The game's often saddled with a sub-par image in movies and novels: buffoon-like, bourgeois, boring . . . and only sometimes beneficial.
by Lorne Rubenstein

GOLF HAS NOT exactly had the best of it when it comes to how the sport has been portrayed in movies and novels. But maybe things will change with the soon-to-be-released movie Tin Cup. At least this film, which stars Kevin Costner as Everyman pro Roy (Tin Cup) McAvoy, shows that golf is more than a bourgeois sport for the elite, as it has often been depicted. Why, McAvoy, who runs a driving range in west Texas, even gets to the U.S. Open, where he comes up against his rival in golf and romance, played by Don Johnson. Director Ron Shelton hopes filmgoers leave with a happy feeling that golf isn't so goofy after all.

Shelton, mind you, is aware that many non-golfers "hate the game." Still, he said while shooting Tin Cup last December, "There's something special and maddening about it. I wanted to tap into that through a guy who is wildly gifted and wildly self-destructive, showing how and if he comes to terms with his demons and grows up." This sounds more promising than such movies as Follow the Sun, in which Glenn Ford played Ben Hogan after his auto accident in 1949 that nearly killed him. Shelton calls that movie "kitsch at best." And Shelton feels that the immensely popular Caddyshack "isn't really a golf movie." Maybe not, for Caddyshack takes the usual theme of golf being a game for buffoons who wear polyester slacks decorated with flagsticks and turns every character into an idiot. That might be movie-making, but is it golf?

Yet wherever golf is found in movies, it seems it's there to buttress the notion that the game is, as Winston Churchill said, "like chasing a quinine pill around a cow pasture." Playwright George Bernard Shaw had a similar view of the royal and ancient game. He wrote that golf "is a typical capitalist lunacy of upper-class Edwardian England." Hmmm.

And so we find the following scenes in movies, and this by no means exhausts the field. In Beaches, a character who has left a stifling life in San

Francisco tells a friend that "the world is falling apart while my father plays golf." In Leaving Las Vegas, Nicholas Cage plays an alcoholic writer bent on self-destruction. He succeeds and along the way runs into the landlord and landlady of an apartment complex in which dwells his sultry girlfriend. Cage accompanies his girlfriend to her apartment and confronts the managers inside the gate to the complex. It is immediately obvious that the landlady is the boss, because her husband

is a slug. We know this because he is seen brandishing a golf club, testing his swing. Nothing else matters to him.

The reference is blatant and requires no words. The man is a bourgeois dummy, a fact rendered by his association with golf on the screen. That he plays golf and allows his interest to distract him from his landlordly ways is meant to define the dopey fellow as dissolute, a slovenly waste of a human being.

The inference that golf and self-indulgence go together is also seen in political life. When George Bush was president it was demonstrated in a television show called Acts of War that he was a blueblood by showing images of him playing golf. Esquire magazine, in its February 1993 issue, tried to diss President Clinton by devoting an entire feature article to his enjoyment of golf. "Our new President's nothing if not politic," one reference had it, "so his golf fixation must have great semiotic significance. Question one: Discuss Clintonomics with reference to the follow-through on the sand wedge at right," pointing to a photo of Clinton in a bunker.

North of the U.S. border the situation is similar. Mike Harris is the Premier of Ontario and a former golf pro. One writer described him in a typical way: "A good old boy; that, at least, he certainly is. Golf pro, ski instructor, university dropout, beer drinker, a lot of laughs, a fun guy, a guy's guy." Not exactly a blueblood, but not exactly fit for high office, or so the writer implies. This only goes to show that golf can be used in a variety of ways to pin somebody, and most of them are not all that attractive.

Consider the way novelists often portray golf. Englishman Louis de Bernieres, author of the highly acclaimed novel Captain Corelli's Mandolin, writes of a character who has "been hacking his way round a golf course, no doubt. Damn stupid game, in my opinion. I could understand it if one was trying to hit rabbits or intercept the odd partridge. You can't eat a hole-in-one, can you? You can't draw the entrails of a good putt."

This reflection of golf as a rather absurd sport occurs so frequently that it may well represent what psychoanalyst Carl Jung called an "archetype," an image so popular it becomes a central truth, if an invented one. It is also an image of the sport with which de Bernieres himself has struggled. He indicated as much in a column he wrote in October 1993 for The Observer, a national British newspaper. His subject was that of male menopause, which he defined as having suddenly become "the fashionable explanation for middle-aged men buying sports cars and absconding with their secretaries." He pointed humorously to his own mid-life "crisis" and added that had he understood that sports are important as a means of self-expression, and as pure play, then he "wouldn't have given up golf for 20 years just because I thought it was bourgeois."

Bourgeois and apparently only for the aging and infirm. American Mark Strand captures this notion in a poem called The Mysterious Maps. He writes, ominously, "Here comes old age, dragging a tale of soft/Inconvenience, of golfing in Florida/Of gumming bad food." This is not exactly the sort of passage that would encourage people contemplating a happy retirement with their clubs to the sunny south. Yet its prevalence in the culture of golf cannot be denied: Golf, one would think, is played exclusively by fat old men.

