Hacks and hackers

One of the worst things that has happened to golf is the boom – not the supersonic reverberation of a full-blooded Tiger Woods drive but the fact that the game has become so damned popular.

And I’m not talking about the fact that every bit of real estate from Cape Point to the Kruger Park is being turned into a golf estate or that golf is the fastest growing sport among women; hell, I’ve always loved to play a round with a girl.

I’m not even peed off because it has become impossible to play on one’s own (as opposed to with one’s self!), or that my scruffy driving range where, as Hogan advocated, I could try to get better by “digging it out of the dirt,” has given way to yet another hideous office park.

What really gets to me is that golf has attracted the attention of advertising schmoozers (or Ponytails as John Robbie refers to them) and all kinds of marketers who want to catch a ride on the fairway to riches.

The other day, for instance, a local newspaper catering for the business community carried an ad advertising a new golfing supplement. Their market research had clearly showed that more and more heavy hitters, including a fair sprinkling of Black Diamonds, were playing golf so the thing to do was “plug into this golfing thing.”

Their ad showed a modern bag filled with a set of clubs – including wooden ones. Now I ask you – in this day and age can you possibly have faith in the veracity of a golfing publication when the editors don’t know that no-one plays with wooden clubs any more – other than perhaps themselves!

Golf has become the favourite vehicle for fashion shoots. Girls with impossibly short skirts, the type which would only be appropriate if the flagpole were transplanted to a strip joint, and blokes in attire that is so laughable that no single item would ever be sold to a serious golfer.

Recently I spotted a model, club in one hand thrust out in front of him as though he were driving cattle, gloved hand shading his eyes (a favourite pose) with a “cotton golf tee” (his shirt!) the only piece of clothing that would be permissible inside a clubhouse.

His trousers were a calf length pair of bleached denim baggies with plenty of pockets and ribbon ties fluttering from the hem, his gaudy socks came up to just below his pants, leaving about two centimeters of shin exposed and on his feet he had on a pair of wooden clog sandals!

And to think that some company (in this case a famous brand which originated in the Scottish Borders) paid for this garbage.

Then there’s some of the poses. Lining up a putt that is 10 centimeters from the hole, putting with the pin in, shouldering-arms with a club and, inevitably glove on the right hand because the trannie had been reversed.

Newspapers too have been seduced by golf becoming cool – but for some reason they insist on assigning features to reporters obsessed with their own lack of skill.

Here’s a typical example. “Every player has a favourite club that they can use better than any other. Mine is an extendable pole with a cup on the end, used for lifting balls out of the water.” What drivel? Who cares? How could someone like this possibly understand the nuances of a golf course?

The other day I spotted a feature of golf in Malaysia. The reporter on this junket described the vista off the first tee and then proceeded to inform his readers that his greatest fear was that he might not be able to carry the flower bed in front of the tee with his opening shot! That’s as far as I read. Golf in Malaysia might be wonderful but all I had visions of was badly dressed golfers, hackers “scroffling” in bushes and 6½-hour rounds.

All this, of course, comes accompanied by other modern intrusions. Cellphones, ringing or being talked on, demons on carts who think the aim of being motorized is to rush up to the four-ball in front or that to a golfer playing a shot a buggy is somehow silent and invisible - and don’t get me started on a lack of good manners; even though golf is the only sport that defines etiquette in its rule book many of golf's "newbies" have little or no idea about the concept of courtesy.

I love nothing better than a game of golf, with good friends at a favourite place – but I must say I much preferred it when it was a royal and ancient game.