by Lynne Truss
The young Tiger Woods had played at the Scottish Open the previous week - as US Amateur Champion - and there had been quite a kerfuffle about him, but my new friends warned me to be suspicious of the hype when he turned up at St Andrews. They reckoned he might be a flash in the pan, and that the big-boned British amateur Gordon Sherry would probably amount to more than Woods in the long run. (I still have hopes this might come true.) The big news was that John Daly won the Open that year. We would have preferred to see Rocca triumph, but the mega-hitting Daly was undeniably exciting to watch. We all went ‘Ooooh!’ like an old-fashioned advert for fireworks whenever Big John slugged the ball. As someone who had so far managed to knock the ball along the ground a maximum of twenty-five yards (using a driver), I was naturally lost in admiration for Daly’s crack-whizz 300-yard shots. I couldn’t wait to get out there again, to grip it and rip it just like Big John. Which is why, when I got home to Brighton, I immediately called up a local golf course and arranged to have some lessons.
And that was when I was forced to accept that all those old prejudices of mine did have some foundation in reality, after all. When I first turned up at the golf club, I was hanging around in the pro shop in advance of my lesson, fingering the knitwear and trying not to scream, and two members introduced themselves. One was a woman whose husband had collapsed with a heart attack on the course the previous week, and she had dropped by this morning to return his motorised trolley, with many thanks for everyone’s kindness. Whether the motorised trolley had accompanied her husband to surgery wasn’t clear, but anyway it was back now, and the husband was in recovery. As she extended a welcoming hand to me, her first, rather startling words were, ‘Are you thinking of joining us? Do you have a husband?’ (She said this as if she strongly suspected the answer was no, and that I wouldn’t get membership without one.) The other member keen to say hello was a man who claimed to be an airline pilot, but didn’t ask me what I did. Without preamble, he said warmly that he was all in favour of women members sharing the tee equally. Scarcely knowing what he was talking about, I said, ‘Oh good.’ ‘Yes,’ he said, barely able to contain his amusement. ‘I mean, fair’s fair. Men can have the tee from nine in the morning till nine at night; and women can have the rest.’ Shortly after this the lanky pro arrived, and we strolled out to an airy practice ground where I told him - in between gaily topping balls with a lofted club again - that I wasn’t feeling terribly comfortable with the culture of this place already, and he said, to my relief, that he couldn’t stand the members either, and was hoping to leave quite soon.
I really enjoyed the pro’s company after that. His wife was also nice: in fact, I’ve just remembered how she advised me to go home and change, sharpish, when I first showed up at the course wearing a comfortable stretchy T-shirt and some jeans. ‘I wouldn’t want the members to be nasty to you,’ she whispered. ‘You must have some tailored shorts? And a top with a collar?’ I obediently jumped into the car and drove home, but in the full knowledge that ‘tailored’ and ‘shorts’ were words that didn’t apply to a single thing in my wardrobe. I eventually turned up back at the course wearing a rapidly improvised combination of above-the-knee skirt, sleeveless blouse and pleading expression, and they let me off, but I knew in my heart that my not-in-a-million-years attitude to the tailored short was bound to cause trouble further down the road - which it certainly has. Having now covered 18 golf tournaments, I still go through the same despairing nothing-to-wear routine before each event: rooting through my cupboards in the insane hope of finding appropriate attire supplied by kindly pixies in the night.
One year I caved in and bought some proper ladies’ navy gabardine golf trousers in the tented village at the Open, but I had to throw them away when I got home. There was something about the thickness of the material and the sturdy functional waistband - not to mention the satin lining that stopped at the knee - that made me feel denatured. When I had them on, I wanted to cry ‘Unsex me here!’ like Lady Macbeth. The idea of having them in my house really upset me. Another time - at the Ryder Cup at the K Club in 2006, where there was torrential rain on the Sunday morning - I made the reverse mistake and wore some rather lovely expensive linen trousers from Hobbs in a fetching shade of moss green. First they got very wet; then they got very muddy; and in the end it was like trying to wade through glue with a heavy weight tied round each ankle. I took them off in the hotel room afterwards and briefly thought about taking them to the cleaners.
