist dares to enter the bar in sandals. But there is no doubt that golf still rather enjoys its snooty conventions.

Throw off your shackles. You have nothing to lose but your wooden clubs and long irons. Join us in at the tin shack where they sell non-branded balls, recycled tees and big bottles of orange-flavour drink. If Rosa Luxembourg had a free afternoon (and wasn’t dead, obviously) this is where she’d be.

Such was my attitude until a few years ago when, while researching an article for this newspaper, I phoned a charming representative of the Pitch and Putt Union of Ireland. He listened calmly while I talked baloney about my passion for the game. Then he broke the news. Apparently, I hadn’t been playing pitch and putt at all.

The folk who organise the game have very precise rules as to how a course should be laid out: no hole should be longer than 90 metres; the entire course must be less than 1,200 metres. My chums and I played a course that had several holes twice the maximum length. We were using clubs never seen on a “proper” pitch and putt course. It seems that I’d been playing golf all along.

These were the confessions of a class traitor.