Free drops, rats and drainpipes … how will golf trade emerge?

Golf relies on the players themselves to self-police and apply the game’s playing codes, rules and ethics without the continuous presence of a referee. A player’s own moral sense, personal values and integrity is therefore under constant scrutiny.

This is one of the reasons why golf should be a compulsory sport at schools, as it equips young people with a set of values that will stand them in good stead for the game of life, which they will quickly discover is not a team sport.

It will be interesting to see if there has been any real transference in terms of these values, and the attendant morality and integrity, into the golf business.

At the end of this health crisis we shall see which of those companies trading in the golf space and publicly supporting its codes regarded reneging on a business debt, lease or agreement not as an act of moral turpitude, but merely a pragmatic response to the need for survival

In isolation that approach would be reasonable, but seen against the background of the widespread hypocrisy in modern business, its justification becomes much less compelling.

These sorts of issues have come up before. From a Hittite businessperson, in 500 BC, complaining about a broken delivery contract from his Phoenician merchant contact because of “a couple of minor squalls in the Med”, to a trader in the north of England circa 1350. The latter moaned about a merchant in London failing to send up the required materials, because of “some silly plague or other troubling the capital”.

However, unlike the times of the Phoenician empire or Europe’s Middle Ages, with the advent of modern communications and the global village (Marshall McLuhan’s evocative description), we can now choose to be “aware” of everything that is going on everywhere, at any time.

This media microscope shows the moral morass characterising so many areas of modern business — from Enron, to Volkswagen and the exhaust emissions scandal, and on to the accounting fraud at Steinhoff.

The public espousers and preachers of a convenient morality are legion and we know exactly who they are. We also know from experience that they are prone to shrug off their moral “stance of the day”, like an unwanted garment, at the first signs of pressure.

Apart from the public hypocrisy, the unscrupulous and self-serving abandonment of contracted responsibilities in terms of agreements, contracts, leases and so on is very dangerous. If nothing else in practical terms, it runs the very real danger of cannibalising the structure underpinning business through using this virus as the excuse to, attempted justification for or opportunity to abandon contracts and liabilities.

In effect, they are little better than a bunch of rats, as they hastily vacate their faux moral high ground in their undignified haste to get up into the mouth of the nearest drainpipe.

In the movie Wall Street, Hal Holbrook’s character opines to Charlie Sheen’s Bud Fox: “Man looks in the abyss, there’s nothing staring back at him. At that moment, man finds his character. And that is what keeps him out of the abyss.”

Sadly, the abyss often brings out the worst in people, such as reports showing cybercriminals using ransomware to hijack the IT systems of hospitals, which are in the front line of the fight against coronavirus.

We are also greeted by the sight of speculators making fortunes from collective misery, and politicians mouthing expedient and insincere phrases to support their career goals.

The challenge arising from keeping track with modern business is its global scale.

To this can be added that much of the wrongdoing is at an industrial level and will have been aided and abetted by politicians, large corporates and those supposed to safeguard the public — the legal and accounting institutions, which on too many occasions have been entirely complicit in orchestrating the process and the cover-ups.

I hope history will show who was doing what and when in the aftermath of this pandemic. Whether they will be brought to book is another matter, looking at how many “thieves” are still at large and swaggering in full public view in SA.

Formerly the sole preserve of the politicians and used-car dealers, these days the inner circle of hell has become very crowded.

It is said a round of golf, even with social distancing in force, will show you the real character of a person. Golf, like most other business sectors, will need a team effort to pull through. Therefore, will golf businesses do the “right thing” and score a hole-in-one in terms of business morality, which is admittedly something of an oxymoron?

Alternatively, will they choose, like rats in other business sectors, to run for cover, in this case not via a drainpipe, but by taking an unwarranted free drop from their agreements and responsibilities?

IT IS SAID THAT A ROUND OF GOLF, EVEN WITH SOCIAL DISTANCING IN FORCE, WILL SHOW YOU THE REAL CHARACTER OF A PERSON