You’d be green to think this game won’t get you hooked
I’ve thought about it, I really have and I’ve done my best to be fair. But honestly, golf. There is nothing to say for it, nothing.
A golf course is a parody of the natural world, with the grass mown just so and overlaid with a network of little paths so every inch of it can be reached by electric cart.
A golf course may look like the first chapter of Genesis where the lion shall lie down with the lamb and the 24-handicapper, but whoa, one hint of lion or lamb on the 16th fairway and it’s out with bazooka and barbecue in that order.
Golf courses are as unnatural as 5th Ave. They exist only for the pleasure of an unimpressive subset of the currently dominant primate species.
The essence of golf courses is to be found in a story from Atlanta, Georgia, that I told in these pages many years ago and have never forgotten. Atlanta, Georgia, is where they hold the Masters - and there’s a title to savour with its overlapping layers of arrogance, absurdity, mythology, misogyny and good oldfashioned southern racism.
It’s also where they dress the caddies in shapeless white overalls to emphasise their subordination, and to remind the overlords of the great days of the plantations - all of which is very golf.
But also, down there in golfing Georgia where the cicadas sing and the heat is hot, they dye the water in the water hazards blue to make it look more watery. There you have golf courses pinned in a single image.
Golfers fall into two types: professional golfers and golfers. Of the two it’s hard to know which to pity more.
Professional golfers are a travelling circus. They fritter the best years of their life going from place to place to compete with each other for the amusement of spectators while wearing clothes best described as - and it is hard to think of a more insulting phrase smart casual.
The absurd sums of money that professional golfers are paid insulate them from reality and the need to grow up. They are condemned in consequence to a state of perpetual mental adolescence, as illustrated by the most famous of their number, the now middle-aged Eldrick ‘Tiger’ Woods, being renowned for chasing cocktail waitresses and crashing fast cars in the manner of any 15-year-old boy’s wet dreams. But most golfers aren’t professional golfers. Most golfers are chubby middle-aged men who’ve achieved a modicum of wealth and free time and who spend it on golf.
At the weekend on the first tee they select a club and address the ball and waggle their little buttocks and take the club back slowly as they’ve been taught and bring it back down as they’ve taught but oh dear me, they hook it or shank it or thin it or fat it and they curse and rant and hate the world because it isn’t the ball that’s bunny hopping 50 feeble metres down the fairway and dribbling to a halt, it’s their manhood.
It is to this that the soaring ambition of youth has sunk. Here is the last bright dance of testosterone, dressed in awful slacks and a patterned sweater and towing approximately $2000 of polished titanium in a little wheeled trolley, in order to achieve, well, nothing, in order to come up wanting.
And I haven’t even mentioned putting. Putting. Any player in the act of putting should mentally climb the sky and look down on himself hunched over the ball and he could not help but be seized by a sense of comic futility, of absurdity crawling between heaven and earth. But of course no player in the act of putting ever does that because he is a golfer.
All of which is indisputable, so how to explain that when I was invited last week for the first time in maybe 20 years to play a round of golf I not only said yes but did so with a surge of the heart?
And of all the shots I played last Friday afternoon as I hacked my way round Coringa golf course, I have forgotten 124 and remembered two. One was a booming drive that sounded like a rifle shot and sailed beyond the curvature of the earth, the other a six iron that leapt from the club like a startled bird and flew and fell and came to rest a metre from the pin.
And how further to explain that late that evening I went on Trade Me and bought myself a secondhand set of clubs?