But they smelled badly of fertiliser, and were beginning to rot, so in the end I put them in a plastic bag and left them in a bin in the bathroom.
But the point is, back at the golf club in Brighton: the pro genuinely loved golf, and that’s what rescued the situation. Over the following weeks, he slowly let me into the secret of the golf swing, and it was fascinating. For example, one week he would say the golf swing was all about the left knee; the next week, he’d say it was all in the right shoulder; then it was about the plane of the hips. I began to deduce that a successful and graceful golf swing depended on a miraculous - some might say impossible - split-second coordination of all these independently swivelling bone-joints, muscle groups and body parts. Would I ever be able to do it? Well, the fact that many professional golfers were quite ungainly of figure yet could still perform this beautiful action was a source of inspiration and hope. And I got a bit fanatical as the weeks passed. On the pro’s advice I bought Ben Hogan’s book and read bits to friends who weren’t interested. I practised my grip and my waggle whenever circumstances allowed, because the wonderful Hogan tells you (in capitals): ‘PUT IN 30 MINUTES OF DAILY PRACTICE ON THE GRIP. LEARNING THESE NEXT FUNDAMENTALS WILL THEN BE TWICE AS EASY AND TWICE AS VALUABLE.’ On the day I found myself waggling the grill pan handle in the kitchen, and letting the toast drop to the floor, I did wonder if I was letting my enthusiasm go too far. But I was in the grip and waggle of something I could not control. I really, really, really liked golf.
* * *
Since golf is the only sport I still write about (once or twice a year), I suppose it’s fair to call it my favourite, even though I dislike the culture of the game as represented by the small-minded men in blazers. What one can’t help asking is: does golf actually make people small-minded? Is it something about the game? The evidence does sometimes seem incontrovertible. Many people will remember the Channel 4 ‘Cutting Edge’ documentary The Club, about the Northwood in Middlesex. This film was quite a snobbish enterprise, but it is rightly famous for including astonishing first-hand evidence of petty tyranny running rampant in a last bastion of lower-middle-class self-importance: the club’s chairman threatening a dissenting member with expulsion (and then denying it); a bullying speech to the ‘Ladies’ Autumn Prize-Giving’ from the club’s president, in which he ticked off the assembled female membership for paying improper respect to his wife, by not remembering to give her flowers. ‘My wife thinks it may be an intentional slur on me,’ he said (he meant ‘slight’). ‘But I told her it was just a little mistake, and that it wouldn’t happen again.’
The downtrodden ladies at Northwood were mere ‘associate’ members, of course, with limited access to the tee, and no voting rights. Their changing room had only recently been granted a shower. They were annually informed that the agm had voted by a huge majority not to extend the vote to them. One of the older male members, in real confusion, said he couldn’t imagine how a woman could be ready to play golf at nine o’clock in the morning, in any case. Weren’t there breakfast things to be cleared up? After the documentary was shown, the board of directors was obliged to resign, and the women got full membership within the year, but, sad to say, the reasoning was still faulty. The board was criticised not for what the film exposed of the club’s antiquated culture of high-handedness, Masonic solidarity, and institutional sexism. It was berated, but entirely for its lack of judgement in agreeing to let cameras inside the hallowed gates.
