Golf is a Four-Letter Word

By Alasdair McClintock on July 19, 2016 in Sport

This month the British Open will be in full swing. If you’re feeling inspired, it might be time to clean your balls, head down to the driving range and relieve some built up stress with a few violent swings, aiming at the guy driving around in the golf cart at the end of the range. That bastard deserves it, I assure you.

Golf is a queer sport, if ever there was one. Like polo, it is often more about status than the game itself. But unlike polo, it can also just be four friends smashing beers in double-pluggers while shooting a quick nine. Depending on which course you’re at, of course. I don’t think you’ll be doing that around here any time soon. I can almost smell the pomp when I drive past the Royal Sydney Golf Club.

It provides us with big personalities as well. Overweight alcoholics can thrive in golf and that makes for a wonderful array of loose cannons and narcissists. I find it simply fantastic to follow as a result. I couldn’t care less about the actual game itself, but the closeted world of golf is like a dark drama on HBO that should be enjoyed with a bowl of popcorn and a warm blanket.

This is a sport where you used to be able to do anything and they’d cover it up for you. An army of ‘Ray Donovans’ must have followed the PGA Tour around, sweeping up dead caddies and paying off alluring young women at every stop. It doesn’t seem like that so much anymore, which is probably a good thing all said and done, but my interest has certainly waned as a result.

It should come as no surprise, though, that pro golf was once so sordid. Traditionally it has been the domain of stuffy old men and there is no group more sinister or perverted, under the surface, than stuffy old men. Of that I assure you.

Just look at Muirfield Golf Club in Scotland, which recently voted to not allow women as members, thus surrendering its right to ever host the British Open. This is a group working very hard to resist the expectations of modern society. What kind of devilishly sick secrets must they be hiding in the basement of the clubhouse? Are they serving human flesh in the pies at ‘The Nineteenth Hole’?

Mark Twain is attributed as saying “Golf is a good walk spoiled” (though there is some debate as to whether it was actually he who first said it). He lived in a time before golf carts and Segways, though, so what would he know?

All I know is there are few things as satisfying as hitting a crisp drive down the middle of the fairway and backing it up with a chipped iron onto the green. It is just a shame about the fifty or so other shots that get shanked into the bushes or go uncomfortably close to a group playing another hole entirely.