This is the Golf Punk Blog.
talking nonsense to coke-addled pop stars. For a whole year I hung around in LA talking alternately toHollywood’s A list and South Central’s C list. I have done a lot of shit.
 I have even on occasion covered the odd sporting event. I interviewed Juventus and Roma, and spent a whole day with the England team. I went skiing in Scotland and had the guts to cover the Shinty FA Cup Final. It was shinty that brought home to me just how awful I was at sport.
Shinty is like a cross between rugby, football and head-high hockey played on a pitch as cold and hard as cement by men who smell like they’ve been napalmed in Glenfiddich. As I studied this terrible game a huge Presbyterian priest with a heart-attack pink neck and a Bible in his right hand lent over to me and said in booming Paisleyite tones, “It’s nay game fae weaklings or degenerates.”
Recognising myself to be both I decided that in future I would avoid covering any sporting event or playing any sport. No true red-blooded sportsman wants to play against a weakling or be interviewed by a degenerate. That was five years ago and I haven’t kicked a ball, picked up a bat, or spoken to a player of anything since. In fact, I haven’t taken any exercise at all in the last five years. So the editor’s call was a shock. The shock got worse when I realised that though he found the idea of me playing golf hilarious he was deadly serious about the story.
Then something happened. I read an ancient interview I did with ’90s electro group, Yello. Their front man, the latter day Swiss modernist, Dieter Meier had been a keen golfer. Back in the mid-’90s when his records topped the charts worldwide, he had spent as much time talking about the Zen-like qualities of golf as he had about “sonic architecture”. It wasn’t too long before, thanks to Google, I discovered that the granddaddy of punk rock, Iggy Pop, also golfed. He too found that 18 holes provided the perfect karmic cure after tearing himself to bits on stage and getting into fights with David Bowie. Even pantomime rocker and proto-Satanist Alice Cooper had discovered that golf worked where Narcotics Anonymous had failed. Of course, avant-garde jazz saxophonist Albert Ayler had also been a keen golfer and he had been found floating in New York's East River in circumstances the police would later describe as “at best mysterious”. But ignoring that last example, golf seemed, on balance, to be good for the soul.
Now the only problem was getting over the numerous prejudices I harboured against the game. These are worth listing in order for you, the reader, to understand just how difficult it was to get me anywhere near a golf course.
 Firstly there is the rather epic matter of the countryside. As someone a who is determinedly metropolitan, the notion of endless green fields, rolling hills and bucolic peasants toiling happily in the midday sun strikes me as both mendacious and creepy. One only has to take a brief (televisual) look at the supporters of the preposterous Countryside Alliance to realise that this green and pleasant land is at its most viciously unpleasant when it is at its greenest.
All the worst ideas in the world have come from the countryside. Nazism, swine fever, BSE and morris dancing all hailed from the world’s boondocks and hamlets. The people who live in the countryside are divided into two sorts. There are the arrivistes who leave the city saying they want peace and quiet; a deeply sinister way of expressing their deep-seated misanthropy. And there are farmers. Farmers have been there so long most now regard a family reunion as a way of meeting girls. Furthermore it’s difficult to think of a single one of them who has done a stroke of work since 1945. And yet amazingly they expect to be rewarded for their Homeric lethargy.
Once upon a time farmers grew stuff. Now thanks to EU food mountains, trade barriers and money-hemorrhaging subsidies they are paid not to grow stuff. Any farmer with any ambition and foresight now devotes thousands of acres to not growing stuff and hours a day to doing sweet FA. Nice work if you can get it. And yet they never cease to bleat.
You may well ask what any of this has to do with golf. Well, a lot as it happens. Golf is often played in the countryside and when it’s not it certainly looks like it is. Even the most metropolitan of courses shares many of the countryside’s most disagreeable characteristics. Grass to begin with.
A golf course is simply a well-manicured version of the countryside. But even at their most impeccable they have man-made hazards that are often more hazardous than those nature can manage. Take those ubiquitous sandpits designed to entrap and embitter. Or the hideously long grass placed at strategic intervals and looking for all the world like some dangerous snake sanctuary. And then there are the lakes. Nature has been reasonably careful with lakes. It has given large continents like the Americas and Asia a fair amount of them. While smaller continents such as Europe and Australia get fewer. Golf courses on the other hand seem to have loads of them. Is there no upper limit on how many they are supposed to contain? Every time I catch a Golf Open on the telly there is invariably some frightfully harrowing footage of a man staring across a lake bearing an expression of utter despair.
 The fact that all these hazards should have been put there to deliberately confound and wound the ego of a man in black and white patent leather shoes strikes me as horribly cruel. The fact that he is wearing black and white patent leather shoes while attempting to negotiate a landscape that would normally be the subject of a documentary titled, The Angry Planet, is positively sadistic. Unless of course that man happens to be a farmer. In which case I think, “Now you know what it’s like walking across your dismal fallow fields.” So that is the countryside dealt with.
My second prejudice is less well founded but no less dearly held. It is the institution of the golf club itself. Admittedly what I know about golf clubs has been largely gleaned from dimly remembered episodes of rubbish comedy Terry And June. Oh, and not to mention the fact that Tiger Woods once said that though he had been allowed to play a certain course he would not, as a black man, be allowed to join that self same club. And this was in Atlanta, a city that boasts it’s too busy for racism. Even close friends of mine who love the game admit that the atmosphere at the 19th hole can often resemble the copper canteen culture that was named and shamed in the MacPherson Inquiry.
Private Eye's “Dear Bill” letters revealed golf clubs to be full of men like Dennis Thatcher; or rather men with all the prejudices of Dennis Thatcher and none of the charm. All of which makes golf and Iggy Pop none too easy a circle to square.