None of this did much good to the image of golf - but th
e game never learns, it seems to me. It is always telling people off for infringing rules; it is full of puffed-up little men. You can’t use the front door on Fridays. Denim will be punished by flogging. You see this chalk line across the floor of the bar? Women may not pass beyond that point. I know a woman golfer who once reached the final stage of a competition, but when she turned up at the designated course to play her final round, the club secretary turned her away, on the grounds that it was Sunday. I was once at Augusta National, during the Masters, with The Times’s lovely golf correspondent, John Hopkins, and he invited me to a small party inside the famous colonial clubhouse. Halfway there, he stopped and apologised. He’d just remembered that the room selected for the festivities had a notice on the door saying it was men-only. The thing to do in this situation is to cause a scene by turning up anyway, and daring the Pinkerton security people to remove you by force - but I’m a rule-abiding kind of person, and I hate to ruin something nice, and I appreciated being at Augusta, so I went back to my desk instead and dolefully ate one of those special Augusta sandwiches with the famous cheese-and-pimento filling that looks (and tastes) like vomit. Clubs make rules, I reflected; and men make clubs. One can’t help feeling that God is logically implicated further up the line. What are you going to do? One of my favourite jokes is about an Englishman shipwrecked alone on a desert island and not discovered for 25 years. When found, he reveals he has not been idle: he’s spent his time building three structures. ‘This is my house,’ he says, proudly pointing to the first structure. ‘So what’s that one?’ they ask, pointing to the second. And he says, proudly, ‘That’s the club I go to.’ ‘What’s the third one?’ they ask. ‘Oh,’ he says, as if the subject is painful to him. ‘That’s the club I don’t go to.’
Obedience to the rules is what golf is all about. On the professional side of the game, there have been extraordinary cases down the years of the rules of golf being bureaucratically applied against all logic, common sense, or simple human compassion - but since that’s the price of being such a well-regulated sport, everyone accepts it. But what about that chap (Welshman Philip Parkin) whose small son had placed a miniature putter in his bag, thus causing him to be disqualified from the Italian Open for having too many clubs? Parkin found the toy in his bag after he’d completed his round, confessed at once, and asked the tournament organiser for a ruling. ‘I asked whether it would be classed as a golf club, and he said it has to be at least 18.5 inches long to be classed as such,’ he recently explained. ‘So of course we went off measuring and it was actually 19 inches long, meaning I was disqualified.’ The interesting part of the story is that Parkin then asked what would have happened if the club had been half an inch shorter, and he was told, well, then it would have counted as an illegal club, so he would have been disqualified for that as well. In other words, measuring it made someone in a blazer feel terribly important and authoritarian, but was absolutely pointless, in the circs.
Something similar happened to Ian Woosnam at the Open in 2001 at Royal Lytham. An extra driver in his bag (the fault of his caddie) incurred him a two-stroke penalty, which may have cost him the title. Meanwhile, what about the infamous case of Craig ‘The Walrus’ Stadler who, before kneeling on the ground to take an awkward shot at the Andy Williams Open in 1987, put down a towel to save his trousers and therefore broke the rule about ‘building a stance’? Unaware that breaking this rule carried a two-shot penalty, Stadler was deemed to have signed an incorrect scorecard and was therefore disqualified. In 2003, at the Open, Jesper Parnevik and Mark Roe were disqualified for not exchanging score cards before teeing off. Recently, a chap in Canada got the chop because his caddie stood behind him while he putted. Neither of them knew this was against the rules. What makes me cross is that the religious players get away with claiming that Jesus is with them from tee to green. They seem to forget Henry Longhurst’s admonition that if you call on God to improve the result of a shot while the ball is in motion, you are using an ‘outside agency’ and are therefore subject to appropriate penalties under the rules of the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St Andrews.
Isn’t it time they changed this score card business in professional tournaments, to acknowledge the presence of an official scorer? Professional players fall foul of this silly rule more or less continually. This is partly, I think, because they fill out score cards for each other, as if playing a social round at their local club, but since they scarcely speak to one another (no one ever said, ‘What ya get there, Tiger? Was that an eight or a nine?’), it’s a phoney situation. As I write this, Michelle Wie is still in shock after being disqualified from the State Farm Classic in Springfield, Illinois for forgetting to sign her score card until after she’d left the enclosure of the scorers’ tent. She immediately went back to do it, but that wasn’t good enough, and she was out. ‘She was like a little kid after you tell them there’s no Santa Claus,’ reported the mean-spirited tournament official who had disqualified her. However, still ranking as the worst case of score card pettiness in history is probably that of poor Roberto DeVicenzo, the Argentinian who lost his chance to compete in a play-off for the Masters in 1968 because he signed a score card that incorrectly recorded a par on the 17th when in fact he had birdied. Instead of being disqualified, at least he came second, but the incident didn’t reflect well on anyone involved in the ruling. DeVicenzo became popular with the American public, of course; especially because he is supposed to have exclaimed, in broken English, ‘What a stupid I am!’ But it did nothing for the reputation of the game, or of Augusta National. Moreover, the official Masters winner that year, Bob Goalby, was always somehow thought to have won it unfairly - or, at best, by default. Which, while we are on the subject of unfairness, was quite unfair on him.
