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Last Tuesday I was moseying around my house in Wales when two things happened to me. The first was interesting and caused me to think. The second hit me hard and made me sit up with a start.
In terms of good weather, May 2020 was one of the best months in living memory in this part of the world. Day after day was clear and sunny and remained so until dusk fell. Wonderful days to be out on a golf course, which we will come to in a minute.
On Tuesday afternoon I was enjoying some summer sun when a friend in the US, talking on a conference call, outlined his concern about the demonstrations and outbreaks of violence following the death of George Floyd in the US. He described himself as being a man in his early-60s and it took him back to the summer of 1968. Speaking quietly and thoughtfully and being all the more powerful for that, he said that what disturbed him was the thought that the US had made little progress in racial matters in the past 50 years. He had tried to explain his feelings to his 26-year-old son and failed completely, he said. He sounded depressed.
That made me think. Later that night, watching the BBC’s Ten O’Clock News programme, which always last 30 minutes, I became aware that the first 15 minutes of that programme were taken up with stories to do with one subject, the protests following the Floyd's death, including an interview with Spike Lee, the filmmaker. For half the programme there was no mention of COVID-19 in the UK, which has hardly been out of the headlines since the lockdown on 23 March, nor Boris Johnson, the prime minister, nor any other domestic politics. In fact, no mention of anything other than the troubles in the US.
Praise to the BBC for casting such a wide eye on world affairs, indeed. I couldn’t remember the last time that the first half of a news programme had been devoted to the happenings in another country on another continent but I was fairly sure the answer was some time ago. If I hadn’t realised how serious the situation in the US was in that afternoon’s phone call, then I had by 10:15 that night.
What has this got to do with golf, you might ask.
Well, I can’t play golf at the moment because of the lockdown that was brought in an attempt to staunch the arrival of COVID-19 in the UK. Or rather I can’t play at my home club in Wales because I live 15 miles away from it and the Welsh Government in Cardiff have deemed that in the context of golf for recreation I can only travel 5 miles. So in the good weather of the past month I have been making a lot of practice swings in the kitchen checking on my reflection in a window and sitting in the sun in the garden, writing and thinking.
Golf matters to me and to you too, as fishing matters to anglers and a sea as calm as a millpond would to a sailor. But life matters more.
One of the things I have reflected on is what a happy time I had in the US when I lived there 50 years ago and how so much of my subsequent life, spent predominantly in the UK, has nevertheless chimed with life in the US. My mother once remarked to me: “You may not be a Yank but you are certainly a Yankophile.”
Fifty years ago I lived in a series of flats on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, lugging my possessions from one to another when the lease ran out or a tenant returned to reclaim occupancy of a room I had been allowed to use in their absence. In travelling around New York seeking work, I blagged my way into an interview with Harold Hayes of Esquire and while he talked in a kindly fashion to this young man from across the Atlantic he dug vigorously into a tub of ice cream and had his feet up on his desk.
It was at this time I discovered a wonderful sports magazine called Sports Illustrated and dreamed of being able to write for it. I could not wait for The New Yorker to come out each week. Remember the Herald Tribune? Lighter, less prosperous and smaller than the The New York Times, it had a core following of readers of which I was one.
As I write now, I have a copy of the April 1968 edition of Esquire by my side. It cost $1 in the US and 7 shillings in Great Britain. (7 shillings was a little less than one-third of a pound in the pre-decimal days when 12 pennies made one shilling and 20 shillings made 1 pound.) The cover is a picture of Muhammad Ali with arrows sticking out of him. “The Passion of Muhammad Ali” was the headline and it was written by Leonard Shecter. Guess what is on the first page you see after the cover? An Acushnet advertisement. “If Titleist grabs any more gold and silver golfers may start calling it The Bandit,” ran the wording.
In 1999 and by now golf correspondent of The Times newspaper, I flew to Houston, Texas, to write about the funeral of Payne Stewart who had died in a plane crash a few days earlier. “They said goodbye to Payne Stewart in a big white church in Orlando, Florida,” I wrote in The Times. “It was a memorial service that mixed music and love, tributes and jokes, stories and emotions. It was quintessentially American, as American as Stewart himself was … ”
Two years after that I was driving to a golf tournament at Bellerive Country Club just outside St. Louis, Missouri. The date is significant: 11th September 2001 as we would write it in the UK, 9/11 as it is known in the US. I was marooned in the country for some time after that and found it as rewarding professionally as it was distressing personally. I had acres of space in my newspaper in which to write. Trying to explain to predominantly British readers what it felt like to be in the US at that time was fulfilling. So were the comments I received from Americans around the world.
My point is this: In September 2001 and for months thereafter golf was scarred by the events of 9/11 just as it is being affected now by the triple threats of a pandemic, an economic recession and racial unrest. I don’t think you can separate sport from life any more than you can separate the head of a golf club from its grip. There are those who say that they play golf to escape from the rigours of life, that the game is a refuge. To those I say: I bet that if you play now, today, tomorrow or this coming weekend and even if you swell with pride at a beefy drive, the sinking of a curling putt, or a run of birdies, or defeating your opponent on the 18th green, during your round you will still talk a little about the Black Lives Matter movement or furloughing or the pandemic.
Golf matters to me and to you too, as fishing matters to anglers and a sea as calm as a millpond would to a sailor. But life matters more. The vicissitudes incurred on a golf course have a happy way of putting life’s triumphs and failures into perspective. But the obverse is true, too. Real life occasionally shoves golf into the margins. It certainly is doing so now. We are golfers but first and foremost we are citizens of a troubled world.
E-Mail John