Then of course there is the almost classically arcane language golfers use when they get together. While I can totally go along with words like “ace”, “approach” and “flyer”, all of which sound reasonably cool and hip and modern, I am absolutely baffled by most of the bullshit. “Coring”, for instance, sounds like something muscle-bound men in rubber do to other muscle bound men in rubber at clubs with names like The Cottage and Revenge.
“Bogey” is simply infantile. A “punch-out” conjures none of golf’s much vaunted healing karmic qualities, in fact, quite the reverse. Ditto “kill”. “Substance” at best reminds me of New Order and at worst sounds like a polytechnic seminar on ethics. “Sweet swing” makes me think of wife swapping parties. “Dogleg”? Well, need I really go into detail? “Supination” reminds me of something a particularly dedicated and alarmingly medieval branch of the Jesuits might get up to at Easter.
A “snap hook” looks like an item on the menu at Pescatore in London’s Charlotte Street. “Duck hook” has me thinking of the restaurant across the road from Pescatore. And a “foursome” puts us right back in The Cottage and Club Revenge. Even the term that actually makes golf the closest sport has to working socialism, “handicap”, makes all players feel a little like cripples.
Finally we come to the clothes. Now while I am clued up enough to know that golfers no longer look like Florida white trash vacationing in Vegas, I am equally hip to all that Tuck-Your-Shirt-In cobblers that appears in large menacing letters at the beginning of the first hole. Here, for instance, are a few supernaturally weird rules from Wentworth. We’ll take them three at a time on the grounds that I don’t want to give younger readers a nosebleed: no jeans; no collarless shirts; no leggings.
 Now if any of you hip young gunslingers are wondering why golf, your favourite sport ever, is considered by the rest of the non-golfing world to be as stuffy and anachronistic as ration cards and powdered eggs then read those rules again. And this time think about them. Each one of those angrily proscribed items listed above belongs to a time most of us have long since forgotten.
Arguably when Marlon Brando donned a pair of Levi’s and a peaked leather cap in The Wild One jeans really did look a little like the storming of the a Bastille. Nowadays, however, Richard Madeley wears them and Marks & Spencer sell them. Christ in heaven, ASDA sells them. Equally, collarless shirts may, at a push, have looked a little scary when James Dean decided he needed no real cause to rebel. Today mergers and acquisition lawyers turn up to the Chase Manhattan Bank wearing collarless shirts.
“Leggings” though is utterly amazing. Did the high and mighty at Wentworth really expect that the forces of revolution would storm their clubhouse screaming, “FAME!/ I Wanna live forever/ FAME!/ I Wanna learn how to drive”?
And from here Wentworth goes truly mad. Baseball caps or hats of any other description must not be worn the wrong way round. (Presumably to preclude the possibility of a chapter of the 18th Street Crips forming on the fairway.). Ladies may wear sleeveless shirts provided they are tailored. (Tailored by whom? Donatella Versace? Saville Row? Someone’s mum?). And changing clothing and/or shoes in the car parks is strictly forbidden. (Clearly vital as there is an ill-reported but growing army of Fifth Columnists keen to turn golf into an all nude sport so that they can have anal sex on the putting green.)
I am picking on Wentworth simply because I have been there. Really, with the notable exception of municipal courses, all golf clubs are much the same. I could have picked on anyone. All this nonsense goes to prove that golf, or rather golfers, are so behind the times they actually need to update their prejudices if they are ever to hope they will come anywhere near to losing them. Even their anachronisms are anachronistic. And the thing is, golf is supposed to be fun.
 So, I guess, if you’ve got this far you will realise that golf was not exactly a game I was cut out to play. But prejudices are easily dismissed when they have no foundation in reality. And even when they do, even when they are utterly justified, enjoyment can sweep them aside. So golf has a fighting chance. Golf can prove me wrong.
I told myself to forget what I had seen, forget what I had read, to put aside my highly honed bigotry and simply get on with it. I booked my first golf lesson, tucked in my shirt and set off for Ditchling's mid-Sussex golf course. My teacher was Neil Plimmer, a 25 year old golf pro from the reassuringly gritty and working class town of Wolverhampton. Neil had moved to Sussex 10 years ago having found that ‘gritty’ and ‘working class’ could be all too gritty if you happened to be working class. I liked him immediately. He talks in a timbre so soft and reassuring he could do voice-overs for Bailey’s Irish Cream and has the look of someone with inexhaustible patience. A good look if you are teaching me tiddlywinks, a fantastic look when it comes to anything more complicated. And, as I was to learn, golf is nothing if not complicated. Boy, is golf complicated.
‘Busy day?’ I inquired as Neil eyed my jeans, trainers and dazzling electric blue psychedelic shirt with a curiosity best described as anthropological.
“How is your hand to eye co-ordination?” asked Neil as we strode through the rain toward the driving range.
“Not good to be honest Neil, not good at all.”
He looked a little puzzled.
“Generally my limb to eye co-ordination is pretty mediocre, at times it’s terrible. There are mornings when I wake up and I’m amazed I can walk.”
Neil seemed to take this information in his stride.
“I was thinking of asking my doctor if I have one of those weird diseases, you know, like Parkinson’s, or multiple sclerosis. But I just can’t remember his name.”
“Pardon?” said Neil.
“My doctor, I haven’t got the foggiest idea who he is. I mean I know I have one, and I know where he works, but that’s it.”
At this point Neil decided it was perhaps best to change the subject.
“Soooo,” he began, a noticeable caution creeping into his voice, “you don’t play much sport.”
“None whatsoever, I’m afraid, old chap.”
“What do you know about golf?”
“Well...”
5/3/2005 10:18:29 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00) 
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