John Butler on the draw - and danger - of golf
Everyone is familiar with the quote attributed to Bill Shankly, the one about football being a matter of life and death. When I was young I missed the joke, as it summed up my relationship with Liverpool Football Club perfectly. Looking back, I realise how naive I was, and I now understand the comic implications of a grown man thinking this way about football. The cliche is obviously made for golf.
Let me say I'm not a huge fan of the game - not by any means. It's just that the way I play lends Shankly's saying a hard literal truth. When I peg up the dimpled white missile and stand on the tee, surveying the narrow fairway as if I could pick my spot, it is a matter of life and death for anyone unlucky enough to be sharing the course with me.
There is no telling where my ball will go. It's nothing that I do on purpose, but when your arsenal of shots includes both a wicked slice and a vicious hook, you have zero chance of controlling the outcome. I feel certain that the best golfers aren't thinking about death at the top of their backswing, so I'm at a clear disadvantage here. Golf is all about managing pressure, and I resent my handicap.
Players like me show considerable bravery in persisting with it as a hobby, year after year; players like my friend Peter, who continues to play from time to time, having once nearly decapitated a small boy on a pitch-and-putt course.
On his nine-iron tee shot he caught the ball flush on the blade of the club, sending it scudding so low, so hard and so far to the right that it shaved the scalp on the boy's head, 100m away. No one was hit, thanks to holy Vishnu, but it makes you realise all the instances in which the smiling face of fortune has prevailed.
Even if the outcome was tragic you'd still probably get a fair hearing in court, because every barrister plays golf, and they're probably all hopeless at it, like Peter and I. Empathy is vital: if the man on the street could put you on trial it would be a different matter. He would lock you up and throw away the key, because most people don't play, and anyone who doesn't play, hates golf, so most people hate it - and with the white heat of a thousand suns.
In the eyes of those who don't like golf the symbolic value of the game is huge. It's a sign that you're getting old, that you're a snob, that you're hopelessly conservative and dull. People use the word in conversation as shorthand for bad fashion, jockishness and conspicuous wealth. I can understand some but not all of these negative associations, and I disagree with every one of them.
You do need a certain amount of money to buy a set of golf clubs and join a golf club. But you don't have to join a club to play the game. Generally speaking, money is a barrier to entry, but jet skis are quite expensive, too, and nobody accuses the jet-ski community of snobbery.
A friend who has just returned from 10 years abroad points to his friends' playing golf as a clear sign that we are all past it. But he fails to understand that everyone who plays it now has played it since they were 10, and were they past it then?
The wardrobe is always cited as an incriminating factor - the laziest of all criticisms. Some competitors in the professional game, such as Sergio Garcia and Ian Poulter, dress like rodeo clowns, but so does Serena Williams, and nobody rounds on tennis the way they do on golf.
So what of the accusations that golf clubs are bastions of sexism and snobbery? You won't catch me defending the indefensible, but this argument fails to make an important distinction, such as the one that exists between the Church and religion. Applying for membership of a golf club is a Byzantine process, and the clubs are havens for many irritating, toxic personalities (and that's just the junior members), but the golf is, or should be, democratic, for young and old.
Some people seem to think there's something wrong with a sport that everyone can play, but any game in which a 70-year-old can beat a 20-year-old is worth playing. I'm at a loss as to why the pursuit of a tiny ball around a field inspires such vitriol, but I try to ignore the prejudice, even if most of it reeks of ageism.
Nobody should treat any sport as a matter of life and death, except for me, at the top of my backswing. I have played many times at Los Feliz public golf course in eastern Los Angeles. It's a decent track where you can rent a set of clubs for $10. You can drive up there on a Saturday morning and tee up with total strangers.
These folks are not exactly slack-jawed yokels, but neither are they Fauntleroys in canary colours.
After the game, players repair to the club house with the Pepsi sign out front, sit at the Formica counter and order hot dogs. Drinks arrive in plastic cups, the short-order cook is flipping burgers, and the diners are male and female, black and white, young and old. The atmosphere is serene and friendly until it, and the clubhouse window, are shattered by another wayward drive from the Irish guy. I love this game.
John Butler blogs at http://lozenge.wordpress.com