The Tribune

AS the world strives for equality, it sometimes strikes me that the greatest chasm in democratisation of opportunity lies in the strangest place of all: the games we play.

Almost anyone can pick up a basketball and shoot hoops. Even in the poorest neighbourhood, there is something that passes for a net, a plastic milk crate, or a bottomless 5-gallon paint pail. Like basketball, track is anyone’s game. All it takes is a pair of tennis, though serious runners insist on something that looks like tennis but that are built for pounding a pavement and are called “running shoes.” (History is filled with stories of track greats who began their running career in nothing more than the feet they were born with.)

There are lots of sports, in fact, that take little more than desire to participate in to make them playable.

Soccer is available in most schools. American football only requires one leather ball to be shared among a team of 11. Pro football teams do have more than one, to be fair, but still, at street level, all it takes is an elliptical ball, an open field, and a few kids with a decent arm or powerful kick. Swimming requires even less gear, especially for us in The Bahamas. Anyone with something that can pass for a bathing suit and who is willing to jump into the Lucayan Sea can splash for the sheer joy of it or swim like Michael Phelps is watching. There’s plenty of water to go around--100,000 square miles of it--room for all with water to spare.

Golf a whole different ball game

But golf – well, golf . . .  that’s a whole different ball game. Golf is just different – less accessible, more out of reach. It doesn’t lend itself to homemade remedies like milk crates converted into hoops nets. You could buy a whole lot of football, baseball, or soccer balls for the cost of a single golf club. And greens fees, the price you pay for a few hours on the course, can run into hundreds of dollars at exclusive golf clubs or resorts, though thanks to Craig Flowers and the Bahamas Golf Federation there are far more reasonable options in Nassau.

Golf courses even carry designer names, the Greg Norman or Arnold Palmer or Tiger Woods course. You don’t see the Shaq-designed basketball or the Tom Brady football, though if you did, they’d probably sell a lot more of them over the holidays. 

Despite the cost, the time it consumes for a single round, the equipment it takes, and the learning curve it demands, golf is one of the fastest growing sports, particularly among a younger population. It’s estimated that as many as 130 million people play at least one round of golf a year.

That’s a lot of people.

The popularity spiked post-Covid when everyone who had been locked inside during the pandemic suddenly wanted to burst free and breathe fresh air for as long a period as possible, while socialising and achieving what could be justified as a goal.

And golf takes time, another thing that makes it feel different from other sports. A lot of time.

Pre-Covid, golf was suffering a steep decline. Its drop-out rate rivalled first year Trigonometry. Some 1200 courses closed, nearly seven million men and women who once played gave up lugging the bag out of the closet or themselves out of the house to get to the course early on a weekend morning when they could just sleep in instead.

UNTIL the pandemic and the aftermath of the desire for fresh air.

More off the course than on

But there was more. The game changed. Not everyone playing golf today plays on a golf course, staring at the dimpled ball, sighting the next hole, calculating distance, studying angles and wind, pondering which club to use, setting up the swing. It’s startling to realise but more men and women, especially the younger variety, play non-traditional golf on standalone ranges, at golf entertainment venues, or places like TopGolf, than those playing on a 9- or 18-hole course with greens and fairways.

The very fact that we say men and women shows how much the sport has changed. There was a time that folks made light of the acronym, GOLF, saying it stood for “Gentlemen Only Ladies Forbidden.” Today, one out of every four golfers is female. What Venus and Serena Williams and players like Billie Jean King before them did for tennis, women like Babe Zaharias and Michele Wie did for golf.

The real question here is why, with all the critical issues facing us, with all the harshly spoken and unspoken matters impacting The Bahamas, why am I writing about golf? For crying out loud, isn’t there something more important on your mind?

Here’s why: I wanted to understand something more about a subject I knew nothing about, but was weirdly fascinated by: how people carve out time, especially those who do it weekly, to do something they love instead of something required. And golf takes a lot of that me-time.

