BAN GOLF

“Golf is a good walk spoiled,” a famous man once said, speaking to the author of A Book of Quotes. Would it not, in our modern world, be more accurate to say, pithily, “Fuck golf—golfing ass motherfuckers?”

Yes it would. Golf has spoiled much more than walks. The sort of people who enjoy golf do not walk. They ride in ridiculous carts, or are carried in litters by servants. In a more just world they would run, from angry mobs of non-golfers, seeking to reclaim public lands that were taken and clear-cut into sandy wastelands and painstakingly replanted with exotic astroturf-like non-native grass studded with carefully planned hills and curves and mowed and watered and cared for far better than the people tasked with caring for it, all so that a Regional Manager could put on a pastel purple shirt with sleeve cuffs and smoke a cigar away from the office while squinting in the sun from beneath a branded visor.

Golf is against humanity. So humanity must be against golf.

The worst people like golf, the worst pastime. There is a certain stereotype of golfers: lazy, wealthy, loud men in ugly clothing—Republicans. This stereotype is accurate. At this statement, I can already hear the Golf Propaganda Community rushing into action. “Not all golfers are like that,” they will say. Sure. Though most serial killers are men, Aileen Wuornos managed to murder seven people in a single year. Something to be celebrated? Golfers believe so.

Like croquet and yachting, golf has the distinction of being an unathletic hobby that insists on being referred to as a sport. This is due to the fact that rich people enjoy thinking of themselves as athletes yet lack the fundamental inner drive that motivates athleticism, due to the ravages of a life of leisure. Golf is not a sport. Sports require that you break a sweat because of something other than the sun beating down on you as you drink bourbon in the seat of a motorized cart. “It’s difficult!” cry the rankled golfers. Chess is difficult. Public speaking is difficult. Retirement planning is difficult. None of those things are sports.

This desire to both bathe in an atmosphere of servile luxury and at the same time be praised as a great athlete is emblematic of the spiritual rot that golf induces in those who indulge in it. It is made for those who care nothing for the rest of humanity. In order to really enjoy golf, you must be able to completely ignore the fact that your fellow golfers are all of the worst elements of society; that golf courses represent the most unnatural and warped ideas of man’s dominion over nature, in which the natural environment must be totally eradicated and rebuilt in a technicolor, Thomas Kinkade-esque image; and that golf clubs are preposterous fortified outposts of social and financial privilege completely devoid of moral worth, bastions of historic racism and sexism and anti-Semitism that expect a medal if they have reformed themselves to mere raging classism. You must, in short, have no soul. A soul is a fatal detriment to the enjoyment of golf. Quite a few people are more than happy to forgo the burden of a soul in order to bask in the ability to wear Titleist clothing without shame. Golf courses should be planted with thorn bushes and populated with wolves to facilitate rewilding and dissuade regolfing.

To ban golf is the humane choice. The alternative is to allow these people to continue on in undisturbed bliss until the inevitable day arrives when hordes descend on them, emerging from the wooded sides of the fairway, wielding crude clubs, dressed inappropriately for the clubhouse, to burn and pillage and reclaim the golf courses for the earth, fertilizing them with the ashes of the golfers. I do not welcome this development—I would much prefer to see golfers sent off to reeducation camps to learn skills that might be put to use in the community, like manure processing—but I predict it with the same confidence as I predict that Florida will get more hurricanes and California more earthquakes. It will happen. You cannot hope to “win” at golf. You can only hope to escape in time.