Golf ’s problem is rather more structural than sartorial
Relaxing dress codes to allow jeans on the course will not of itself bring in more players and would fray the sense of etiquette and respect on which the sport depends
It was the type of argument to leave Peter Dawson, a latter-day Colonel Blimp, spluttering on his vintage port. Martin Slumbers, his successor as chief executive of the R&A, has this week called for golf clubs across the land to rethink their dress codes, perhaps even to the point of allowing players to swap slacks for jeans. It feels, for all the cogent reasoning about broadening access, like the breaching of a dam wall. One question is, where will this softening of strictures end? Before long, we could be seeing T-shirts in the Ailsa Room at Royal Troon, or tourists in reverse baseball caps trooping across the Swilcan Bridge.
Not that golf is in a position to be prescriptive when it comes to fashion. The sport has inflicted any number of abominations on the watching world, from Nick Faldo’s Pringle sweaters to Payne Stewart’s plus fours. Arcane club rules help to reinforce the absurdities. In 2012, Michael Jordan, no less, was slung out of La Gorce in Florida for wearing a pair of multi-pocketed combat shorts. In 2018, David Cole, a recreational golfer, was told he was not welcome at Hertfordshire’s Letchworth Golf Club because his socks were the wrong colour.
Slumbers’s aim is to dismantle this type of tyranny by committee. Some hesitation is wise, though, before acclaiming him as a great architect of progress. For while it might be enraging to have some desiccated blazer quibble about whether your tailored summer shorts fall sufficiently below the knee, golf is struggling to retain players not because of its restrictions on what you wear.
It is suffering as a consequence of how long it takes, and how much it costs. More than 10,000 memberships were relinquished in this country from 2017 to 2018. The most common reasons given? That people could no longer squeeze four-hour rounds into timepressured days, and that they had grown tired or incapable of paying an average of £900 a year for the privilege. Its most urgent problems are structural, not sartorial.
As such, there is an impression that Slumbers is choosing a soft target, and quite possibly the wrong one. In golf, dress code is not a domain that can be revolutionised at a stroke. As terminally unhip as the standard on-course garb of collared shirt and cotton trousers might be, especially when paired with an ill-fitting cagoule, its saving grace is that it is practical. Try swinging at full speed for 18 holes in tight denim jeans. Not only would you draw noisy harrumphing from the members’ bar, you would wince in soreness from the chafing.
Then, of course, there is the dreaded etiquette debate. At many clubs, the e-word can mask a code of decorum so infernally pernickety, even Debrett’s would struggle to disentangle it. Take the ever-mystifying rule that decrees a golfer who has just managed a hole-in-one should buy everybody else a drink upon reaching the clubhouse. Would it not, in any other environment, be the other way round?
Without some semblance of etiquette, though, the essence of the game would dissolve. You could talk over your partner’s shots, carve out giant divots on practice swings, hurl your clubs like missiles, converse noisily on your mobile phone, even cavort half-naked through unraked bunkers if you pleased. And it is etiquette, for better or worse, that mandates dressing to a certain standard. This is not to advocate lurching to the extremes of Jacob Rees-mogg, a man who wears double-breasted suits for his holiday snaps. Even Ian Poulter, who came into golf the hard way, managing the stockroom at the back of the Woburn pro shop, made concessions to dress code. For all that his colour palette was lurid, he founded an entire fashion business on the principle of “look good, play great”.
The issue can be reduced, ultimately, to one of respect. By eschewing jeans on the course, you are not giving in to petty autocrats, but simply showing a semblance of deference to house rules. Perhaps I am showing my age these days, but I would no sooner turn up on the first tee in a T-shirt and jeans than I would at the Vienna Philharmonic wearing the previous day’s gym gear. In life, not just in golf, there is a reasonable expectation that you abide by the rules of your chosen setting.
On examples of strictness over dress, golf is far from the worst offender. In 2015, Lewis Hamilton was turned away from the Royal box at Wimbledon for disobeying the edict that all men had to wear ties. He was duly offered a tie by