It becomes almost laughable how often this theme recurs in popular and even not-so-popular culture. In 1933, French novelist Jean Giraudoux made the following observation in The Enchanted: "A golf course is the epitome of all that is transitory in the universe, a space not to dwell in, but to get over as quickly as possible." How's that for an advertisement for the royal and ancient game?

The acerbic boxing writer and journalist A. J. Leibling also took a mean-spirited approach to golf. He indicated in his book The Wayward Press that golf was a decadent enterprise, something that newspaper publishers play when they become rich. He did soften his position somewhat after golfing ambassador and President Dwight D. Eisenhower helped popularize the game. "There has been a revival (in golf) since the first Eisenhower inaugural," Leibling wrote. "I attribute it to the invention of the electric go-cart, in which, I am informed, the golfers now circulate, obviating ambulation. It sounds like the most fun since the goat-wagon." Now that's golf writing.

An earlier writer, Sarah Norton Cleghorn, notes in her poem Quatrain, in 1915, that "The golf links lie so near the mill/That almost every day/The laboring children can look out/And watch the men at play." Golf here represents indolence, and it is not difficult to detect the note of repulsion that the writer feels as men play while children work. And, of course, there is more than a grain of truth in this observation, because child labor was rampant in the early days of this century.

Here we must turn serious, then, because there have always been elements of golf that do suggest it is an elitist sport, for one, and a game for the lazy, for another. Surely the themes that are so frequent in the arts have more than a grain of truth in them. Surely they must be examined when obviously intelligent people make their observations. Muriel Spark sets a scene in The Executor, where a mother complains that her son is spending too many late nights out. Asked where he goes, she answers, "Oh, he always goes for a round of golf after dinner. He's always ready for a round of golf, no matter what else there is to do. Public golf is the curse of Scotland."

These observations all ring true to the person who has seen people become obsessed with golf. And yet, does golf have no redeeming values? Thankfully, the answer is yes, even in the arts. It may be hard to find expressions of the feeling that golf is a healthy recreation, a refresher course in the outdoors, a way to have both companionship and solitude as golfers make their way down the course. But they exist in sufficient number to challenge the idea that the game is a bourgeois absurdity.

One looks to former New Yorker writer Brendan Gill, in a memoir about his father, writing that his father was "a brilliant surgeon and physician . . . . He hunted, fished, hiked, chopped wood, planted trees, and painted houses, barns, sheds and every other surface a brush could reach. But his favorite outdoor activity was golf. The game amounted to a passion with him."

This passion must allow a golfer to remove himself from ordinary concerns on the course, which, when it does not mean abdication of responsibility, cannot be a bad thing. Seen in this context, we can understand what actor James Mason said to Judy Garland in A Star is Born. Mason plays Norman Main, a star actor on his way down, and is speaking to Esther Blodgett, who would become more successful when she changes her name to Vicki Lester. He says, "If I'm happy or if I'm miserable, I putt golf balls around the living room." Putting balls around the living room becomes a form of meditation, an excercise in relaxation.

Turned around, then, golf becomes a benign enterprise that offers simple pleasures. John Updike, a golf lover nonpareil, addresses this theme often. In his hands golf as a game played by older people becomes a positive attribute. He writes in his poem Upon Winning One's Flight in the Senior Four-Ball of the lessening of the competitive urge, and yet one feels a sense of reconciliation with aging via golf. The older golfer may not now experience "the bravely slashed wedge that lifted the plugged ball/up in a sea-spray of sand to bobble blindly toward the hole," but still he can feel pleasure "boiled down to a trinket of silver, a tame patter/of applause in the tent, a pleasantry, a loss." Even a loss can be accepted; Updike leaves the reader with the feeling that the playing of the game counts, not its material rewards.

How odd, to be sure, that there is such divergence in the culture about what golf means. Yet even the artists themselves symbolize this ambivalence. The comic political writer P. J. O'Rourke was on a television show recently and pointed out that he would never play golf as a young man. But now he loves the game, if only, as he says, because it is a "useless" game and he is looking for meaningless enterprises in a world full of all too significant and serious affairs. Golf is a healthy diversion, again.

Even Louis de Bernieres comes to appreciate golf. The same character who called golf "a damn stupid game" speaks of it in the very next paragraph as a "wonderful game, so fascinating, such a challenge, as much intellectual as physical, I understand."

The beauty of the arts is that they represent all points of view. Why should golf be different? A golf course consists of about 150 acres, room enough for all sorts of ideas to be played out. "All the world's a stage," Shakespeare wrote, and sometimes it appears that all the golf course is a stage, a palette upon which artists can portray their feelings about the game, and, of course, life. Even Roy (Tin Cup) McAvoy learns a few lessons about life on the golf course. And that can't be all bad.