By: Max Marcovitch
The author in the midst of his contradiction.
I think I can guess your mental picture of golf. You see some sticks and a little white ball, a bunch of painfully inelegant old white men, wailing away on greenspace that should be used more responsibly, smoking cigars, drinking beers. At best, you are ambivalent to this lifestyle. You may well resent it.
You are not wrong. And neither am I when I see a gorgeous, constant battle—a game that repeatedly pits you against yourself and begs you to relent.
Consider all that goes into hitting a single shot. First, you sift through mental machinations: club choice, wind direction, fairway slope, maybe even humidity. You see where the ball is aligned in your stance and where the hole is placed on the green. To manifest the picture in your head, you must pair the mental with the physical, a complete test of self-control. It is both science and art, the fragility of a Jenga game and the diligence of a standardized test.
But golf as a game—a genius game—so often must answer to its industrial complex, the various layers of exclusion and bigotry and bullshit that are baked into its past and present. Each time I step onto a golf course, I wonder: How much should I care?
While demographic data is imprecise, some estimates indicate less than 5 percent of golfers are Black, and less than 30 percent are women. Pro golf’s main professional circuit (the PGA Tour) only eliminated its “caucasian-only” requirement in 1961, more than a decade after the other major American professional sports. And less than 1 percent of male professional golfers are Black.
This is deeply unsurprising in the context of golf’s history. In 1990, prior to the PGA Championship at Shoal Creek Golf Club in Alabama, the club owner came under fire for defending their exclusion of African Americans. “The country club is our home and we pick and choose who we want,” he said.” I think we've said that we don't discriminate in every other area except the blacks.”
Under pressure, the club eventually relented, admitting a single Black member. The PGA Championship forged on. Reverend Abraham Woods, a civil rights leader, predicted the controversy would be “the death knell of exclusionary clubs throughout the nation.”
He was spectacularly optimistic.
Private clubs still reign supreme. One out of every four golf courses in the United States is private, meaning you must be a club member to play; and membership fees at the most elite clubs run into the six figures. Augusta National, America’s most prominent golf course, only admitted its first woman, Condolezza Rice, in 2012, while the birthplace of golf, The Old Course in St. Andrews, Scotland, only began allowing women in 2014.
These demographics are not coincidental. Success in golf requires substantial financial comfort, and access is fraught. Golf clubs are remarkably effective in satisfying prima facie equality, while still maintaining the demographic and socioeconomic status quo. For example, most clubs require “recommendations” from members within the club, and admittance to clubs means satisfying entirely subjective measures—like whether you’re a “good fit.” Even that does a disservice to how club culture feels, which can only be described broadly as a vessel of teleportation back to 1950.
Meanwhile, golf courses are environmental disasters—havens for pesticides and ungodly amounts of water. Creating golf courses requires uprooting trees and destroying natural ecosystems and biodiversity. Courses can sit on up to 200 acres of land, and they service, on average, just 300 people per day. Even for an avid golfer, it’s hard to argue that juice is worth the squeeze.
And yet I do, in fact, continue to play golf. Often. Is that an affront to my values? Does my infatuation with golf-the-game help prop up the golf-industrial-complex?
Perhaps my predicament sounds simple to you, the reader, who may loathe golf and its participants. Through that view, the answer would be easy: Quit.
But we all deal with these contradictions of identity. It can be a comfortable impulse—an intellectually lazy shortcut—to draw caricatures of each other, to putting people in a box, admitting or rejecting them to a particular in-group based on a narrow lens. Did you order from Amazon recently? You’re killing the neighborhood shop. Did you travel by plane over the summer? You’re burning our planet. Do you live in a gentrified neighborhood? You pushed out poorer families.
We are all just a complicated mix of the values that we ascribe to ourselves and the things that we do. In my life, golf is a microcosm of that tension—a game that I love, surrounded by an environment I loathe.
I’m willing to bet you have one, too.
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