Golf

It’s a little different from most other sports. There is no standard size of field to play on. There are no uniforms but there are some strange and colourful clothes. It’s for everyone, men, women and children and it’s not too fast or tiring, so you can play at almost any age. But it seems to be most popular with older men. We’re talking about golf, of course; a very international sport with a lot of players and a lot of fans who just watch it on TV.

You can find it all over the world these days but the game started in Scotland in the 1500s. It may come from one of many similar games that were played in Iran, China or Holland but nobody is sure. The oldest golf courses are in Scotland and many of them are ‘links’ courses. That is, they are by the sea just next to the beach. This is why golf courses so often include ‘sand’. They are copies of the natural sandy parts that you find near a beach. Areas with very short grass, called ‘greens’, happen naturally where there are rabbits to eat the grass. The holes that golf players need to get the ball into (that’s the aim of the game!) are like rabbit holes. So a golf course is a copy of typical Scottish countryside.

For the first three hundred years, golf stayed in Scotland but in the 1800s, in Queen Victoria’s time, everything Scottish became popular – Victoria loved Scotland and the Scottish – and rich Englishmen started playing golf. They soon built courses in England. Then they took the game all over the British Empire. In some places, the heat and land made it difficult to have a golf course but they still built them.

Golf courses usually have nine or eighteen holes and this means as many ‘greens’; and that means a lot of land. If a golf course is anywhere near a city, the land is expensive and so it costs a lot to join the club and play. This is why most people who are part of a club with an 18-hole course are middle- or upper-class. Both men and women play and enjoy the social life at the club but the actual playing seems to interest the men more. Certainly, at competition level, almost all the players are men.

Some of the competitions give prizes of hundreds of thousands of dollars. And this is not the only money in golf: the courses cost tens of millions of dollars to build and then become businesses worth hundreds of millions. The golf clubs are quite expensive and you need several to play. And then there are the clothes ....what can we say? Golf clothes are expensive but in very poor taste. It seems to be the opportunity for men who spend the rest of their time in grey suits to wear something really silly.

Behind all this, the club is a very important meeting point for business and politics. Many deals are made over a round of golf. It’s a relaxing atmosphere and nobody can hear the conversation. However, it keeps a lot of the business and politics in the hands of rich, white men.

Some people say that is changing now, just look at the famous black American player, Tiger Woods. And he has inspired a lot of non-white young people to take up the sport.

What we know is that, whatever race, sex or religion, when people start to play golf, it becomes an addiction.