I wanted to understand how it ranks in the world of leisure, what it takes, how popular it is, its history. I wanted to learn what it is that makes it so special that networks like NBC (which has the good sense to bring us Willie Geist on Sunday morning) can spend the rest of day with its cameras focused on the greens and fairways of a golf course most of us will never see, watching a player we do not identify with. What’s more, most viewers follow a ball that our eyes can hardly make out until it lands somewhere and we are told how it got there and what that means for all the other players. We don’t see those players, but their names are posted, apparently, on something called “the leaderboard.”

You could argue that tens of millions watch NFL but don’t play football so what’s the difference with golf? People will watch. Folks who have never played, never held a club in their hand nor twisted their torso and lifted their eyes to the heavens, hoping the ball they just hit will land where it is supposed to, near a hole with a number next to it. They’ll watch.

Elite sport or sport for the elite?

Since people do watch golf (and I have, on rare occasion, for roughly three minutes, the length of time it takes to decide what I want to change the TV to), I figured I better learn something about this game that remains one of the last bastions of borderline-snobbish social symbols. (I would have said elite sports but it’s not technically. It’s more like a sport for the elite. Formula 1 racing is an elite sport.)

First, golf is one of the oldest sports in the world. Depending upon the source of information you rely on, mine often being the first one I come to, some form of what we call golf dates back to Medieval days. Dutch and Scots both take credit. Roughly translated, that’s more than 1500 years ago, so it has had a lot of time to catch on. I was fascinated to see how it has evolved and its roller-coaster ride in the last decade, from courses closing to the number of new courses being built, to the explosion of non-traditional golf.

Compare the length of time golf has been around to that of sports like baseball and football that can only trace their history back 200 years or less. Golf’s been played since the fall of the Roman Empire, yet for most of us, it feels like someone else’s sport. We don’t relate. Something about being surrounded by all that manicured lawn when we can barely make a patch in our yard behave sets it apart.

Then there’s the cost. Greens fees for a few hours of swinging followed by chastising yourself for not doing better can equal all the money you budgeted for Christmas presents before you blew the budget.

But all credit goes to Craig Flowers for spending a decade creating a Par 3 course for Bahamians at the sports complex where I understand you can play a round for about $35. There was a Bahamas Golf Federation course that at one time was even less expensive, which reminds me that LeRoy Bowe, the first Bahamian pro golfer and the founder of the BGF, still needs to be immortalized on the Wall of Fame at LPIA. But I digress. (Forgive me but Sports Minister, can we please get that done?)

Back on topic

Perplexed about my inexplicable fascination with a sport I have never played, comes with built-in frustration for those who do. Not to mention the grave concern about what the fertiliser run-off does to the environment.

So I asked a friend who plays why he does. What’s special about this ancient sport that costs a fortune, drives those who play to get mad at themselves, and endangers the environment while looking like a setting from a fairy tale?

Here’s what he said, “It’s about the fresh air and social interaction, the exercise, especially if you are able to walk the course (do people still do that?).” It’s also the challenge, he said. “It should be simple, hitting a stationary ball. But the challenge is hitting it consistently straight.” The unfortunate part -- some folks cheat by not updating their handicap. But most importantly, he added, it’s something that no matter how well you play, you can always do better. He’s been playing for 40 years and every time he hits, chips, pitches around the green, or putts, he tries to do it better than the last time.

And maybe that’s the fascination with this almost ancient sport. No matter how many times you try your hand at it, you always come away from it feeling you could have done better.

A chef knows when she has baked the perfect wedding cake. A runner knows when she has broken a world record. A golfer only has an ideal score in sight, perfection will always be out of reach. It’s a sport with a long shelf life, one that lasts as long as the legs will carry you and a challenge that never ends.

Kind of like writing. 

No matter how hard you try, you always leave it feeling like you could have, should have done better.