There are a couple of basic philosophical contradictions that must strike anyone looking at golf. This issue of fairness is the big one. Golf is, by nature, a game of rules and etiquette; about the allowable and the unallowable - and for a perfectly respectable reason. The rules exist to prevent argument, and are therefore cleverly designed to cover every conceivable situation on the course, such as ‘ball in movable obstruction - not found’ and the subtly different ‘ball in immovable obstruction - not found’. You might like to know that in the former case, here is the ruling:
If it is known or virtually certain that a ball that has not been found is in a movable obstruction, the player may substitute another ball and take relief, without penalty, under this Rule. If he elects to do so, he must remove the obstruction and through the green or in a hazard drop a ball, or on the putting green place a ball, as near as possible to the spot directly under the place where the ball last crossed the outermost limits of the movable obstruction, but not nearer the hole.
Rules like this partly explain the phenomenon of ‘slow play’, by the way. It takes a good ten minutes to work out what’s being got at here. However, as I said, the rules are all designed to make life simpler and fairer in the long run; to make sure no one gets an unfair advantage, which is surely a high ideal for any sport. And what about the handicap system? Golf is highly unusual in attempting to ensure that a player does not gain an advantage over his playing partner even by being better at golf. So my philosophical point is: why isn’t golf a byword for egalitarianism? By rights, it should be. In the world of politics, the nearest equivalent to a brilliant player being hobbled so that he can play on level terms with a bad one would be those terrible old Maoist policies of getting ballerinas and opera singers to clean the lavs. Doesn’t this make it all the more of a tragedy that this strenuously fair game has been ruled for ages (by and large) by intolerant and inflexible jumped-up misogynist bastards?
But I think I have the answer. I think that perhaps golf was, simply, designed for a race of people better than us. It is a very humbling game, as all thoughtful practitioners are happy to admit. Whereas in other sports, your performance is healthily affected by what your opponent does - by serving at you at 140 miles an hour; or p
unching you on the side of the head; or kicking the ball away from you at a crucial moment - in golf you are repeatedly forced to deal with the results of your own actions; you have no one to blame and nowhere to hide; every error is unforced; ultimately, you are called upon to stop and think. Golf is a scrupulous sport. It’s all about strength of character; about inner resources; about honesty; even about goodness, possibly. So it lays us bare. It’s no wonder so many professional golfers turn to God when they weigh themselves in such an exacting balance. It’s no wonder, either, that in the face of such scary absolutes out on the course, man, little man scuttles off to the clubhouse afterwards, combs his moustache, adjusts the cuffs on his blazer and attempts to restore his wounded self-esteem by devising nit-picking rules about whether members can change their shoes in the car park, suspending outspoken members of the greens committee, and callously withholding basic plumbing amenities from the women.
‘Human kind cannot bear very much reality,’ wrote T.S. Eliot in Four Quartets, and I’m sure it will be discovered one day that, when he wrote this, he had just endured a disastrous afternoon at the Burnt Norton Golf Club. What I’m saying is: this game may actually demand more of people than they can give. John Updike’s essay ‘Moral Exercise’ (collected in his book Golf Dreams) perfectly describes how golf makes a person face his true worth.
What other four hours’ activity can chasten a magnate with so rich a variety of disappointments, or unman a lothario with so many rebuffed desires? Golf is a square shooter. In the sound of the hit and the flight of the ball it tells us unflinchingly how we are doing, and we are rarely doing well.
